Tag: piano

Immaculate and varied piano recital from gifted young Russian pianist

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Nikolai Saratovsky (Russian pianist)

Bach: Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother, BWV 992
Shostakovich: Prelude and Fugue in A, Op 87/7; Preludes Op 34: No 2 in A minor, No 15 in G flat and No 16 in B flat
Schubert: Impromptu in E flat, Op 90 (D 899) No 2
Brahms: Op 118: No 4 – Intermezzo in A and No 5 – Romanze
Rachmaninov: Barcarolle in G minor, Op 10/3; Preludes, Op 32: No 5 in G and No 12 in G sharp minor
Gershwin: Three Preludes

St John’s Church, Corner Willis and Dixon Streets

Friday 22 June, 6:15 pm

Nikolai Saratovsky is a 31-year-old pianist, brought to New Zealand by Mary Gow, impresario (feminine form??), who runs the Mulled Wine concerts at Paekakariki (you can catch him again, at the Paekakariki Memorial Hall, this Sunday at 2:30 pm).  Mary Gow also organised his concert at St Andrew’s on The Terrace on Thursday lunchtime.

One of a seeming endless flood of musicians from Russia and other former-Soviet states.

Bach opened the recital; an unusual piece, though one whose name resonated; in my case, having not heard the music itself.

Its title is rather uncharacteristic of the aesthetic climate of the early 18th century: Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo (Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother). Though Bach(?)’s autograph is lost, the work has acquired Italian titles.
1 Arioso: Adagio — ‘Friends Gather & Try to Dissuade Him…’
2 Andante – ‘They Picture the Dangers Which May Befall Him’
3 Adagiosissimo (or Adagissimo) – ‘The Friends’ Lament’
4 Andante con moto – ‘Since He Cannot Be Dissuaded, They Say Farewell’
5 Allegro pocco – ‘Aria of the Postilion’ (Aria di postiglione)
6 ‘Fugue in Imitation of the Postilion’s Horn’ (Fuga all’imitazione della cornetta di postiglione)

Wikipedia reports that “The story that Bach performed it at age nineteen when his brother, Johann Jacob, left to become an oboist in the army of Charles XII in Sweden, is questionable”. Another musicologist has offered a new theory: that Bach wrote his Capriccio at the age of seventeen and dedicated it to his school friend, George Erdmann, who was departing for Danzig and later served at the Russian court. So its date can thus be guessed at around 1703-5.

If I had been asked to name the composer in the course of the first few minutes, I might not have guessed Bach. An impression that accords, as I have later read, with doubts about its authenticity. Partly, it’s the feel of a piece that seems to lie unusually for the harpsichord, but further, that its calm and rhapsodic-like character hardly sounds like Bach, even though its scenario was not inconceivable.

More significantly, I really couldn’t get a clear idea of the pianist’s grasp of the music, and while the second section was a little quicker, it hardly sounded much more Bach-like; more ornaments and changeable in its phrasing that could have suggested possible risks on the journey. The third part, strangely marked Adagissimo, certainly suggests sadness with its repeated, descending motifs; finally, Bach’s candidature seemed stronger. The Postilion’s octave horn cries marked the fifth movement vividly, and by this time I had come to feel both that Bach was a credible composer candidate and that in Saratovsky we were hearing a highly gifted, unobtrusive and self-effacing musician who was not trying to impose a Bach style where it didn’t clearly exist.

Shostakovich’s collections of preludes (1933), and preludes and fugues (1951) are more read about than heard (in my experience). I await a pianist who will present either collection in its entirety in Wellington. This taste of three Preludes and the second Prelude and Fugue was tantalising, capturing so well their quirky or enigmatic character.

The rest of the programme was both varied and demonstrative, ranging from Schubert’s much loved Impromptu in E flat, a couple of less known, late piano pieces from Brahms’s Op 118, both played with taste and discretion, essentially Brahms in flavour, and to Rachmaninov.

A similar absence of ostentation was clear with Rachmininov: first the Barcarolle in G minor from the Morceaux de salon, Op 10, fleet of detail, natural and impeccable; then two of the Preludes from Op 32: No 5, deceptively difficult to articulate with delicacy, and No 12 (the second to last in the set), the right hand rippling (‘coruscating’ is a favourite word) over a beautifully limpid left hand melody.

But here was an utterly different pianist in Gershwin’s three Preludes; absolutely in the American spirit, vividly striking the contrast between the sombre second, Andante con moto, and the heavy, conflicting rhythms in the first and the more swinging, comfortable (even if it’s marked agitato) third one.

The encores had their purpose in the context of the programme: Rachmaninov’s G minor Prelude, the most familiar after the earlier C sharp minor, and then the piece included in other programmes: the familiar, though hard to attribute, Malaguena by the famous Ernesto Lecuona y Casado. Each contributed another facet of the pianist’s impeccably scrupulous, individual approach to the piano repertoire.

Rachmaninov from Rustem Hayroudinoff, via Halida Dinova……

Posted on by Peter Mechen

RACHMANINOV – The Piano Sonatas

Piano Sonata No.1 in D Minor Op.28
Lullaby (Tchaikovsky) Op.16 No.1) arr. Rachmaninov
Piano Sonata No.2 in B-flat Minor Op.36

Rustem Hayroudinoff (piano)

ONYX 4181 (available from Presto Classical)

What on earth, you are asking, am I doing reviewing a CD by a pianist whose name would be largely unknown to New Zealand audiences? The answer is that Rustem Hayroudinoff is the brother of the remarkable Tatarstan pianist Halida Dinova who has relatively recently toured New Zealand on two occasions, giving, at the Lower Hutt Little Theatre during her visit here in 2012, one of the most remarkable recitals I’ve ever witnessed – go to https://middle-c.org/2012/05/halida-dinova-russian-soul-from-tatarstan/ for more details. At the time, I thought Dinova’s playing seemed to epitomise a style long associated with Russian-trained pianists, one which invariably resulted in music-making that powerfully conjured up a compelling amalgam of pictorial, emotional and structural associations out of whatever repertoire these pianists performed.

On the strength of the brilliant music-making to be found on this new Onyx CD from Rustem Hayroudinoff, that tradition certainly runs in the family – it’s a further example of a musician’s alchemic “ownership” of the notes and their recreation in performance. Coincidentally enough, I had already encountered Hayroudinoff, in a previous issue of Rachmaninov’s music on the Chandos label, featuring the composer’s complete Preludes (CHAN 10107),  long before I knew of the connection with Dinova.

This time Hayroudinoff turns his attention to the Piano Sonatas, adding a well-judged interlude in the form of Rachmaninov’s transcription of Tchaikovsky’s Lullaby Op.16 No.1, placed between the two larger works. Hayroudinoff comments in a thoughtful note printed in the CD booklet, that this was Rachmaninov’s last composition, dating from 1941, aptly completing a circle of creativity which had begun as a 13 year-old with another Tchaikovsky transcription, that of the latter’s Manfred Symphony for piano duet.

Still, whatever the Tchaikovsky Lullaby transcription’s merits, nobody will be buying this disc with this piece first and foremost in mind – though the Sonatas (especially the Second) have had their “champions” (one thinks of John Ogdon’s ground-breaking 1968 LP of both works, for example, and Vladimir Horowitz’s espousal of the Second over the years), it’s only in comparatively recent times that these pieces have become widely accepted as masterpieces. The First was rarely performed, and the original version of the Second wasn’t played for many years, so that a proper “performance tradition” is only now being established for each of the Sonatas by a newer generation of super-virtuosi.

