Tag: piano

Splendid, richly satisfying NZSO concert of four strongly contrasted works played with mastery and conviction

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Carlos Kalmar with Steven Osborne (piano)

Michael Norris: Matauranga
Mozart: Piano Concerto No 12 in A, K 414
Osvaldo Golijov: Last Round
Nielsen: Symphony No 4, Op 29 (‘The Inextinguishable’)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 13 July, 7:30 pm

Anniversary: Cook’s first voyage and Matauranga 
The first piece in Saturday’s concert was entitled Matauranga, which means ‘knowledge, wisdom, understanding, skill’, according to the programme note. It was in part to mark the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage one of whose purposes was to observe the transit of Venus in Tahiti in June 1769. His reaching New Zealand was timely to observe the transit of Mercury on the Coromandel Peninsula in November 1769, and the names Cook’s Beach and Mercury Bay celebrate it.

The intelligent programme note also places in perspective Cook’s voyage (voyages) as a product of The Enlightenment in Europe. The notes write: “The ideals of the Enlightenment sprang from a rejection of institutional religion, entrenched tradition and superstition in favour of rational thought, logic and the empirical, organised advancement of knowledge”.

Michael Norris’s approach to the subject was to combine taonga puoro with the orchestral strings and live electronics. Nevertheless, the score created an attractive pattern of subtle sounds, the Maori instruments having the most conspicuous role while the strings and the electronics seemed present in principle rather than in their actual impact. However, this piece offered an interesting range of sounds generated by taonga puoro, a wider range of these instruments than I think I’ve encountered before; scored with considerable sensitivity and clarity and played confidently by the versatile Alistair Fraser.

This is not the first time that I’ve rather wished that a little time had been taken in naming and sampling the sounds of each instrument, and for the programme book to have illustrated and named each one. I have the same feelings about the value of identifying with visual and sound examples the huge range of less familiar orchestral percussion instruments which, apart from timpani, are referred to merely as ‘percussion’.

The orchestra might have hoped that the inclusion of a quite approachable piece highlighting taonga pouro might have attracted a number of Maori to the concert; it didn’t. Furthermore, the concert as a whole attracted a much smaller audience that is usual for NZSO subscription concerts.

This was a surprise and a disappointment given the programming of a charming Mozart piano concerto by a particularly gifted pianist, and an arresting, strong-minded yet beautiful Nielsen symphony.

Steven Osborne in Mozart
Mozart’s piano concerto no 12 is one of the first group of three that he wrote for his own very successful subscription concerts after he moved to Vienna from Salzburg. Conductor Carlos Kalmar didn’t reduce the size of the string sections to the extent than has become common for music of the ‘Classical’ period. Instead, he concentrated on a warm, quite opulent sound that the modest-sized orchestra produced, while Steven Osborne’s piano offered quite a contrast with crisp, semi-detached playing that was nevertheless in perfect accord with the orchestra. His articulation was varied and subtle, and that modesty characterised the not especially bravura cadenza. The Andante, second movement, though at a walking pace, gave off a restful air. Here, as with the first movement, the orchestral part is very much simply a polite accompaniment, and though there’s quite an extended solo episode, it wasn’t the occasion for anything flashy.

The unostentatious character of the concerto ran through the Finale too; again, little work for the winds: just oboes and horns. Though Mozart also scored optionally for bassoons, none were audible (I couldn’t see).

This performance of this very charming concerto was, along with the other three very significant pieces, the reason for being dispirited about the size of the audience. It also prompts a comment about the failure of the NZSO to make better use of their soloists, especially ones as distinguished as Steven Osborne, in solo and other recitals in Wellington and other parts of the country. A few decades ago it was normal; now, with declining audiences for good music and their increasing unfamiliarity with what one could formerly consider standard, popular repertoire, it strikes me as even more important for concert promoters to exploit every means to get people through the doors. For many people, even one unfamiliar or New Zealand piece is a turn-off.

I would love a subscription series to be devoted to Mozart’s piano concertos, with particular attention to these earlier Viennese ones, before the much more played ones from No 20 in D minor. But does the poor audience tell us something about the general level of cultural awareness? I think it does.

Golijov and the culture of the tango
Osvaldo Golijov was born in Argentina to Romanian-Jewish parents and has quite suddenly put contemporary Latin American music on the map. Many will remember the impact made at the 2014 festival by a semi-staged performance of his opera Ainadamar (the place where Federico García Lorca was killed by Franco’s Falangist assassins in 1936).

Last Round was inspired by the sudden death in 1992 of Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla and refers also to notable Argentinian singer and composer Carlos Gardel, the most important main-stream tango musician.  We were fortunate in having this performance from the hands of a particularly vigorous and inspiring conductor whose background lends a special insight into the spirit of the music; and the orchestra responded with great enthusiasm.

Last Round is tango in character though obviously unorthodox. Symbolic conflict dominates the first movement, Movido, urgente, between the divided strings: violins, violas and cellos, half on each side with double basses in the centre, behind. The tango rhythm remains steady for long periods before accelerating and becoming agitated or violent, with characteristic sudden screeching glissandi – very bandoneon. Without an actual pause, the pulsing first movement rhythms subside and the tragic spirit of the second movement, Deaths of the Angel emerges, much slower and exhibiting less overt tango in rhythm and articulation. In the words of the programme note, the tango flavour returns as Golijov “yearningly quotes the refrain from Carlos Gomes’ ‘My beloved Buenos Aires’”.

This is no forbidding, intellectually pretentious avant-garde music: it seems to summarise aspects of contemporary music, through an Argentinian lens that injects a powerful emotional spirit in a perfectly coherent accent, perfectly accessible yet of our age.

Nielsen No 4
Nielsen is a symphonist who is in many ways the equal of Sibelius, and not just through being born in the same year and coming from the broad Scandinavian region; his six symphonies are so different in character both from any other symphonist and from each other that they are difficult to characterise. I would like to think that an enterprising Wellington orchestra might perform all six in the course of a season, but I’d have my work cut out, looking at the size of the audience here.

The fourth, the Inextinguishable, is probably his best known: particularly dramatic, coloured by the First World War, calling up words like ‘violence’, ‘intensity’, ‘headlong energy’, ‘the indomitability of life itself’. The massive brass call to attention at the start might have set the scene, but there are extended passages of beautiful, calm music, such as we are suddenly presented with from the lovely woodwinds of the NZSO in the shorter second movement and in the pensive, beautiful third movement. In all the quicksilver variety of emotion and musical character Carlos Kalmar led the orchestra with energy and rigour, yet with a sense of freedom, giving rein to all Nielsen’s detailed and instrumentally vivid orchestration.

If I had to choose, it would be the Nielsen that I found the most richly satisfying in the concert, and that’s from a field of four very successful, strongly contrasted works each of which was performed with mastery and conviction and should have pulled in all but deeply prejudiced, half-hearted concert goers.