Rather like the case with Bruckner and several of his own symphonies, the Second Sonata’s original 1913 version was called to question by Rachmmaninov himself, who drastically revised it in 1931, cutting the original by six or seven minutes. For a long time afterwards interpreters either followed the composer’s revised score, or played a version that combined elements of the two editions, such as Horowitz made (with the composer’s blessing), and Hayroudinoff himself does here. The original 1913 version is finding increased favour with more interpreters, and recordings, among them Leslie Howard of the “complete Franz Liszt” fame, who states unequivocally in a note accompanying his own recording of the original, “…..no musician should ever give a passing thought to a “pick-and-mix” version of the two texts”. As with the aforementioned Bruckner Symphonies, it may well happen in time that the various combined-edition versions will come to be regarded as curiosities next to either the original or composer-made revised version – all part of the work’s overall genesis and process of acceptance!

Hayroudinoff’s present recording certainly contributes to that process in the case of both of the sonatas, even if he takes little heed of Leslie Howard’s comments regarding the Second Sonata, by offering his own “amalgam” of the two versions, obviously from deep-rooted conviction……

“I strongly believe that in his quest for conciseness, Rachmaninov excised so much in the revised edition of the Sonata that the structure of the work suffered. Where I felt that some of the logic of the continuity of ideas was compromised, I discreetly reinstated them from the original edition. I hope that the listener will not judge me as an insolent desecrator. I did this out of love for this extraordinary work, and with the humble intention to restore its coherence……” (Rustem Hayroudinoff)

Even if Rachmaninov aficionados reading this review agree with Leslie Howard’s negative opinion regarding the “hybridisation” of the Sonata, they should, in my opinion, still try and hear Hayroudinoff’s extraordinary playing of it, irrespective of the pianist’s own cross-references to the Sonata’s original edition. With the chromatic descent that opens the work, Hayroudinoff emphatically plunges the listener into a world of unique sensibility at once expansive and volatile, each note imbued with purpose and “attitude” which gives both expansiveness and weight to those opening declamations and the tremendous “rolling” crescendi whose peaks then fall away so resonantly and ambiently before the second subject’s heart-easing lyricism (to my ears a precursor of the Fourth Piano Concerto’s similarly bitter-sweet melodic outpourings).

Hayroudinoff’s innate sense of the music’s organic flow allowed both the music’s tenderness and pent-up energies to interact, bringing out the “growing” of the downwardly chromatic motif with ever-increasing insistence to the point where the sounds transcendentally became as sonorous church bells (one of a number of recurring influences of Rachmaninov’s compositional life), linking the Sonata to another work from that same time, his choral symphony “The Bells”.

Seemingly from out of the air Hayroudinoff floated the notes which set the second movement on its course, patiently building the music’s richly-laden decorative aspect towards, firstly, a full-throated melodic peroration, and then another bell-like evocation, this time darker and disturbingly remorseless. After delivering panic-stricken flourishes of shriller voices in response, the pianist brought a beautifully consoling order to the uneasy resonance of echoes and consoling voices, a “calm before the storm” aspect which heightened the effect of the third movement’s onslaught!

An almost militaristic aspect dominated the opening, Hayroudinoff’s incredible strength and dexterity driving the music forward excitingly, though with playing always alive to quixotic changes of mood, with their attendant variations of touch and sonority. Again, I thought the pianist’s rendering of the music’s different facets extraordinary – here bound together with an alchemic sense of ongoing purpose, a living quality which quickened this listener’s senses as well as the emotions and the intellect. Still, overwhelming as the result was, the playing’s illuminating quality left part of me wishing that Hayroudinoff had “gone for broke” and given us the original 1913 version of the music.

Thankfully no such lasting equivocations affect the music of the First Piano Sonata, composed in 1907 when Rachmaninov was in Dresden, simultaneously writing his Second Symphony and his opera “Monna Vanna”. The sonata has the same epic proportions as the symphony, and Rachmaninov characteristically expressed dissatisfaction with both works on their completion, and even after publication of the symphony suggesting numerous cuts for performers to apply. Of course, in the wake of the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony in 1897, it was perhaps understandable that the composer would, even after the new symphony’s initial success, “lose his nerve” in the face of eventual critical disparagement, the upshot being that his suggested cuts were “sanctioned” and invariably followed in subsequent performances up until the late 1960s/early70s when the work at last began to be played “complete” once again!

A different fate awaited its “companion piece”, the D Minor Piano Sonata, which, while maintaining its content since its publication in 1908, had already been cut extensively by a worried composer after a “trial performance”. Describing the work in a letter to a friend as “wild and endlessly long”, Rachmaninov remarked ruefully that “no-one will ever play this work” due to its “dubious musical merit”. Mostly non-committal regarding any “programme” or other source of inspiration for his compositions, the composer let it slip in the same letter that the work’s “idea” was made up of “three contrasting characters from a work of world literature”. He refrained, however, from telling the sonata’s first public interpreter, Konstantin Igumnov, until AFTER the latter had performed the work a few times, that the “work of world literature” was Goethe’s “Faust”, and each of the three movements related to a particular character in the story, as was the case with Liszt’s “Faust” Symphony.

Hayroudinoff tells us that he believes an awareness of Rachmaninov’s original programme is a key to understanding the complexities of this work – Rachmaninov said as much in another statement from the letter quoted above – “…..I am beginning to think that, if I were to reveal the programme, the Sonata would become much more comprehensible…..”. The pianist quotes from Faust’s monologue at the beginning of the play, one which expresses the character’s inner conflict, and explains his actions throughout the drama’s course – Faust speaks of his “two souls”, one loving the world, the other longing for higher things “beyond the dust”. Thus, in his playing, Hayroudinoff stressed certain themes that for him illustrated this conflict, making the music’s trajectories throughout the “Faust” movement interact and confront one another in the most visceral and dramatic ways, though always preserving the grand sweep of the whole, demonstrating something of that ability which Sviatoslav Richter’s teacher Heinrich Neuhaus described his pupil as having – that ability to soar above the whole work, even one of gigantic proportions, with an eagle’s flight, and take it all in at a single glance with incredible speed.

In the second “Gretchen” movement, there’s straightaway a sense of a young girl’s innocence and purity, in tandem with a quickening of impulsive longing as the line is “counterpointed” by a would-be lover’s voice, real or imagined, the long-breathed themes encircled and sensitised by the sinuous patterning of the accompaniments, and intensified in feeling by ecstatically elongated trills. Hayroudinoff here showed himself equally at home with evocations of tenderness and sensitivity as with brilliance and strength, as the lovers’ union reached a kind of fulfilment, before the music unhurriedly returned both the characters and their intentions to the imaginations’ shadows.

Characterising in his accompanying notes the sonata’s final movement as “the realm of Mephistopheles”, Hayroudinoff then made the word flesh with playing of staggering bravado, giving the “Spirit of Negation” all the swagger and energy that accompanied his quest for possession of Faust’s soul. Suggestions, echoes and variants of the Latin hymn “Dies Irae” abounded as the forces of good and evil, and light and darkness did battle, Rachmaninov’s astounding vision here put across with unsurpassed conviction and irresistible command by the pianist.

This issue, in my view, takes its place among the great Rachmaninov recordings of recent times, a number of which feature the same two-sonata coupling (from Xiayn Wang, Leslie Howard, Nikolai Lugansky and Alexis Weissenberg, by way of example, along with a recent reissue of John Ogdon’s famous 1968 RCA recording). With the advocacy of such illustrious names as these, along with that of Rustem Hayroudinoff’s, the shade of the composer may well rest contentedly at last regarding this vindication of two of his greatest compositions.

 

Pianist Tony Chen Lin’s debut CD for Rattle a must-hear….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Rattle Records presents:
DIGRESSIONS – Tony Chen Lin (piano)

BARTOK – Piano Sonata BB 88 (Sz.80)
JS BACH – French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816
TONY CHEN LIN – Digressions (Meditation on R.S.)
SCHUMANN – Humoreske Op.20

Rattle RAT DO80 2018

My first encounter with Tony Chen Lin was in 2008 at Kerikeri’s International Piano Competition, in which he was awarded what I’ve always regarded as a “too close to call” second place to his friend Jun Bouterey-Ishido. Since then I’ve heard each of them some years afterwards give separate recitals in Wellington; and while appreciating the unique excellence of each, I’m still unable to pronounce either of them the other’s superior. Most recently I heard Lin perform at St.Andrew’s, which was less than a couple of years ago, in September of 2016  (the review can be read at the following link – https://middle-c.org/2016/09/tony-chen-lin-piano-evocations-visions-and-premonitions-in-st-andrews/ ), and two of the items he presented on that occasion are now included on this, his first CD, appearing on the Rattle Records label.