Delightful St Andrew’s recital from NZSM piano students: Bach, Haydn, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, Prokofiev and Henry Cowell

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts
Piano students of the New Zealand School of Music

Alexander Jefferies: Brahms’s Rhapsody in G minor Op 79, no 2
Helen Chiu: Haydn’s Andante and Variations, Hob XVII:6 (Sonata, un piccolo divertimento)
David Codd: Chopin’s Nocturne in D flat, Op 27 no 2 and Henry Cowell’s ‘The Tides of Manaumaun‘
Jungyeon Lee: Bach: Prelude from English Suite No 4 in F and Prokofiev’s Sarcasms No 1
Cecilia Zhong: Debussy’s Children’s Corner: Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum, Jimbo’s Lullaby, The Snow is dancing, The Little Shepherd, Golliwog’s Cakewalk.

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 29 May, 12:15 pm

Though Middle C has been catching the weekly lunchtime concerts at St Andrew’s pretty regularly, we have sometimes been a bit neglectful in writing about them. This one was harder to duck.

Student recitals almost always reveal a player or two of considerable distinction, in addition to which we have the experience of watching live performers playing music, a phenomenon that is becoming ever more rare, as disembodied versions of music dominate our hearing and are listened to indiscriminately: radio, conventional recordings on CD and vinyl again, downloading and streaming through Netflix and YouTube and the like, of recordings or live performances. Not to mention the quantity of dehumanised music actually composed for performance by machines. It’s all accustoming us to what have to be considered pale, dehumanised reflections of the real thing.

What about the concert?

First year student Alexander Jefferies played Brahms’s familiar Rhapsody in G minor, Op 79 no 2, as you’d expect from a music student early in his career: most of the notes there, plenty of spirit, though a way to go yet.

Helen Chiu showed an impressive talent, first in speaking confidently, with knowledge of the music’s background, of one of the pieces that Hoboken classified simply as ‘piano pieces’ (Hob XVII) – that is: not a sonata, but sets of variations, fantasies and other miscellaneous works. Its subtitle calls it a ‘sonata, a little divertimento’. It turned out to be familiar and Helen made it musical and interesting, technically fluent and idiomatic.

David Codd was a less experienced pianist, but played this familiar Nocturne thoughtfully, with sensitive rubato and other evidence that the music was a living creature. And he followed with a piece by an American composer of the generation of Gershwin and Copland: Henry Cowell whose reputation seems to have been obscured in recent years, though I’ve long been familiar with his name if not his music. His The tides of Manaunaun, written about 1917, began like Debussy but quickly leapt about fifty years ahead, taking Charles Ives by the throat, to produce dense music that might have shocked even Schoenberg at the time. It seemed to cry out to be scored for large orchestra, weighty in the percussion department. It was an interesting, technically pretty challenging piece: a capable and impressive performance.

Jungyeon Lee was another third year and she played the Prelude to Bach’s fourth English Suite with clarity and intelligence. Then the first of Prokofiev’s Sarcasms – not a standard genre of piano music, but one grasped the composer’s intention in this alert, stylistically conscious performance, both lyrical and teasing.

And finally Cecilia Zhong played Debussy’s Children’s Corner – all six pieces, running the recital ten minutes or so over time! But I’m not complaining as one doesn’t often hear them played. It’s a collection made more interesting through the availability of recordings from piano rolls by the composer in 1913. They cover a very wide range of moods, play, games and kinds of music. Serenade for the Doll appealed to me in particular, but the entire suite is one of Debussy’s most delightful works, and here was a performance by Cecilia Zhong, an accomplished post-graduate student, that revealed all the fun and variety and Debussy’s charming affinity with children.

So ended a very engaging concert that made one, again, grateful that we live in a city with a down-town tradition of bringing music students from the university to help enrich our traffic-congested, culturally barren lives.

 

A beautiful concert of Romantic symphonic music from the NZSO under Thomas Søndergård

Posted on by Steven Sedley

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Thomas Søndergård
Denis Kozhukhin (piano)

Beethoven: Coriolan Overture, Op. 62
Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54
Sibelius: Symphony No. 6 in D minor, Op. 104
Sibelius: Symphony No. 7 in C major, Op. 105

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 18 May, 2019, 7:30 pm

This concert had no challenging contemporary works, no surprises. It was romantic music, all within the bounds of the traditional, standard symphonic repertoire, but it was all beautiful music. The programme spanned 127 years of musical development from Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture of 1807 to Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony of 1924. Over that period the world changed and this was reflected in the music. The individual responsibility, accountability, sensibility and the individual’s role in nationhood became the focus of the European cultural landscape.

Coriolan, the classical hero, or perhaps anti-hero was the subject of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture. It was inspired by Heinrich Joseph von Collin’s 1804 play. Coriolan is an ambitious and arrogant character who turns against his own people, but succumbs to his mother’s pleading not to destroy Rome. He cannot, however, reverse the onslaught he started and kills himself (unlike in Shakespeare’s version, in which he is murdered). The music depicts the drama, the conflict between war and compassion and ends with the fading chords of Coriolan’s slow death. The contrasts in the music, the sense of drama were beautifully, clearly articulated.

A generation later the cult of the individual as hero, something started with the adulation of Beethoven, was dominant. The virtuoso gained ascendancy in the concert halls. Schumann’s Piano Concerto was, in its time, a significant departure from earlier concertos. Schumann wrote in 1839 that:
“Modern pianistic art wants to challenge the symphony [orchestra], and rule supreme through its own resources; this may account for the recent dearth of piano concertos.”

After composing a large number of works for solo piano, he took up the challenge to write a concerto, but having lamented the state of piano concertos, it took him six years before he completed this concerto and was satisfied with it. He saw in the work the reflection of two opposing impulses in himself, the boisterous, impetuous and passionate on the one hand, and the dreamy, gentle and poetic on the other. There is a lovely interplay between the orchestra and the soloist, starting with the beautiful oboe solo enunciating the theme and the piano’s reply. Kozhukhin responded to the orchestra with great sensitivity and mastery, taking up the theme but also enhancing it. His playing was magical, drawing the listener in, with every phrase, every note full of meaning. It was a sensational performance. Kozhukhin rewarded the enthusiastic applause of the audience with an encore, playing Grieg’s To Spring, from his Lyric Suite (Op 43 No 6).

By the time of Sibelius the dominance of the grand romantic symphony was drawing to a close. Playing two Sibelius Symphonies written after each other was interesting programming, and hearing No. 6, followed by No. 7 shed new light on both of these works. No. 6 starts with a sombre opening,  followed by playful passages. There is darkness and light. Unlike in some of Sibelius’s other orchestral works, the themes are fragmented, there are no overarching melodies. The folksy tunes are overlaid on top of each other and interrupted. There are abrupt transitions. This is the most difficult and least often played of Sibelius’s symphonies, yet listening to it one can appreciate its beautiful if personal qualities.

The Seventh on the other hand is dramatic, starting with mournful chords that seem to mark the end of an era. The traditional musical forms, tonality, structure, were all falling apart. Sibelius was familiar with the new trends but did not adopt them. He was always a loner, a composer with a unique voice, his own sound and view of music. In this symphony he abandoned the usual four movement structure. Instead he created a work made up of multiple sections distinguished by frequent changes of tempo, which cohere into a seamless whole. The symphony was in gestation for many years. In the end Sibelius seemed to have considered that he had nothing further to add. At the time when serious classical music was dominated by the music of Schoenberg and his followers, by the barbarism based on folk idioms of Bartók,  by the harsh brutal dissonance of Stravinsky, Sibelius wrote a grand romantic symphony that wallowed in rich sounds. This was his final major work, and it has the stamp of finality about it.

Playing the two symphonies one after the other worked well. It provided an enriched insight into Sibelius’s world. This was a great concert. The orchestra under Thomas Søndergård played with lovely sonority and attention to subtle details. It was, however, Denis Kozhukhin’s wonderful playing that made the concert memorable.

 

An excellent lunchtime concert from university string students at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s lunchtime concert
Performances by string students of the New Zealand School of Music

Zephyr Wills (viola), Rebecca Warnes (cello), Hayden Nickel (violin), Ellen Murfitt (violin), Emily Paterson (cello), Tamina Beveridge (piano)

Music by Bach, Hindemith, Saint-Saëns, Mendelssohn

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 8 May, 12:15 pm

Though I had thought not to write a review of this lunchtime concert, but simply to have a pleasant hour listening, I found my mind changing however, a couple of minutes in to the first item: the Allemande from Bach’s fourth Cello Suite, in E flat, played on the viola by Zephyr Wills. Sometimes such transpositions don’t work, but this one did, beautifully. Wills, only a second-year student, has acquired a warm flawless technique on his instrument. The Allemande is a relatively sedate, moderately paced dance and it flourished in his flowing, note-perfect playing. I’m not always happy about other instruments playing music the composer carefully crafted for one in particular. Here, it sounded as if the viola was what Bach really had in mind.

Hindemith’s viola 
More challenging in a sense was the first two movements (Breit and Sehr Frisch und straff) of Hindemith’s sonata for solo viola, Op 25 No 1 (it has five movements). Though opening with an arresting dissonance, it quickly settled into the sort of piece one expects from the Weimar Republic in the 1920s.

The viola was Hindemith’s own instrument and he wrote several sonatas for solo viola as well for viola and piano. I came across a good quote in Gramophone magazine:

“Throughout these works … there is an almost overwhelming competence. The sheer mastery with which he was able to go about making one instrument express the creativity of his extraordinarily fertile mind is quite breathtaking. … There is a strong feeling that it emanates from an era of unrest: the constant moving-on from one idea to another and the rapid harmonic shifts are symptomatic of this. The role of the viola is somewhat solitary.
“Alfred Einstein encapsulated Hindemith’s relationship to his audience thus: ‘’He is unwilling to exploit his feelings publicly and he keeps his two feet on the ground. He merely writes music, the best that he can produce.’ … it is in the four sonatas for solo viola that one is closest to his essence, an essence that is rather bleak and certainly highly cerebral.”

I felt that, for a young student (yet only about four years younger than Hindemith at the time), this sample of the sonata also showed a surprising grasp of the essence of Hindemith.

Saint-Saëns: the whole concerto
The next piece was advertised as the first movement of Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto in A minor (No 1). Rebecca Warnes is a fifth year student at the School of Music (which perhaps means she’s studying for her Masters’, or even a PhD). No high degree of musical discernment was needed to hear a highly accomplished performance from her and her pianist Tamina Beveridge who was a more than adequate orchestra substitute. If it wasn’t for the conspicuously concerto-flavoured cello part, it wouldn’t have been hard to hear it as a cello sonata.  Because I’d forgotten how short the first movement is (about 5 to 6 minutes), I thought the more charming and lyrical second movement was an episode of the first, but realised by the time the third movement began that I was listening to the whole concerto which usually runs a bit over 20 minutes. The excellence of the playing never diminished, and the many virtuosic sections were dealt with, by both players, with undiminished competence and that sense of delight that a mid-30s composer and an early-20s cellist can deliver.

Mendelssohn was still to come (and it was already about 12.50). Hayden Nickel played the first movement of his violin concerto as Tamina Beveridge stayed at the piano. His violin had a bright tone well suited to the spirit of the first movement (this time it was only the first); though it might have exposed both instruments in the more taxing passages. But that accelerating cadenza that leads excitingly into the second movement came off excellently.

And to end, the first movement of Mendelssohn’s last string quartet, Op 80. The players were Haydn Nickel and Zephyr Wills again, plus second violinist Ellen Murfitt and cellist Emily Paterson. They captured the anguished urgency of the Allegro vivace assai (which might as well have been named the ‘appassionata’) music that creates, for me, one of Mendelssohn’s rare, thoughtful, deeply felt utterances.

‘Twas an excellent lunchtime concert!

 

Maria Mo: a fine recital by a promising artist at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Steven Sedley

Maria Mo – piano 

Beethoven: Piano Sonata in C, Op.53 (Waldstein)
Albeniz: Iberia, Book 1
                Evocación; El Puerto; El Corpus en Sevilla

St. Andrews on The Terrace

Wednesday 17 April, 2019

Mario Mo is a talented young pianist at the threshold of her career. She has won awards and scholarships, studied with Katherine Austin at the University of Waikato and then at the Vienna Conservatory and the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. She has had a thorough grounding. She played an ambitious programme.

Beethoven stretches the limits of the piano in the Waldstein Sonata and apart from a few glitches Mo coped with these challenges capably. The problem was that because the work is so well known it is hard not to draw comparisons with performances by some of the great pianists. Mo is a thoughtful performer who paid a lot of attention to the phrasing, the dynamic contrasts and melodic flow of the piece. I am sure that with greater experience and maturity her playing will acquire greater fluidity.

The Albeniz pieces were more successful. Albeniz, virtuoso pianist, one of the foremost composers of the latter years of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th centuries had a significant influence on composers of a younger generation, Debussy and Ravel among others. His piano pieces were based on Spanish folk idiom. The best known of these works is Iberia. Mo played these pieces with a delightful freedom bringing out their lovely Spanish lilt. Evocación set the spirit of the work, El Puertocaptured the busy port, expressed through the use of the zapataedo, a lively traditional Andalusian dance. El Corpus en Sevilla is the longest and most dramatic of the three movements. It is a colourful depiction of the Spanish celebration of the feast days of Corpus Christi with its solemn march, religious fervour and ecstasy. It called for a great tonal range and sharp contrasts. Mario Mo gave an enjoyable account of these pieces. This was a fine recital by a promising artist.

Dazzling pianist, Alessio Bax, gives sole Wellington performance at Upper Hutt

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Classical Expressions 2019, Upper Hutt
Alessio Bax – piano

Bach: solo keyboard arrangement of Alessandro Marcello’s Oboe Concerto in D minor, SD935; BWV 974
Rachmaninov: Variations on a Theme of Corelli
Dallapiccola: Quaderno musicale di Annalibera
Liszt: St. François d’Assise: La prédication aux oiseaux, S.175/1 and Après une lecture de Dante: Fanatsia quasi sonata, S 161

Expressions Arts and Entertainment Centre, Upper Hutt

Monday 8 April, 7:30 pm

Last Thursday, 4 April. RNZ Concert broadcast the usual Thursday concert from the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra. It included Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony and Grieg’s Piano Concerto. A generation and more ago it was common to be dismissive of the Grieg concerto, but the classical music world has grown up a bit since then and sensible people with cultivated but unpretentious tastes rate it among the loveliest in the repertoire.