The CD’s overall title “Digressions” is borrowed from one of these two pieces, in fact Lin’s own composition. As its subtitle Meditation on R.S. suggests, the piece is a kind of reflection on Robert Schumann’s Humoreske, the work that concludes this recording’s programme. The opening tones of Lin’s piece seemed conjured out of the air, with occasional “impulses of delight” enlivening the self-communing character of the whole, the lines becoming more and more declamatory and detailed to a point where the music seems to turn in on itself and exclaim “Now, what was that work I was going to play? – ah, yes!….” – and from the resonances, the opening notes of the Schumann sound, in haunting accord with the pianist’s musings.

Before this, however, the disc’s contents take us well-and-truly to “other realms” (as Schumann was fond of saying), in the form of music firstly by Bartok and then JS Bach, the latter’s French Suite No. 5 in D Major being the “other” work previously performed at the 2016 St.Andrew’s recital.  One might think that the Bach piece, with its supremely ordered sensibilities, would make an excellent “starter” to any concert – however, we’re instead galvanised in a completely different way at the outset by one of  Bartok’s pieces. In Lin’s hands, the composer’s 1926 Sonata makes an arresting beginning, with its hammered repeated notes and three-note ascending motif, the whole peppered with irregular phrases and brusque punctuations. Amongst these, Lin still manages to find moments of light and shade, as well as in places giving the rhythms a disconcertingly irregular (almost “dotted”) pulse, creating a somewhat precarious, even “slightly tipsy”, effect, and adding to the droll humour. A sudden headlong sprint and a whiplash glissando, and the movement brusquely takes its leave.

Like some Dr.Coppelius-like clock, tolling bell sounds usher in the second movement, the piano’s repeated chords augmented by an insistently anguished single right-hand note, Lin’s clean, steady playing allowing the grim austerity of the scenario its full effect. Though this “tolling bell” rhythm persists throughout, Bartok creates whole worlds of culminative angst and desolation over the widest possible range of colour and dynamics – a particularly magical moment in Lin’s performance sounds at 4’01”, with the constant stepwise rhythm suddenly hushed, almost sinister, as the right hand’s spaced-out pinpricks of light flicker disconsolately through the gloom.

The “rondo with variations” third movement features a pentatonic melody given all kinds of different rustic-like treatment, with songs and dances, fiddles and flutes, in the midst of great merriment and energetic spirits. Lin evokes all of these strands of colour and timbre with seemingly indefatigable energy, by turns invigorating and startling our sensibilities with his playing’s strength, flexibility and incisiveness. Throughout he’s served by a recording which reproduces every contour, scintillation and whisper, making for listeners as much a properly visceral as a musical experience.

After this, the music of JS Bach evokes a somewhat different world, though, as with Bartok’s work, Bach’s forms often incorporated dance styles and rhythms familiar to his contemporaries. The French Suites, for example, contain examples of well-known forms such as Allemande, Courante, Sarabande and Gigue, along with other dances such as the Gavotte, the Minuet and the Bouree, both courtly and rustic in origin. To my ears, Tony Lin’s treatment of these pieces open them all up to sunlight and fresh air – the opening Allemande moves directly and assuredly along a trajectory whose modulations go with the terrain, registering both impulse and reflection along the journey, though without impeding the flow, Lin animating the repeats in what sound like entirely natural and spontaneous ways, compelling my attention with every bar. How joyously the Courante leaps forward from all constraints, its canon-like voicings in places between the hands bubbling with energy and humour – and , in response, how dignified and visionary seems the stately Sarabande, the pianist’s way with repeats illustrating Lin’s ability to create time and space within the realms of a steadily-moving pulse.

I loved how the music seemed to then pick up its skirts/coat-tails for the Gavotte, and trip insouciantly through its paces, the pianist’s lightness of touch never descending to any kind of  “pecking” or jabbing at the music. The engagingly garrulous Bouree acted as the perfect foil for the succeeding Loure, with its sedate, but teasingly-patterned 6/4 rhythms, so very flexibly voiced. And in conclusion, the Gigue danced its way through the soundscape, Lin making something wide-eyed and wondrous of the inversions of the theme in the dance’s second half – a performance which so warm-heartedly brought out the music’s life-enhancing character for one’s listening pleasure.

Once the brief though entraptured musings of Lin’s own “Digressions” had prepared the way, I was more than ready for Schumann’s Humoreske. The composer meant the title not as “humour” in the accepted sense of the word, but as a kind of portrayal of the contradictory and volatile nature of the human condition. Lin’s playing gives the opening a beautifully thought-borne quality, something seemingly to exist both “in the air” and within the realms of the listener’s imagination, at once elusive and all-encompassing in its poetic effect – the composer’s “rhapsodising” about his Clara, and his expressions of love for her here given poignant utterance, obviously somewhere between the “laughing and crying” confessed to by Schumann in a letter to his beloved. At the beginning, the way the melody seems to be “revealed” as if already mid-course is beautifully brought about by the pianist, as is the spontaneous leap-forward of the quicker material, the left hand’s accompanying figurations allowed some tripping, angular quality, imparting a character of their own in tandem with the right-hand’s melody, the effect boyish and engaging! After the extended dotted-rhythm section quixotically dances through fanciful modulations, Lin masterfully eases the music back through its journeyings, returning to the first of the quicker episodes, and then, magically, dissolving such energies into the opening, as if the song we heard at the outset had been meanwhile singing to itself while awaiting our return.

Further fancy awaits the listener in the inspirational, often volatile second movement, during which succeeding moods appearing to “cancel each other out” with breathtaking rapidity. Lin’s traversal of the music is remarkable for its chameleon-like aspect, its ability to “go with” whatever impulse the composer’s fancy follows, while constantly keeping in mind something of what Schumann called an Innere Stimme or “inner voice” (a quality he also referred to concerning his Op. 17 C-Major Fantasie). So while Lin rings all the composer’s seemingly random changes of momentum and mood, he keeps us close to the music’s spirit with an all-pervading concentration on some unspoken and indefinable, but palpable “centre” around which all the “humours” revolve.

By comparison, the third piece, Einfach und zart (Simple and delicate) seems straightforward enough, interpretatively, a poetic opening, with a contrasting Intermezzo – rapid semiquaver figurations, including right-hand octaves at one point so as to set the pianist’s pulses racing! Here, the notes tumbled over one another jovially, Lin’s playing giving the octave passages a kind of fierce joy in their unbridled energies, before returning to the simple lyricism of the beginning. The Innig
(Heartfelt) section is here delivered by the pianist with a born poet’s sensibility, and the energetic Sehr lebhaft which followed then works up a proper head of steam as to convince us of the music’s inevitable “shower of brilliance” summation in Lin’s hands, only to suddenly (and characteristically) transform into a portentous march!

All the listener can do is gape in astonishment and “go” with the strains of the music as it struts into yet another realm of expressive possibility, muttering to itself as it fades into the following Zum Beschluss, one of the composer’s beautiful “epilogue-like” valedictions, an extended amalgam of song and recitative, here, as with so much else along this journey of Lin’s, most eloquently expressed. It remains for a series of swirling chromatically step-wise descents to rudely awaken one’s imaginings from this final reverie for a “return to life”, leaving this listener with “What a journey, and what a guide!” kinds of reactions! – Tony Lin’s ever-spontaneous and boldly adventurous playing seems to me to have most assuredly penetrated the spirit of the composer’s most fanciful, yet deeply-felt outpourings. In all, it’s a disc well worth seeking out and hearing.