I hadn’t heard of Alessio Bax, but it didn’t take long to be more than a little arrested by the dynamism, beauty and subtlety of his playing. He was born in Bari on Italy’s Adriatic coast, graduating from the Conservatoire there aged 14, won the Leeds Competition aged 22 and his career has followed a remarkable path, though it has not been blessed with the sort of frenzy that has followed Trifonov, Yuja Wang or Lang-Lang. The Editor of Gramophone wrote: “Alessio Bax is clearly among the most remarkable young pianists now before the public.”

He also knows how to construct a programme that is challenging, fascinating and hair-raising. The programme he has been taking around Australia and New Zealand is Italian-themed.

It opened with an unusual piece – an arrangement by Bach for solo keyboard of an oboe concerto in D minor by Alessandro Marcello. There’s the Italian element: Marcello (there were two composer brother – Benedetto and Alessandro, the former being a year younger than Bach). In the dark, and without having read the programme properly, I thought it might have been a group of three Scarlatti sonatas, and even after seeing Bach’s name attached to it, that was still not a silly guess.

There was all the bright, staccato attack, tunes that sounded Italian – more lyrical than was common north of the Alps; and there was Bax’s wonderful dexterity in his handling of the piano, with elegant, adroit decorations that had a perceptible harpsichord feeling, but which his playing turned into a perfectly genuine piano piece. Though I’m sure I’d never heard it before, the slow movement was akin to any other of Bach’s loveliest adagio or andante movements. But it was the third movement that seemed both familiar and combined the sensibilities of Bach and Scarlatti.

Rachmaninov’s La Folia
The programme was Italian themed perhaps, but Italian entirely through other eyes (or ears).  Rachmaninov wrote two sets of piano variations: first on a theme by Chopin (Op 22) and later this, on the ubiquitous ‘La folia’ late medieval tune that was used by many composers; Rachmaninov used the version by Corelli as Opus 42. Considering its importance in the composer’s catalogue it has not been much played here. The range of colours, technical and lyrical demands that Bax fulfilled effortlessly, suggested why not too many tackle it.

Rachmaninov seems to have taken the name ‘folia’ literally injecting moments of madness in certain variations, such as the Vivace and the Agitato, and elsewhere, when the plain little tune is thoroughly dismembered; they seem to break out of the pattern of sharply varied yet harmonious moods, and these Bax delivered with a sort of wild abandon.

After the Interval came the piece that the audience might have felt most dubious about: Quaderno musicale di Annalibera; for Dallapiccola was one of the Italian composers (the other conspicuous ones were Maderna, Nono, Berio) who subscribed to the 12-tone or serial technique invented by Schoenberg and promoted through the famous Darmstadt School. (My own major exposure to his music was a dozen years ago at La Scala, Milan, his one-act opera Il Prigioniero which was certainly a taxing but memorable experience).

He spoke about the piece in the most engaging and fluent way, so that his very personality and his devotion to at least some of the precepts of serialism seemed to break down any immediate knee-jerk reaction to it. The story of its inspiration – dedicated to Dallapiccola’s 8-year-old daughter, the title an echo of Bach’s Notebook (‘quaderno’) for Anna Magdalena.  Bax’s introduction certainly encouraged, predisposed one to listen seriously, unprejudiced, even sympathetically to the music. So in the end it was the tonal and dynamic variety, the commitment of his performance, filled with lyricism and liveliness, that held the attention and led one to hear some kind of serious creative imagination at work.

Two great Liszt pieces
One could find references in Liszt’s music to quite a number of countries other than his native Hungary, but Italy became important to him quite early: for example the Second year, Italy, of his Années de pèlerinage, from which the ‘Dante sonata’ is taken. The two ‘legends’ of 1863 depict two Francises: St Francis of Assisi and St Francis of Paola (his was Liszt’s saint’s name). An opportunity for glittering, joyous story-telling, the saint’s voice contrasted starkly with that of the birds.

Bax linked the two by launching into the ‘Dante Sonata’ without pause, evading any applause. Rather than attempting to depict any of the legendary or classical figures in the great epic, Liszt’s narrative work is largely a description of paradise and hell, contrasting silvery peacefulness and chaotic vengeance. But while the general impression is of a violent narrative dominated by hell, Bax takes every proper opportunity to reveal the intimate, gentle character of many passages. If he’d orchestrated it, the Dante Sonata would have been called a symphonic poem and it strains the resources and the limitations of the most resilient Steinway, which in this case responded impressively.  The piece contains some of Liszt’s most dramatic, ferocious music, which served as a splendid vehicle for Bax’s virtuosity, and his gift of injecting genuine emotional power into this great music.

It was wonderful to hear such exciting, compelling and poetic performances of these two marvellous piano works.

Reflections on musical management in New Zealand 
Given the ways in which the most important arts are so often denigrated and deprived of necessary funding and support, it is disappointing that a musician of Bax’s stature has not been engaged to play more concerts around the country. A great credit to Upper Hutt, but a serious oversight that, for example, Chamber Music New Zealand failed to engage him for half a dozen concerts.

The other issue that such a concert highlighted was Upper Hutt’s support of music and other arts in their excellent Arts and Entertainment Centre, in contrast to their neglect by local authorities elsewhere in Greater Wellington: for example the struggling local chamber music society in Lower Hutt, virtually ignored by the city authorities.

Much greater collaborative relationships should be cultivated among all New Zealand classical music organisations.

Poetry and music co-habit most successfully at St Andrew’s lunchtime concert

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts
Ingrid Prosser and Colin Decio – a programme featuring piano and poetry
Debussy: La cathédrale engloutie (No 10 of Preludes, book 1)
Tennyson: Poem: The Lady of Shalott
Rachmaninov: Preludes, Op 23, Nos 4 & 5
Ingrid Prosser: Poem: Jehanne la Pucelle
Ravel: Miroirs, No 4 – Alborada del gracioso

St Andrews Church, 30 The Terrace

Wednesday 27 March, 12:15 pm

The world of music has almost totally overwhelmed the world of poetry. That’s not to say that there has ever been a large, ravenous audience for poetry, particularly over the past couple of centuries. There are probably few people today who have poetry anthologies and even volumes of poetry by the likes of Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Kipling, on their shelves; fewer than those with a piano in the house. Most of the population under the age of about 60 have hardly been exposed in school to the huge treasury of poetry in English, let alone in other languages. The time when my own generation heard their teachers and even their parents quoting bits of poetry or reading poems to their pupils or their own children, seems like a completely foreign, vanished era.

The choice of poems and music here was not random. Debussy’s sunken cathedral was an inspired piece to set alongside one of Tennyson’s best-known poems.

La cathédrale engloutie is inspired by a Breton legend about an ancient city, Ys (also the subject of an opera by Lalo, Le roi d’Ys; inter alia, Roberto Alagna sings an aria from it on his CD ‘French arias’), built on reclaimed land surrounded by dykes; there is a gate in the dyke that can be opened at low tide and the king’s daughter steals the key and opens the gate, causing the city to be flooded: thus the cathedral is submerged. On clear mornings the cathedral can be seen, its carillon bells heard. Both the Ys legend and Tennyson’s elusive elaboration of an episode from the Arthurian legends can be seen as products of an overheated Romantic imagination, dealing with the perils of transgressing an unarticulated separation of the real world from that of the creative imagination.

Colin Decio’s playing sounded immediately authoritative with its heavy modal chords, though there was little mystery or other-worldliness. He captured the atmosphere of engulfing waters sensitively with evocative bass notes and a sense of ancient legend.

The Lady of Shallot
Ingrid Prosser picked up the mystical thread of water as an agent of the supernatural, with Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot. It’s a story with its slender origin in Arthurian legend, about Lancelot and the Lady of Shallot, who dies love-stricken, from a mysterious curse, the result of the conflict between the isolated artist and the physical world beyond the isolated island where she lives alone, weaving her magic web.  Hugely popular in its day, it inspired painters like Holman Hunt and Waterhouse whose reproductions are everywhere, including my childhood home, where poem and painting were closely connected.

So the poem had a curious impact for me, as I hadn’t heard it read aloud since my father’s bedside reading (typically of his generation, Tennyson had special meaning for him, and I have his well-thumbed volume, dating from his first year at university, with his initials gold-embossed on the front of the leather binding). There was a good deal more darkness and rhetorical character in his reading than with Prosser’s lighter tone that let the narrative speak clearly. Tennyson’s strict rhythmic and rhyming patterns (four rhymes in short successive lines) are singular and it was a delight to hear it and for light to shine through its strange, enigmatic story, symbolic, ahead of the symbolist movement proper later in the 19th century.

Rachmaninov and Ravel
Colin Decio returned to play two Rachmaninov preludes: the D major and the G minor, from Op 23; the first warm and lyrical that has something of a ‘ballade’ character about it, and the second in the very familiar marching style with its contrasted contemplative section. They were intelligently and musically played – not immaculately perhaps, but with affection and a keen ear to the sometimes unruly acoustic in the church. And his third offering was Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso, more often heard in its brilliant orchestral version: sudden dynamic shifts, even from one note to the next, again with a middle section that imposed a calm on the impulsive frenzy of the outer parts. Slightly marred by slips but a splendid performance nevertheless.

I tried to find narrative or emotional links between these piano pieces and the poem that lay between them, but nothing other than a common military quality in the G minor prelude and Joan of Arc’s story came to mind.

Prosser’s ‘Jehanne la pucelle’
Ingrid Prosser’s narrative poem was inspired by a journey in a part of France: the estuary of the Somme which has a connection with the march of Joan of Arc, ‘Jehanne la pucelle’, to her trial and execution by the English in Rouen. It had the character of a dramatic poem touching on many aspects of Anglo-French history and the ridiculous monarchical conflict, the Hundred Years War.

Just brief background: That war had its origin in the Norman invasion of England (William the Conqueror), which implied English rule over parts of France and tempted the English to extend their rule to the entire country. Joan of Arc entered the scene to revive French determination to rid the country of the English, whose ambitions to conquer more of France, had been re-inspired by Henry V’s victory at Agincourt, in 1415. After Henry V died in 1422, it looked as if the English could prevail, until the emergence of Joan which led to decisive French victory at the siege of Orléans in 1429. But in 1430 she was captured by the Burgundians, English allies, and handed to the English at Rouen which the English had held. There, in 1431, she was tried and burned at the stake. English strength in France then fell apart, and a more centralised France with a professional army soon became the most powerful force in Europe. For the English, defeat on the Continent led indirectly to the Wars of the Roses.

Poetry has changed since the late nineteenth century: regular rhythms and multiple rhymes are unimportant, which leaves poems dependent on the play of ideas and evocative imagery and symbols and suggestive references. Though the details of the story of Joan’s emergence, reviving French determination to regain control of their country, are only known sketchily to most, Ingrid Prosser’s weaving  the names of saints and places into a framework of words and imagery, and events, created a persuasive emotional and even pictorial story. And the spirited, histrionic manner of her delivery held the attention.

There are many styles of poetic recitation, and some with their roots in elocution lessons, imagined ‘English’ theatrical speech and private school education, are today intolerable. Prosser’s style was both poetic and narrative in a natural way and she held audience attention through her mixture of naturalness and conviction.

I hope that this successful recital will inspire further poetic undertakings of similar kinds.

 

Michael Endres surrounds Schubert with varied companion pieces at Mulled Wine concert

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Mulled Wine Concerts

Michael Endres (piano)

Handel: Minuet in G minor, HWV 434
Schubert: Sonata in D, Opus 53, ‘Gasteiner’, D 850
Ravel: Jeux d’eau
William Bolcom: Etude No 12 ‘Chant à l’amour’
Gershwin: Four song transcriptions: Embraceable You (trans. by Earl Wild), Someone to watch over me, Looking for a Boy, I got Rhythm)

Raumati South Memorial Hall, Tennis Court Road

Sunday 10 March, 2:30 pm

The first of this year’s Mulled Wine Concerts, organised by Mary Gow, usually in the Paekakariki Memorial Hall, took place in the South Raumati Hall because the other is undergoing earthquake treatment. It was a fine beginning to the year, musically, but was subject to sound problems (as does the Paekakriki hall to a less degree), broad, hard surfaces that present difficulties for a pianist. It’s easy enough to say he should play more quietly, but dynamics are as deeply embedded in a pianist’s performance as the notes themselves and other aspects of articulation. When I spoke to him afterwards, he himself referred to his efforts to deal with the acoustic.

One is there however, to enjoy the performance in as positive a way as possible, and that was not hard.

The programme was interesting, with three out of the five pieces unfamiliar, at least in a concert setting. Handel’s Minuet, as with a lot of his music presents problems for the non-specialist: his output was so enormous in quantity and variety and its cataloguing seems more complicated and problematic than the works of any other composer.

The Wikipedia entry on Handel’s works shows this piece as the fourth part of a Suite de pièce in B-flat major, HWV (the Handel catalogue: Händel Werk Verzeichnis) 434, a minuet in G minor.

This was an arrangement by great German pianist Wilhelm Kempff. As Endres wrote, it’s Romantic in character, and it sounds of the 19th rather than the 18th century. His playing had a wistfulness, seeming to avoid emphasis on its rhythm. And the piano responded to Endres’s approach, far removed from the sound of a harpsichord, for which it was presumably written.

To Gastein with Schubert
With no pause, Endres launched into Schubert’s Sonata in D (No 17 in some editions, but Deutsch No 850, and ‘Gasteiner’ because it was written the spa town, Gastein, in the Alps south of Salzburg). The contrast was quite as dramatic as the pianist had clearly intended: passionate, full of energy, tonally and rhythmically varied, with many modulations. Sure, at times it was a bit overwhelming in the dry space; Beethoven’s presence was audible in the piano treatment and the almost orchestral density of the scoring, if not in the music itself which was clearly enough Schubert.

The essentially rhapsodic nature of the second movement, Con moto, might have suggested a relaxed rhythm had Schubert not provided the title, and with its quite markedly contrasting sections, it is hardly a typical ‘adagio’-like slow movement.

The Scherzo picked up, in a more energetic spirit, the dotted rhythms that characterised parts of the previous movement, and here the pianist’s virtuosic skills were fairly dramatically exploited.  Those unfamiliar with the piece would probably have, like me, been surprised at the greater familiarity of the first theme of the last movement, and engaged by the constantly changing character of the piece, and Schubert’s originality of composition for the piano.