 

 

Paul Dukas’s Sonata the climax of John Chen’s monumental Waikanae piano recital

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Waikanae Music Society presents
John Chen (piano)

Music by Handel, Chopin and Dukas

HANDEL – Keyboard Suite No.8 in F minor HWV 433
CHOPIN – Piano Sonata No.2 in B-flat Minor Op.35
DUKAS – Piano Sonata in E-flat Minor (1900)

Memorial Hall, Waikanae.

Sunday 22nd April, 2018

April has been a bumper month for piano recitals in the Wellington region, this being the third I’ve attended and reviewed in as many weeks. What’s astonished me about each of them has been their utter distinctiveness, with not a single recurring piece between the three, and a sense of adventure very much to the fore in each instance, in terms of the repertoire and its presentation.

Firstly, Michael Houstoun’s Lower Hutt recital wrought a well-nigh flawless balance of sensibility between a group of contrasting pieces whose overall qualities enhanced the uniqueness of character demonstrated by each one in turn, to wondrous effect. The following day, Jason Bae’s lunchtime recital at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music’s Adam Concert Room presented a demanding group of virtuoso works, which included a New Zealand premiere alongside three rarely-performed others, all played with finely-honed sensitivity and terrific panache.

And, just last Sunday, a Waikanae audience enjoyed the rich elegance and cumulative power of John Chen’s playing of three works representative of their different eras – baroque, romantic and fin de siècle – to overwhelming effect by the concert’s end. Honours were perhaps divided between the last two pianists regarding  enterprise in terms of rarity, with Bae playing an “off-the beaten track” programme, and Chen giving us a rather more substantial work from a composer, Paul Dukas, whose fame of course largely rests with a single work, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”.

As well, like Houstoun’s, I thought Chen’s programme cleverly worked out, the pianist taking his audience on a kind of grand tour of innovatory keyboard music from three very different eras. Handel, of course, represents the Baroque sensibility at its most winning and attractive, with the choice of the eighth of the composer’s keyboard suites a particularly poignant one, due partly to the “dark” key of F Minor.

Solemn, yet still with a flow expressing both shape and energy, Chen contoured the music’s opening pages with all the colour and variety of tone available on a modern grand piano, a sense of expectation preparing us for the Fugue which followed the Prelude. I liked the pianist’s balancing a sense of fun amid the fugue’s forthright utterances, giving the music its composer’s characteristic “living” quality. The Allemande beguiled us in Chen’s hands firstly with its opening simplicity, and then with its embellishments at each section’s repeat, while the Courante delightfully set its canonic voices in teasing, playful, motion, though still allowing the final Gigue pride of place in conclusive momentum. Here was beautifully pin-pointed playing from Chen, both free-flowing and and angular by turns, the repeats with their inversions of the opening tickling our sensibilities with their delightful “on the other hand” insouciant wryness, the conclusion thrown off with a theatrical touch of elan.

With the Chopin Sonata’s opening, Chen then plunged us into a different world of romantic expression, giving the portentous opening plenty of dramatic weight, but then tempering the wildness of the following allegro, the playing allowing the agitations some shape and coherent utterance, propulsive without becoming hysterical. We got the first movement repeat to underline this balancing act between heart and mind, Chen actually going right back to the Sonata’s beginning, here, instead of merely re-immersing us directly in the turbulent waters of the Allegro, The development continued the pianist’s way of shaping the discourse, the climactic points treated as part of the music’s flow rather than ends of excitement and release in themselves.

Perhaps Chen was commenting in his own wry way on Chopin’s friend and contemporary Robert Schuman’s extraordinary verdict on the Sonata as a whole, calling the work’s movements “four of Chopin’s maddest children” (this from the composer of Kreisleriana!). Here, the music seemed to fit sonata-form like a glove, as justly as had Beethoven’s similar gestures and propulsions in his revolutionary “Pathetique” Sonata’s first movement over a generation earlier. The second movement’s vigorous opening, too, had more of a chunky, almost laconic quality with Chen, rather than seeming to express anything sinister or demonic-sounding in its intent. This seemed far more in keeping with the lyricism of the central section, its beauties resembling tender endearments more readily to my ears than prayer or invocation in times of trouble.

That feeling of relief from oppression belonged more here to the world-famous third movement’s trio sequence, its heavenly beauties realised by Chen with hypnotic focus and powerful simplicity, all the more effective when set against the dark menace of the opening “Funeral March”. The pianist conveyed impressive ceremonial splendour in his playing of the march’s noble melody, as well as grimmer realities with his tolling dotted rhythms and drum-roll trills, though again, everything was as musical as it was graphic, the “madness” not discounted by the playing but kept at bay.

Surely one of the boldest strokes of genius with which to round off a classical work was Chopin’s finale, the part of the work which gave Schumann the most difficulty, in that he couldn’t accept the whirlwind of notes that the former gave us as “music”- vis-a-vis his actual words – “….what we get in the final movement under the title “Finale” seems more like a mockery than any music……and yet, one has to admit, even from this unmelodic and joyless movement a peculiar, frightful spirit touches us, which holds down with an iron fist those who would like to revolt against it, so that we listen as if spellbound  and without complaint to the very end, yet also without praise, for music it is not………” Yet Schumann also had the grace to admit, in the same article, that “perhaps years later, a romantic  grandson will be born and raised, will dust off and play the sonata, and will think to himself, “The man was not so wrong after all.”

John Chen took the music at face-value, perhaps underplaying the romantically-charged impulses generated by the hands in unison by bringing out the delineations of notes with more clarity than usual, but still creating for the poetically-minded a picture of “the wind blowing the leaves across the freshly-dug mound of the hero’s grave”. Had Schumann heard a performance such as this he might well have upped and exclaimed that the music’s time had indeed arrived, and that the “romantic grandson” had already been born and raised, and was here showing us how “right” the composer’s work was already sounding in his hands…….

Having reimagined the relatively familiar, Chen then turned his attentions to a work more heard about than actually played, up until recently the preserve of pianistic legends such as John Ogdon and Marc-Andre Hamelin. This was Paul Dukas’s epic Piano Sonata, grandly-conceived and densely-worked in typically rich, late-Romantic language, a work whose four-movement design and monumental scale actually exceeds half the total duration of the composer’s entire published output (Dukas was notoriously self-critical as a composer).

Though Dukas, unlike some of his contemporaries, was no great pianistic talent, his Sonata remains one of the most significant of French Romantic Piano works. Dedicated to Saint-Saens, and first performed by the renowned French pianist Edouard Reisler in 1901, the work was at once acclaimed by Debussy who wrote a review, stating at the outset that “Monsieur Paul Dukas knows what music is made of : it is not just brilliant sound designed to beguile the ear until it can stand no more… For him it is an endless treasure trove of possible forms and souvenirs with which he can cut his ideas to the measure of his imagination.” Though the music brings to mind something of the profundity of Beethoven, the brilliance of Liszt and the harmonic richness of Franck, it directly reflects Dukas’s own creative ethic, both structure and emotion realised in discursive, though beautifully-sculpted ways, the outcome at once refined and concentrated, leaving the impression of not a single note being wasted.

John Chen began the work steadily and patiently, letting the detailings “unfold”, and giving the impression of the music and musician allowing each to “play” the other, such was his apparent absorption in the sounds and their interaction. Here, the first group of themes gave a dark-browed and troubled impression, while the second calmed the agitations with melting lyricism, here shared in canonic manner between the hands, and there sounded in the bass with deep, rich tones, the contrasting sequences playing out their characters with both volatility and deep reflectiveness, the latter beautifully sustained here by the pianist throughout the movement’s coda.

A chordal melody, reminiscent of Edward MacDowell’s contemporaneous “To a Wild Rose” in feeling, began the slow movement, albeit with a series of delicate chromatic explorations that soon took the music’s textures and tones far above “Woodland Scenes” to what seemed like the firmament overhead…….here, Chen’s fastidious ear for detail brought out a kaleidoscopic world of sensation and impulse, his beautifully-resonant bass-notes opening up the vistas, and his gentle but insistent cross-rhythmed traversals of the terrain having an almost epic Brucknerian quality in places. And, finally, the pianist’s reproducing of the composer’s remotely twinkling “stars in the sky”- like impulse-notes which brought the movement to a close I found simply enthralling.

What an explosion of energy and frenzy accompanied the opening of the Scherzo! – rapid-fire impulses punctuated by whiplash chords! Tumultuous sounds, here brought about by the pianist’s fantastic control of both declamatory utterance and eerily-voiced mutterings. Even greater surprise it was, then, to be confronted with a sudden hiatus in the form of a slow-paced, angular fugue, a trio-like section whose quiet, almost disembodied tones had a disturbing quality of their own akin to that of the eye of a storm, remote, almost alien in relation to their context.

Debussy thought the Sonata’s finale “evokes the kind of beauty comparable to the perfect lines of a mighty architecture, lines that melt and blend with the colours of air and open sky, harmonizing with them completely and forever”. Certainly the grand chords with which the movement began suggested imposing structures, around which were woven meditative-like musings, which eventually gave way to the muscular thrusts that began the anime section. From these swirlings a grand theme emerged, not unlike Franck in heroic mode. John Chen’s energies were remarkable in conjuring up the necessary weight and stamina to realise these epic outpourings. The return of the opening of the theme was a heart-warming moment, which became more energised, with exciting motoric accompaniments, and with various inventive  treatments of it thrown at us to make of what we could – a ferment of excitement! The gradual amplification of these elements generated an echt-romantic glow in Chen’s hands, almost pre-Hollywood in its scale (Debussy’s “lines that melt and blend with the colours of air and open sky”….), before the apotheosis-like climax brought forth the coda, by turns brilliant and monumental in effect. With playing that engaged the the music fully ,the pianist carried his audience with him right to the end, earning, and richly deserving, rapturous acclaim from all sides. Bravo!

 

 

Jason Bae – an enterprising, exploratory and heroic performer

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School Of Music

A recital by Jason Bae

Debussy – Images oubliées
Esa-Pekka Salonen – Dichotomie (NZ Premiere)
Grieg – Ballade Op.24
Medtner – Piano Sonata No.11 Sonata tragica Op.39 No.5

Jason Bae (piano)

Adam Concert Room,
Te Kōkī New Zealand School Of Music,
Victoria University of Wellington

Friday, 13th April 2018

Korean-born NZ-adopted pianist Jason Bae made a welcome return a week ago to the Wellington region for a lunchtime recital at the School of Music’s Adam Concert Room, Victoria University. He brought with him a programme he’s taken to a number of venues around the country, one whose content suggested that there would be no compromises on an artistic level, despite the degree of informality and relaxation often associated with a “lunchtime concert”. This was a programme deserving of serious, five-star attention from start to finish, and received playing that fully realised the “serious” intent of the pianist’s enterprising choice of repertoire.

Bae has already made his mark in the world of piano-playing with many prize-giving performances and awards in various places around the world – according to his web-site, his recent activities include performing recitals in Helsinki, Finland and in Seoul, Korea, as well as currently in New Zealand.  The young pianist is also turning his attention to orchestral conducting, making his New Zealand conducting debut with the Westlake Symphony Orchestra in Auckland. He’s obviously one of those multi-talented musicians who has the aptitude to succeed at whatever he turns his hand to.

Judging from the programme we heard Bae perform at the Music School on Friday, there’s no ‘resting on his laurels”, no trotting out well-consolidated warhorses with which to impress audiences. These pieces required his listeners to come some of the way themselves towards the music, itself extremely varied in content and character, rather than simply let it all “wash over” the sensibilities in a generalised way. Perhaps the best-known of these works, albeit in a roundabout fashion, was that of Debussy’s “Images oubliées” (an earlier work than each of the two, better-known sets of “Images”, but one which, for some reason, wasn’t published in the composer’s lifetime). Recently,  though, there has been some recorded attention given both to Medtner’s solo piano works and to Grieg’s hitherto neglected output outside the “Lyric Pieces”. Certainly the remainder of Bae’s programme indicated there were treasures aplenty awaiting more widespread awareness and approval.

The opening of the Debussy work (Lent) brought forth exquisitely-voiced tones from the young pianist, the sounds resembling some kind of ethereal recitative, accompanied by the softest, most velvety of arpeggiations. This accorded with the composer’s own description of the pieces as “not for brilliantly-lit salons…..but rather, conversations between the piano and oneself”. Bae allowed a beautifully-appointed ebb-and-flow of colours and contours, a kind of nature-benediction in sound, allowing the tones at the end to breathtakingly mingle with the silences.

The second piece “Souvenir du Louvre” bore a close relationship with a movement from the composer’s later “Pour le piano”, a rather more fulsome version of what became the Sarabande from the latter work. Again, the pianist’s evocations were meticulously directed towards detailings of wondrous delicacy, with dialogues throughout sounded between the piano’s different registers, sculpted strength set against liquid movement. Debussy’s original was actually written for Yvonne Lerolle, the girl both Degas and Renoir painted at the piano, and for whom the composer described the piece with the words “slow and solemn, even a bit like an old portrait” (hence the title).

The title of the third piece betrays its inspiration even more candidly than does the later work it (only) occasionally resembles – “Jardins sous la pluie” from “Estampes” with its well-known folk-song quotations. Here it is somewhat teasingly called by the composer “Quelques aspects de ‘Nous n’irons plus au bois'” (Aspects of the song “We will not go to the woods”), with the added afterthought, for the benefit of his young dedicatee, “…because the weather is dreadful”…….Bae’s fleet-fingered playing evoked a game of chase through the woods, by turns lightly-brushed and hard-hitting, with some tolling bells sounding towards the end, the piece then disappearing literally into thin air.

By way of introducing the next work on the programme, Bae spent some time talking with us about his relationship with a composer who’s better known as a conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, after which the pianist performed Salonen’s work for solo piano “Dichotomy”. One of a select few of brilliant contemporary performing musicians who significantly compose, Salonen has a number of important works to his credit, for orchestra, two concerti (piano and violin), and a large-scale work for orchestra and chorus, “Karawane”, which premiered in 2014 in Zurich.

Salonen’s work isn’t exactly “hot off the press”, Dichotomie having received its premiere as far back as 2000, in Los Angeles. The composer wanted a short, encore-type piece as a present for a favourite soloist, Gloria Cheng, but, as he discovered, the material he wrote seemed to take on a life of its own,  and expand to proportions bearing little relation to its actual conception. Jason Bae explained to us, along with his account of a serendipitous encounter with Salonen that led to his espousal of the composer’s work, how the music came to be, its two-movement structure representing a relationship between the two “kinds” of music that Salonen seemed to create almost involuntarily. Thus the first movement of this work, Mechanisme, represented machine-like processes, while the second, Organisme, had a more naturalistic way of developing and extending created material. Salonen wanted to explore how these very different styles might, by dint of juxtaposition, “borrow” qualities from one another which could affect their development.

I confess to being fascinated by what I heard, which is a way of paying tribute to Jason Bae’s playing of it as well. The opening of Mechanisme was indeed motoric and Prokofiev-like, the rhythms growing and developing in dynamically varied ways, with different sequences taking on different and unpredictable characters, variously syncopated, symmetrical or angular. Bae’s playing built to almost frighteningly orchestral levels of volume and intensity, before abruptly adopting flowing, legato phrasing that suggested some kind of counter-impulse had been mysteriously, even covertly activated within the work’s being. It preluded a mercurial section where one sensed the creative process was in a kind of ferment of crisis (the machine, perhaps, trying to be human?), with the musical argument appearing to fragment under scrutiny, almost to the point of stasis. A final counter-burst of incendiary energy, notes swirling and figurations exploding in every direction, left the music almost insensible, with only a few legato-phrased, wider-spaced chords holding the centre, and pronouncing the “new order”.