If that major composition was clearly the centre-piece of the concert, the second half was less challenging and surprisingly disparate. There are scores of brilliant performances of Ravel’s Jeux d’eau out there, but there were some rather individual aspects in Endres’s playing; splashing water had charming tinkling effects in the first pages, while the music later suggested rather fearful and formidable torrents, a more dangerous water game than pianists usually play with Ravel. The acoustic shortcomings of the hall were the last things on my mind, hearing this stunning performance.

I’ve heard some of William Bolcom’s songs, but had never encountered the set of Etudes from which he played No 12. I was attracted by the pianist’s comments in an email prior to the concert: “a magnificent example that contemporary music can be enticing, spiritual and very rewarding to play and listen to as opposed to so much of today’s ‘sound art’, which has often little to say despite its myriads of notes and highest complexity of its scores.” My thoughts too, reinforced after hearing Bolcom’s interesting, far from hackneyed or unoriginal piece, so persuasively played.

That feeling was perhaps deliberately exemplified in the set of four song transcriptions by Gershwin. They were certainly opportunities for spectacular piano playing, reminding one of the more virtuosic jazz pianists – perhaps not Art Tatum, but possibly Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett or Bill Evans. Only ‘Looking for a Boy’ escaped me as I don’t know it; but the arrangement of ‘I Got Rhythm’, built excitingly to a fine, quite prolonged exhibition of Endres’s idiomatic feeling for the jazz area of popular music.

And he ended with a very unfamiliar piece by Ottorino Respighi, Notturno, which would hardly suggest the composer of Pines of Rome or the Botticelli Triptych. It ended a delightful recital of some off-the-beaten-track music.

I hope that this move away from the Paekakariki hall by the sea is not prolonged and that the interest of the forthcoming programmes attracts the usual good audiences, wherever they might be.

 

 

Direct from Nelson: Dénes Várjon and Izabella Simon in singular, absorbing solo and duet piano music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Waikanae Music Society

Dénes Várjon and Izabella Simon – piano duet and solo

Bach: Two Chorales transcribed by György Kurtág: Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit and O Lamm Gottes unschuldig
Schubert: Lebensstürme in A minor, D 947
Debussy: Petite Suite
Beethoven: Sonata No 29 in B flat, Op 106 (Hammerklavier)

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday 17 February, 2:30 pm

This concert was, reportedly, arranged through a somewhat unorthodox arrangement between the Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson and the Waikanae society. I’d spent five days in Nelson and had heard Dénes Várjon playing about four times, including once with his wife Izabella. One of them included the Hammerklavier as well as the last sonata, Op 111; but the first three pieces in this recital were played after I left. I was delighted to hear them at Waikanae.

Bach/Kurtág 
Bach was a major source of inspiration for contemporary Hungarian composer György Kurtág and he made several arrangements of arias from the chorales. I didn’t know these ones; and listening to these piano duet arrangements one could be forgiven for wondering who the composer was, as the early stages of both had an enigmatic character that really didn’t bring Bach to mind straight away. The sounds seemed influenced by at least late 19th century music: harmonically as well as in the pianists’ articulation and dynamics. But with the underlying Bachian melodies,  the music revealed such intense conviction and coherence, it slowly became clear that Bach was the unmistakable inspiration. In Gottes Zeit, the bass (Dénes) entered first and then Izabella with the treble part. Though the two pianists showed remarkable uniformity of rhythm and musical character, what astonished me was the way the primo and secondo parts had such distinct voices. In the second chorale, O Lamm Gottes unschuldig, I was fascinated by the sound Izabella drew from the piano, almost as if she had secreted a rank of organ pipes in the piano, so pure and bell-like was the sound. In speaking with others who were also mesmerised by it, I gathered that it was achieved by keeping the key slightly, very sensitively depressed, holding the hammers in a certain position on the strings.

It was a beautiful performance that created a profoundly meditative spirit, with the most intriguing counterpoint. In both the pieces, the fascination lay in the profound sense of Bach’s presence throughout, even though so much was conspicuously of the 20th century.

Schubert’s Lebensstürme 
The duo’s playing of Schubert’s late Lebensstürme D 947 was driven by a single-minded determination to draw attention to contrasts and similarities between the Bach/Kurtág pieces and the Schubert; their request for no applause at the end of the Bach was clearly to highlight unexpected relationships that might enrich audience response to both. Their close juxtaposition certainly did that for me. At the most superficial level one could hear comparable spiritual and intellectual characteristics in both. Schubert’s abrupt call to attention with heavy opening chords might not have been the clearest Schubert signature, but the following lyrical episodes did clarify the matter; and certain dramatic passages, and some quite elaborate material in the development section suggested that Schubert had Beethoven’s more serious and intense piano pieces in mind.

There is speculation that this piece was the first movement of a planned sonata for two pianos, and the structure of the piece and weight of the music, especially the first arresting theme which returned several times, made that seem very likely. It was again a most authoritative and engaging performance.

Petite Suite 
Debussy’s Petite Suite is familiar, not so much in its original four-hands version, but in the various orchestrations.  I must say that as with many (most?) French piano pieces of the late 19th century, and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, that got themselves orchestrated are more interesting, even exciting, in their original piano version.  The tip-toe dancing  in the second movement, Cortètge, and the quirky, forthright music in Ballet, seems so perfectly attuned to the piano, especially with all the weight or lightness and colour available when four hands are engaged.

Much of this renewed delight in original piano versions is the result of the delightful, infectious playing by this gifted and inspiring duet.

Hammerklavier 
In the second half, Dénes Várjon was left alone to play Beethoven’s Op 106, the Hammerklavier Sonata. My reaction to this performance, in a different space, on a Fazioli piano rather than a Steinway, was similar in some ways, though I guess that the warmer, perhaps easier to achieve lyricism and clarity on this piano in this space removed a certain amount of what I described, inspiring words like ‘tumultuous’, ‘abandon’, ‘the wild character of this performance’, ‘unbridled power’, ‘rebellious’.

The speed, energy and power of the performance were here at Waikanae, and the precipitate changes of emotion and mood, dynamic contrasts from bar to bar, again held the audience spell-bound. The delicious toying with the listener’s conventional expectations were still there to surprise, for example, the witty petering out at the end of the Scherzo. And teasing, aborted gestures that keep you in their grip in the slow movement.

But the last movement seemed to recall best the impression of abandon, of ‘rough and tumble’, the unexpected (even though familiar) halt in the middle of the last movement, and the massive forays that command the keyboard from top to bottom, made this an exciting and draining performance, fully the equal of what I’d heard in Nelson.

And, as in Nelson, it was a sold-out recital that won huge applause.

 

Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson: the first days

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Grand Opening Concert

Mozart: Horn Quintet in E flat, K 407    Sam Jacobs – horn, Helene Pohl – violin, Gillian Ansell – viola, Monique Lapins – viola, Rolf Gjelsten – cello
Brahms: Three Intermezzi from Op 118 (Nos 1, 2, 6)    Dénes Várjon
Prokofiev: Sonata for two violins, Op 58    Anthony Marwood and Nikki Chooi – violins
Brahms: String Quintet No 2 in G, Op 111    Jerusalem Quartet (Alexander Pavlovsky and Sergei Bresler – violins, Ori Kam – viola, Kyril Zlotnikov – cello), with Gillian Ansell – second viola

Nelson Centre of Musical Arts (Nelson School of Music)

Friday 1 February 2019, 7:30 pm

This was the first festival for five years that has been able to move back to the now magnificently enhanced Nelson School of Music (now called the Nelson Centre of Musical Arts). That, as well as the line-up of many top international musicians, saw the early sell-out of all but one of the nine superb evening concerts. That’s attributable also to the festival’s international reputation, attracting many people from around New Zealand and increasing numbers from overseas. My frequent comment that for the past 20 years, it’s been the finest classical music festival in New Zealand bears reiterating: its only earlier competitor was the three weeks duration New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington which has long ceased to be one of the richest classical music festivals in the world.