The following Organisme brought forth shimmering, exploratory textures containing reiterating figurations attempting to secure their tentative foot-and finger-holds in the music’s fabric. I thought it Debussy-like in places in a textured sense, the basic materials gradually coalescing and producing a kind of ambient glow, with beautifully voiced fragments of melody floating by on wings of air. The trajectories were passed from hand to hand, thereby suggesting a kind of osmotic continuity of flow, one which inevitably built up tensions of a kind that saw the tones take on increasingly rhythmic and thrustful expression, becoming tumultuous in the sense of a storm, the pianist sending great arabesques of tone shooting upwards and into the ether. Having resisted the temptation to inhabit “the dark side” the music made a flourish of quiet triumph, and the piece ended enigmatically – all told, an enthralling listening experience, thanks in part to Bae’s brilliant advocacy.

Further explorations were furnished by the pianist with his programming of Edvard Grieg’s rarely-heard Ballade Op.24, in my view one of the composer’s greatest works. It was one of the pieces that the tragically short-lived New Zealand pianist Richard Farrell recorded (as part of an all-Grieg recital disc), but has yet to claim a regular place in the concert repertoire. Though part of this is due to the piece’s technical difficulty, my feeling is that Grieg is still regarded by many people as a “miniaturist”, able to turn out  pretty Scandivavian picture-postcards in the form of his numerous “Lyric Pieces”, but lacking the ability to handle larger forms (despite his magnificent Piano Concerto!). Debussy’s well-known swipe at Grieg (“a pink bonbon filled with snow” was his description of one of the latter’s “Elegiec Melodies”) hasn’t helped the latter’s cause – but less well-known is the remark made by Frederick Delius to Maurice Ravel, that “modern French music is simply Grieg, plus the third act of Tristan”, to which Ravel replied, “That is true – we are always unjust to Grieg.”

Justice was certainly done to Grieg by Jason Bae, here a rather more turbo-charged reading in places than that of Richard Farrell’s poetic soundscapings, one underlining the music’s virtuoso aspect, while giving the more ruminative passages enough space in which to breathe Grieg’s bracing air. The work is basically a theme-and-variations treatment of a Norwegian folk-song melody,  “Den Nordlanske Bondestand” (The Northland Peasantry), and ranges from extremely simple elaborations of the theme to full-scale, almost orchestral outbursts of expression, including some forward-looking, even daring excursions into harmonic conflict, particularly during the work’s final cataclysmic section, before the music suddenly dissolves all such conflicts and returns to the melancholy of the original theme. In general, I thought Bae most successfully brought out the music’s brilliance and sharply-etched contrasts, underlining in places the music’s debt towards and kinship with that of Liszt (Variations 11 and 12 are here particularly overwhelming in an orchestral sense!) but also paying ample tribute to Grieg’s own originality. The pianist’s playing of No.9 allowed the composer’s singular gift for melodic piquancy its full effect, while No.10 here vividly captured the music’s characteristic rustic charm and feeling for grass-roots expressions of energy. In the wake of this performance I’m sure Bae would have garnered in many listeners’ minds fresh respect for Grieg as a composer.

The recital concluded with a work from a figure whose music has only recently received the kind of mainstream espousal needed for it to flourish. Russian-born Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951), a younger contemporary of Rachmaninov and Scriabin, received much the same acclaim as a result of his musical studies in Moscow, but then elected to devote himself entirely to composition rather than pursue a career as a pianist. However (and perhaps not surprisingly) the piano figured in practically all of his major compositions, both prior to and after leaving Russia in 1921. Altogether, Medtner completed fourteen piano sonatas, Jason Bae performing for us the eleventh (which the composer subtitled Sonata Tragica, possibly as a reaction to the aftermath of the Russian Revolution) The sonata, incidentally, was one of a set of pieces separately entitled “Forgotten Melodies” (Second Cycle) by the composer. Those who have a taste for idiosyncratic numbering methods of musical compositions will find much to enjoy in Medtner’s own various enumerations of these works.

None of which is relevant to Jason Bae’s performance of the music, which seemed to me to front up squarely to the piece’s overall character, with its big-boned, declamatory  aspect at the beginning and the war-like march that follows proclaiming a Slavic temperament, with the swirling textures obviously breathing the same air as did Rachmaninov’s music. Bae gave the flowing lyricism which followed plenty of “soul”, allowing the deeper textures to make their mark amid the frequent exchanges between the hands, then gradually building the excitement to almost fever pitch, before strongly arresting the flow of the music with a portentous left-hand, almost fugue-like version of the opening declamation – all very exciting! The pianist’s beautifully wrought filigree finger-work introduced further agitations, the music building inexorably towards a kind of breaking-point (Bae’s left hand performing miracles of transcendent articulation) at the apex of which the sonata’s main theme thundered out at us most resplendently and defiantly! It was music that, in this player’s expert hands, punched well above its own weight, with a bigness of utterance which belied its brief duration!

Very great acclaim greeted the young pianist, at the conclusion of this challenging, and in the event splendidly-achieved presentation of some monumental music.

Thoughtful, enterprising programming from Michael Houstoun performed with conviction and sensitivity

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Hutt Valley Chamber Music presents:
Michael Houstoun at the Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Music by CHOPIN, SATIE and SCHUBERT

CHOPIN – Four Impromptus
SATIE – Three Gymnopedies
SCHUBERT – Piano Sonata in G Major D.894

Michael Houstoun (piano)

Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Thursday, April 12th, 2018

I remember reading somewhere amongst the material advertising this Hutt Valley Chamber Music concert a passage quoting Michael Houstoun as saying he thought the choice of repertoire here had produced “the most perfect recital he had ever put together”. After listening to his strong, deeply considered playing of all three works, I felt bound to concur with his judgement, with each of his choices having some quality that seemed to either complement, disarm or resonate within aspects of the other pieces.

Those items affected most markedly by the juxtapositionings were the recital’s first-half pieces, Houstoun cannily placing each of Satie’s Three Gymnopedies in turn between the four Chopin Impromptus. Not only did this open up the somewhat “moments-per-minute” effect of the Impromptus’ richly-wrought imaginings (the pieces, incidentally, were not composed as a “set”, nor did the composer stipulate any such ordering in performance), but adroitly took the listener away from any superficial feelings of “sameness” between Satie’s delicately-wrought dream-like dances.

It was a masterstroke, really, enabling we in the audience to appreciate each of the seven individual pieces on their own merits, the Satie pieces helping to underlining the uniqueness of each of the very different Chopin works, which in turn gave each of the “Gymnopedies” the chance to refresh our listening-sensibilities in disarmingly different ways.

The overall effect on our reception of the Schubert work which made up the second half was a kind of activation of an open-hearted spirit towards time and space, wrought by the Satie pieces in particular, but also by the freely-ranging traversal of incident characterising parts of the Chopin works. With its long-breathed opening movement, the Schubert Sonata was not an experience to be treated either lightly or with any impatience – and Houstoun’s care for both detail and overall atmosphere throughout the first half had, I think, helped prepare us for the experience of what was to follow.

Beginning with the first Impromptu (Op. 29 in A-flat Major), the pianist got things under way with a whimsically teasing melody sounded over a quiet whirlwind of triplets, leading first to a haunting chromatic “dying fall” sequence like the sighing of the wind, and then to the theme’s excitable but brief ascent, Houstoun easing gracefully into a beautifully weighted chordal middle section before teasing the music back to the opening. In the wake of such frenetic note-spinning, the first of Satie’s “Gymnopedies” took us to “other realms”, the plaintive melody over measured steps drawing us away from “the busy beat of time” and into solitary contemplation.

The following Impromptu (Op.36 in F-sharp Major) warmed and enriched this mood with beautifully crepuscular colourings, and a melody whose decorated contourings led to a Liszt-like passage, almost religious in feeling. Houstoun then beautifully set in motion a quietly-voiced dotted rhythm which gradually  built up both tones and energies, becoming almost warlike, in anticipation of Liszt’s “Funerailles” (which it predated by a decade of years) before disarmingly returning to the opening melody, this time with a triplet accompaniment and swirling decorative impulses. Again I fancied we heard a Lisztian voice (redolent of the Italian Book of “Annees de Pelerinage”) before a couple of emphatic chords finished the piece. The second “Gymnopedie” again allowed our sensibilities some respite, Houstoun’s playing giving the piece’s barely-disturbed stillnesses a hint of human breath, rather than applying a cool, marmoreal finish – a quality which I thought touched on that state we call the “transcendent”, something still living yet elevated to a higher plane – remarkable.

Very much like the previous Impromptu’s F-sharp Major, the third Chopin piece (G-flat Major Op.51) possessed a similar tonal warmth, but rather more fluid movement, Houstoun bringing out the music’s subtleties of light and shade with great surety, and allowing us some almost voluptuous enjoyment of the harmonies at various points.  Such unashamedly indulgent richness of course found its antithesis in the Third Gymnopedie which followed – though, of the three Satie pieces, I’ve always found this one the least “remote”. It’s certainly been the one most often transcribed for different combinations of instruments, including the full orchestra. I thought Houstoun’s reading again imbued the piece with some feeling, even a certain tenderness, despite his own comments in the programme note regarding the music in general as being “definitions of aloneness”.

The fourth of Chopin’s Impromptus is something of a “sport”, being composed much earlier, and published posthumously – as Houstoun remarks in his progamme-note, it scarcely justifies the “Fantasie-Impromptu” title posterity has bestowed on it, but is ironically the most well-known of the four pieces (a flatmate of mine of former times claimed he knew only one classical music “tune” he could play on the piano, it being the melody making up the middle section of the work – admittedly, a tune that’s eminently singable!). Though a mite scornful of the piece on paper, Houstoun gave it as much meticulous attention as he did everything on the programme, capturing the “swirling” character of the outer sections, and playing the famous tune with wonderful eloquence, though I thought the coda’s tricky syncopations almost tripped his fingers up for the merest instant.

So, then, to the Schubert, the first half of the recital having, I felt, primed our sensibilities with plenty of varied expression. I had heard Houstoun play this work at Paekakariki a number of years ago (https://middle-c.org/2011/07/schubert-from-houstoun-at-paekakariki-matching-poesies/), and thought his performance for the most part “truly praiseworthy”, with only some slight reservations bothering me regarding the “stiffness” of some of his phrase-endings during the first movement. This time round I couldn’t say I was bothered by any such quality, the pianist giving the opening chords the spaciousness they needed to fully resound, nicely differentiating major and minor-key utterances, and setting the more animated sections beautifully in motion, allowing the decorative filigree voices plenty of room to fill out their phrases without sounding rushed. As the pianist did actually give us the important first-movement repeat, there were no critical gasps of shock, horror and disbelief from any quarter besmirching the ambiences!

The movement’s development section with its massive minor-key chordings galvanised our sensibilities, as well it ought, Houstoun’s attack here urgent and imposing, though he played the dancing episodes that followed almost defiantly, even cheekily! – the two moods sparred with one another until the onset of those heartbreaking sequences led the music away from the conflict and back to the music’s very opening, by this time seemingly a world away! I thought the pianist’s addressing of the music a shade tougher at the outset, here, stiffened by resolve through conflict, though the movement’s ending featured richly-wrought tones and spacious phrasing which left we listeners in thrall to the range and scope of the music’s journey.

The Andante movement (the description “slow” seems somewhat redundant in the wake of the first movement’s “heavenly length”) was given plenty of light and shade at a tempo which kept things flowing throughout the opening – I found myself thinking while Houstoun was playing that my mother (who was a piano teacher) would have loved what he was doing throughout this sequence in generating a combination of such warmth and clarity. Having charmed our sensibilities thus, Houstoun proceeded to give the music’s central section plenty of real swagger and muscularity at the outset, though still bringing out the lyricism of the minor/major key sequences that followed with real feeling. At its first return Schubert almost cheekily decorates the opening, in places with great finesse, underlining the music’s happiness/anxiety ambivalence, while after a repeat of the agitations, the opening proper reappears, undecorated, but with the melody suddenly taking flight, Houstoun here seeming to surrender to the music in an unguarded moment, giving to the movement’s end some delightfully flowing and lyrical playing, some of the most natural-sounding from him I’ve heard.

That impression continued throughout the Scherzo with its quirkily placed “grace notes”, some flailing about, and others sounding like mere impulses of droll wit. I loved Houstoun’s treatment of these (as I did previously), the pianist taking great care to both “sound” and differentiate their impact on the music, the forthright ones almost abrasive, and the softer ones impish and po-faced in a way that made me chuckle out loud! And what an effect Houstoun’s playing of the Trio wrought – like a sudden sleight-of-hand movement taking the sounds into an almost childlike world of happiness and contentment!

Houstoun launched the finale’s opening with playful-sounding gestures, the composer toying with impulses of energy as if deciding what to do next. Breaking into an infectious jogtrot got the music’s blood pumping, giving rise to those seemingly endless Schubertian sequences, the music modulating freely and joyously. A more sombre theme darkened the music momentarily, Houstoun’s powerful left hand keeping the darkness at bay to almost orchestral effect, before the jog-trot came to the music’s rescue once again, and brought everything back into the sunshine, for the opening sequences to return – Houstoun momentarily brought our hearts into our mouths by turning up the candlepower for the main theme’s sudden upward leap, before settling things back into a state of contentment for the coda’s brief but eloquent farewell.

A profoundly enjoyable and thought-provoking recital – all credit to Michael Houstoun for his inventive programming and his skills as an interpreter in bring his vision to us so successfully.

Polish and Shakespearean themes lead fine St Andrew’s lunchtime recital

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Music for voice and solo piano

Eleanor McGechie, mezzo-soprano (item 1))
Gabriela Glapska (piano – accompanist and items 2 & 3)
Will King. Baritone (item 4)

André Tchaikowsky: Seven Sonnets of Shakespeare  (two songs)
Chopin: Preludes, Op.28 nos. 7-12; Ballade in F minor, Op.52 no.4
Gerald Finzi: Let us garlands bring, Op.18

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 4 April 2018, 12.15 pm

Shakespeare ‘book-ended’ the programme, with two sets of songs, separated by Chopin.  It made an interesting programme, featuring mainly the piano, but with pleasing songs to begin and end.

The pianist and composer André Tchaikowsky was not, we were told in the pianist’s introductory remarks, related to the great composer of the same name.  I remember him visiting New Zealand to play with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, a long time ago.  He was Polish, and died in 1982, at only 47 years of age.

He was apparently a great fan of Shakespeare.  The first sonnet, ‘To me, dear friend, you never can be old…’ was preceded by a long piano introduction.  Eleanor McGechie proved to have a rich voice, and especially gorgeous low notes.  She was well up to singing the wide range of pitch demanded by the song.  The second song, ‘So are you to my thoughts as food to life…’ had a calmer quality.

The song was moody in temperament at first, but later became sprightly, particularly in the piano part.  Both singers in the concert are students at the New Zealand School of Music – and therefore could be excused for using the scores rather than singing from memory.

The Chopin Preludes were skilfully and passionately played (though I counted five, not six).  The link here was Polish nationality, not only of André Tchaikowsky but also of Chopin and of our pianist at this concert.  There were both depth and sparkle in her playing, despite technical difficulties in the Preludes, and the Ballade, which apparently held no fears for her, though the Ballade was not faultless.  All Gabriela’s pieces were played without use of a score.