The first concert on Friday 1 February happened to be the birthday of the festival’s most important and longest standing sponsor, Denis Adam, who died last October. In their opening remarks former minister for the arts, Chris Finlayson, as well as festival chair Colleen Marshall, paid deeply-felt tributes to his 25 years of support.

The opening concert was an opportunity to show-case most of the artists scheduled in the early days of the festival. So the New Zealand String Quartet plus NZSO principal horn Samuel Jacobs opened this first concert with Mozart’s Horn Quintet in E flat, one of several challenging pieces that Mozart wrote for his horn-playing friend Joseph Leutgeb; it’s an unusual work, made more curious by employing two violas instead of two violins. The quartet’s second violinist, Monique Lapins, switched to the viola. It enriched the sound beautifully, even though in the beginning there was some imbalance between horn and strings in this very clear acoustic; the players soon settled to a performance of great delight.

Returning Hungarian pianist Dénes Várjon then played three of the Six Pieces, Op 118, some of the many small piano pieces that Brahms wrote near the end of his life. Intermezzi nos 1, 2, and 6 of the set are sharply different in spirit and style, and they whetted the appetite to hear Várjon playing Beethoven and other music during the week.

Brahms’s 2nd string quintet and three intermezzi
There was a connection between the three intermezzi and the Jerusalem Quartet’s performance in the second half of Brahms’s second String Quintet (this time, the second violist being Gillian Ansell of the New Zealand String Quartet). Though he intended that the quintet would be his last composition, as his health was failing, its great success encouraged him to write a lot more chamber music in his last years, specifically the 20 pieces of opp 116 to 119. They were three well-contrasted pieces in which Várjon found subtle and interesting characteristics, No 6 traversing a sad, reflective mood that grew suddenly more exciting, even overwhelming by the end. I rather wished he’d played more of them.

The quintet is not one of Brahms most familiar pieces, but this performance made it easy to understand the warm reception its premiere in Vienna in 1890 received; somewhere described as ‘a sensation’. And this performance, celebratory and confident, with all five players producing a rapturous first movement with warm, heart-felt, sometimes boisterous playing promised a similar response. The second movement may be rather more enigmatic, but there was no lack of unanimity in their playing, particularly in the uniform warmth and richness of tone that they drew from their instruments. Although the last movement might not have seemed as spirited and moving as the first, at the end the audience responded with a sort of hushed awe.

The 20th century was represented by a not-well-known piece by Prokofiev, his Sonata for two violins, Op 58. Its four movements, vividly contrasted, and ferociously challenging were played by Canadian Nikki Chooi and British Anthony Marwood. Though alternating in musical sense and mood from phrase to phrase, seeming to speak different languages, ultimately an astonishing integrity and a shared purpose was revealed both in the music itself and its performance.

 

Saturday: Meeting the artists and discussing the music

The Jerusalem Quartet, talking with Gillian Ansell

Bartók’s music in the Festival: members of the Jerusalem Quartet, Dénes Várjon with Helene Pohl and Monique Lapins

Nelson Centre of Musical Arts

Saturday 2 February, 10 am and 2 pm

Talking with the Jerusalem Quartet 
The day had started with a morning appointment in which NZSQ violist Gillian Ansell talked with the four members of the Jerusalem Quartet. It was one of those occasions when the public gets to glimpse the sort of relationship that exists between those musicians who appear to the audience as rather super-human beings. The light shone not just on the four Israelis, but also on the normality of their rapport with at least one other musician of comparable gifts and insight: here, Gillian Ansell.

Their lives: the two violinists born in Kiev in Ukraine, the cellist from Minsk in Belarus, and violist Ori Kam who was born of Ukrainian parentage in California. While the other three were original members, he joined the quartet in 2009. Their various backgrounds have naturally become of special interest through the political and military activities that have forced on the rest of the world, some understanding of cynical post-Soviet adventurism and the unwise behaviour of the Ukrainian and Belarusian regimes. Each revealed careers that existed before and continued after the formation of the Jerusalem Quartet, when the players were about 17. And their careers have been troubled by reactions to their evident nature of their relationship with the Israeli Government.

No doubt because of his fluency in English, Ori Kam tended to lead entertainingly, with interesting detail about his own and the quartet’s background.

Bartók
In the afternoon, Dénes Várjon, members of the Jerusalem Quartet, and Helene Pohl and Monique Lapins, talked about the three Bartók pieces to be played in the following days. The relevant works discussed and illustrated were the Suite for piano, Op 14, written in 1916, on Sunday evening, the second violin sonata, written in 1922 on Tuesday evening, and the 5th String quartet played after I’d left Nelson. Várjon spoke in some detail about the Suite and the influence of his early exploration and recording of folk music in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Algeria. He mentioned Bartók’s own comments in the recordings which had a singular impact.

Monique Lapins was given space to play excerpts from, and talk about Bartók’s violin sonata; I found her presentation rarely illuminating, especially through her near-seductive movements that created an almost balletic interpretation of the music. The excerpts chosen from several movements of each work were a revelation, preparing the ground so illuminatingly for all three. I heard the full performances of only the first two works, neither of which I was familiar with.   Like many others, I find Bartók a gritty composer, his music not especially engaging, though it richly repays perseverance and close attention.

The members of the Jerusalem Quartet then discussed Bartók’s fifth string quartet to which all contributed, though it was violist Ori Kam who tended to lead the way, guiding the quartet’s playing of significant passages, pointing to bits that reflected the folk music of this or that Balkan people, even Turkish, and he remarked on the readiness of the Balkan Christian population, even when faced with imminent Turkish invasion, to enjoy Turkish music. He contributed encouraging remarks like, “Cool, isn’t it!”.

Saturday evening: Schubert, Dorati, Schumann and Brahms

Schubert: Violin Sonata No 3 in G minor, D 408    Alexander Pavlovsky – violin and Dénes Várjon – piano
Antal Dorati: Three pieces for oboe solo – La cigale et la fourmi, Lettre d’amour, Legerdemain    Thomas Hutchinson – oboe
Schumann: Piano Quartet in E flat, Op 47    Helene Pohl – violin, Gillian Ansell – viola, Kyril Zlotnikov – cello, Dénes Várjon – piano
Brahms: Horn Trio in E flat, Op 40    Sam Jacobs – horn, Anthony Marwood – violin, Dénes Várjon – piano

Nelson Centre of Musical Arts

Saturday 2 February, 7:30 pm

The Saturday evening concert opened with the first of one of the festival themes: the four Schubert sonatas, three of them called sonatinas in their first publication, after his death. Indeed, they are not heavy-weight in length or tone. Each was played by a different violinist: the first, No 3, D 408, played here by Alexander Pavkovsky and Várjon. There might have been a lingering trace of Bartókian urgency under the warmth and delight that the first movement produces, and one might have thought about the very short distance between Vienna and Budapest, or towns in which Bartók lived as a child, such as Pozsony (now Bratislava in Slovakia). The violin produced a sound that had the burnished glow of Rimu.

Prize-winning New Zealand oboist Thomas Hutchinson chose an unusual solo piece for his offering in this recital of huge variety: a set of three pieces by composer Antal Dorati, who was also a conductor of considerable distinction: a Hungarian (to keep Bartók company).  Bartók taught him at the Franz Liszt Academy and he conducted the world premiere of Bartók’s viola concerto. To modern audiences his fame rests substantially on his complete recordings of Haydn’s 104 symphonies with the Philharmonia Hungarica, an orchestra created from refugee musicians who fled Communist Hungary after Soviet troops invaded to put down the 1956 revolutionary attempt.

Hutchinson’s oboe was rich and virtuosic in the performance of the three sharply contrasted pieces, ending with beautifully articulated playing of the fast, highly imaginative last piece, Legerdemain.

Schumann’s piano quartet
Two major chamber works followed: Brahms’s Horn Trio and Schumann’s Piano Quartet. The latter was played by the NZSQ’s Helene Pohl and Gillian Ansell with cellist Kyril Zlotnikov from the Jerusalem Quartet. Várjon emerged the hero however; though the balance between piano and strings was admirable and all the most remarkable aspects of Schumann’s genius were there to delight us. It is not an everyday experience to hear such an impassioned performance; and one’s attention kept shifting from individual string players to the ensemble sounds and then realising that I was not listening attentively enough to Várjon at the piano, playing with the sort of passion that’s more characteristic of eastern European musicians than to those of the western countries; after all, Schumann was brought up in Saxony (in Zwickau), very close to the Czech border.

Brahms’s Horn Trio brought back Samuel Jacobs and Anthony Marwood, again with Várjon. I found Marwood’s demeanour a little distracting, weaving about excessively, in contrast to his perfectly restrained performance with Nikki Chooi in the Prokofiev sonata for two violins on Friday. However, it detracted not at all from the sense of delight that his omnipresent violin produced. There was perfect accord between the three musicians, with the result that impressions from my earlier hearings of the trio when I had never been wholly persuaded that Brahms had succeeded in creating an intimate threesome, had to be revised. In fact, Brahms here seemed to have absorbed entirely the character of the horn and the way it could most naturally be blended with two other very distinct instruments. The energy of the first and last movements was remarkable. Though the piano might have been visually in the background, and risked being heard merely as providing accompaniment, I’ve never been so engrossed by the work, particularly in heartfelt passages in the gorgeous, elegiac third movement.

Sunday: Várjon in Beethoven and Bartók

Beethoven: Piano Sonatas No 29 in B flat, Op 106 ‘Hammerklavier’ and No 32 in C minor, Op 111
Bartók: Suite for Piano, Op 14

Nelson Centre of Musical Arts

Sunday 3 February, 7:30 pm

I did not go to the Sunday afternoon concert, even though I would certainly have loved to hear Monique Lapins play the third violin Sonata of Schubert, with Izabella Simon at the piano, and probably the pieces by Lohei Mukai and New Zealanders John Rimmer and Simon Eastwood.

Perhaps I felt that I needed to conserve my listening energies for the extraordinary Beethoven project in the evening. The mere thought of playing the Hammerklavier in the same programme as the Op 111 seemed to demand physical and spiritual preparation and calm.

The Hammerklavier
There were no preliminaries to prepare for the big one: Várjon opened as he clearly intended to carry on, with an attack of unbridled power that gave no room at all for gentility or decorum. In fact, it spoke at once to prompt the first scribble in my notebook about ‘the rough and tumble’ opening in which he attacked the keyboard with abandon, with no apparent concern about the inevitable fluff that listeners bothered by such trivia might have spotted. But any of that was utterly unimportant in the overwhelming strength and compulsion that drove Várjon’s playing.

It recalled a comment that I’d come across in a YouTube recording I’d listened to a few days before: “weird, titanic, gnarled, joyous, grief-stricken monster that is the Hammerklavier”. Though the recording in question was courteous and disciplined in comparison to what I heard from Várjon. Confirmation of the wild character of the performance came right at the start, with the sudden modulation, mid-measure, from B flat to D within the first minute, which seemed a far more rebellious act than one had ever encountered before.

At the beginning of the development section, following an unresolved cadence, there are several pauses which Várjon held for what seemed unusual length and which further sustained the sense of ferocity and recklessness. And unusually long pauses continued to characterise the development section, and particularly the recapitulation, always with extraordinary dramatic effect.

The contrast with the brief Scherzo was perhaps more than usually striking: bright and clear, yet with these more restrained rhythmic and tonal shifts Várjon maintained the dramatic mood of the first movement. Then the Adagio sostenuto offered an extended, painstaking retreat to a peaceful, contemplative quarter hour, certain passages feeling as if the pervasive 6/8 tempo has turned it into a Ländler, though Várjon seemed to treat it as if Beethoven was struggling, painfully to find some sort of equilibrium.  Throughout the last movement which starts in deathly quiet, he continued to illuminate the composer’s determination to exploit every possible disturbing and dramatic element that could be found in it.

The last movement is no ordinary fast and sunny affair. It opens in deathly quiet, and gradually accelerates to regain the spirit of fierce determination that had dominated the first movement. Many performances seem to recover a feeling of peace and acceptance, but by the end that spirit was scarce; I simply knew that I’d never heard such a tumultuous, wildly Romantic performance of this masterpiece. And I loved it.

Bartók’s Suite for piano  
The programme notes point out that although Bartók was a fine pianist, he wrote little for the piano; this Suite, Op 14, written in 1916, and a later sonata are his only significant piano pieces. It is in four shortish movements: Allegretto, Scherzo, Allegro Molto and Sostenuto. The first sounds like a folk dance, though none of the themes in the suite are said to be taken from his collection of folk tunes. It’s spiky, unmistakably Bartók, as are the other movements; both the second and third are also fast and only the fourth, Sostenuto, relaxes to allow a feeling of calm to descend, though Várjon never allowed us to relax, persuading us that the work deserved to be much better known.

Opus 111 
The recital ended with Beethoven’s last sonata, Op 111 and although separated by the Bartók from the Hammerklavier, it felt very much from the same source, providing just a rather more metaphysical, less ferocious version of the earlier work, though in the Op 111 Várjon sought to find comparable unease and power. Its long second movement, Arietta, which Beethoven carefully describes as Adagio molto semplice e cantabile, all hardly departing from C major throughout the 20-odd minutes of its five variations, builds the most profound musical creation starting with several slow, repeated passages, then minutes of rolling triplets, before breaking out with a sort of ecstatic episode with rising and falling arpeggios in dotted rhythms (you don’t often find time signatures like 9/16). Várjon built this marvellous movement steadily, creating a near-hypnotic state, ecstatic and profoundly spiritual. His playing seemed never really to return to earth as feathery phrases went on and on, long sequences of trills, all elaborating a profoundly moving melody that is spun endlessly, coming to a simple ending that called for and got a long held silence before an immediate standing ovation.