The Ballade began beguilingly, with poetic, beautiful passages.  The middle section is demanding and very fast, requiring great dexterity – which she has.  Her playing brought out the contrasts very well.  The latter part of the piece was also very fast; the notes shimmered, while maintaining the melodic line, power and forward movement   The pianism was very intense in this intricate music; an impressive performance despite the few flaws.

Gerald Finzi was a litterateur as well as a composer; his love of Shakespeare is depicted in his exquisite song cycle Let us garlands bring (the last line of the song ‘Who is Sylvia’) illustrates his superb word-setting.  The songs, with the plays in which they appear, are:

‘Come Away, Come Away, Death’ (Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene 4)
‘Who is Silvia?’ (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act IV, Scene 2)
‘Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun’ (Cymbeline, Act IV, Scene 2)
‘O Mistress Mine’ (Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene 3)
‘It Was a Lover and His Lass (As You Like It, Act V, Scene 3).

Will King enunciated the words very well, and he projected them with a lovely tonal quality.  The effect was magical in places.  In the first song, the opening chords on the piano presaged something ominous.  The next song was a complete contrast; ‘Who is Silvia’ has a cheerful mood.  The delightful running accompaniment adds to its endearing quality, especially the ending.

The performers did justice to this inspired song cycle.  Each word had its proper emphasis and phrasing.  The accompaniment’s dynamics were just right – Gerald Moore’s famous book title (‘Am I too loud?’) did not need to be uttered here.

Will King’s voice was fine, apart from some strain and rawness when singing fortissimo.  After the rather sombre ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’ there was  return to joy with ‘O mistress mine’.  This could have been sung in a slightly lighter style and tone, and the piano could have done with less pedal for the sprightly final song.  Nevertheless – bravo to all three performers!

 

 

Intriguing improvisatory performances by Robbie Duncan and Bernard Wells at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts
Sonic explorations – original music for guitar and piano

Robbie Duncan (guitar, effects) and Bernard Wells (piano, keyboard)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 21 March 12:15 pm

This is a belated, ‘sort-of’ review of the St Andrew’s concert on Wednesday 21 March. So I have filed it out of date order for a few days so that it will be noticed.

I didn’t arrive at the concert till after 12.30; the first few minutes were spent tuning my head to the sounds and to the character of the playing, and trying to sense the players’ personalities and that of the music, so I lost further time before my receptors were working properly. Nevertheless, from the start, I felt in the presence of genuine, serious and imaginative music making. For one who has neither been gifted with nor been able to cultivate improvisatory musical abilites, these gifts in others have always seemed to be a kind of magic making.

Improvisatory talent is not especially rare, but as with every kind of art, the degree of talent varies hugely.

Being rather unfamiliar with the language of jazz commentary, I had initially decided that I couldn’t offer any kind of sensible review. But I gathered that guitarist Robbie Duncan had spoken interestingly and perceptively at the start of the concert; and because I had found the performances more than commonly interesting, I decided to ask whether Robbie could send me an outline of what he (they?) had said. The indirect email messages between us took some time to get through however, and so this is two weeks late.

Robbie began by remarking on the sound qualities of the church, noting that for many years he had used digital emulations of a natural reverberation in recording music. “Now at St Andrews we get to play with the real thing – a beautiful natural reverb, and a real Steinway piano.” Now they could play into and work with the natural reverberation, “allowing silence and space be part of the music”.

Then he touched on the nature of extemporisation as it is more commonly called in classical music. “Not all music has to be written down”, he said. “Jamming is what some musicians do purely for fun – it can be a social activity that those with the language and the interpersonal skills can do simply for fun. Listening is as important as speaking.”

“The scary thing is taking it into the public domain”, he said, likening the process to quantum physics where the observer (the audience) changes the outcome.

“I was initially introduced to improvisation in the 70’s by a Wellington band named Highway, and was then was inspired by Keith Jarrett’s solo piano playing where he would just make it up –  the music has a flow and a trajectory of its own.”

Then he turned to the music that they had played in the concert. “The first piece we played was to settle us down and to tune us into the sound, the acoustic space and to each other. The piece East Cape originated from a back injury I had sustained.” He found that through being in constant pain his guitar playing would speed up, and East Cape was composed with the intention of slowing himself down, with pauses, “where I could remember my breathing and reset myself tempo-wise”.

“The second and third pieces were totally improvised; we knew the start point – that is, the guitar tuning – but from there the music has a life of its own.

Improvising is all about the present moment, he said: relying on both the conscious and the subconscious mind. But more, he suggested, by the unconscious, “for by the time you have analyzed what the other musician is playing the moment has gone – for me, I just have to trust my fingers will know what to do”.

“For me this is extreme sport for musicians – there is no pre-planned structure, It’s like surfing  – you catch the wave and flow with it – sometimes you fall off but that creates the space for the next wave and the next wave.”

Another analogy would be like a dance, Robbie remarked; “sometimes one leads and sometimes one follows”.

Then he touched on his role as master of ‘effects’. “I used the ‘Empress’ echo system for the guitar effects – I believe our brains subliminally like the subtle tensions which can be created both rhythmically and harmonically.”

And unorthodox tunings also featured. He is exploring alternative tunings.
“Creating a new tuning means you can’t play your usual chords or scales,” meaning the fingers don’t instinctively go to the right places on the finger board. “It forces me as a guitar player to develop a new vocabulary, and each new tuning creates a constraint within which to work.”

Bernard responded a bit later to my approach, offering comments on the art of improvisation, and specifically on their own approach to it. He stressed that they practise together to make ‘composition in the moment’ a conscious process, “a dialogue that can continue in conversation long after we have stopped playing! There is however, always an unconscious or intuitive element entering when we play”.

All sorts of different music can be their point of departure, and he mentions everything from Gregorian Chant, through Renaissance and Baroque music to dance traditions, popular songs, jazz….

The process of improvisation “can begin with a meditative, spiritual aspect, a sense of listening to something outside ourselves (the music of the spheres or sensing a ‘potential for music’) that is always there, waiting to manifest through musicians in the physical world”.

The spiritual element begins, he says, “with musicians and the audience in silence and involves trust that we will somehow begin and honour this creative process through to its completion”.

Bernard then described the different or additional challenges with collective improvisation: “We adapt our individual styles to the fact that we are often improvising together and we thus play perhaps fewer notes, e.g. single finger piano lines to make space for the other. This approach leaves us open to invite others to participate in an expanded lineup and yet preserve our transparent musical texture where every voice is heard. We play together with an awareness for transparent quality in the combined musical line and dynamics and pitch register allowing the different qualities of the piano and guitar to be heard (timbre, attack, dynamic, sustain etc.).”

Bernard referred to listening and intuition in exploring “the unspoken communication between musicians improvising as we listen, react and respond to one another in the moment”, which involved practice and the development of intuition, “to sense who is leading at a particular moment and where the music is going (taking us)”.

So although I had missed the first 20 minutes or so of their performance, I found these perceptions by the two musicians retrospectively illuminating, and they resonated with my impressions of the ways in which the two reacted and interacted in the process of spontaneous creativity. Though one has heard improvisation of all kinds over the years, I had the feeling that these two were, more that is often the case, allowing themselves to be genuinely inspired by what had been played by each other, and by what felt like some kind of inevitable elaboration of what had just fallen from their fingers.

There was no question of trying to identify consciously just what was happening in the shape of shifting tonalities, of contrapuntal moments, elaboration of melodic fragments and all the other musical processes that musicians have devised and practised over the centuries. The resultant music had simply left the impression of something that was aesthetically attractive and emotionally rewarding.

I’d certainly like a chance to hear Wells and Duncan again in this environment.

Two resounding recordings from Rattle – classics and a feisty newcomer

Posted on by Peter Mechen


DAVID FARQUHAR – RING ROUND THE MOON
Sonatina – piano (1960) / Three Pieces – violin and piano (1967)
Black, White and Coloured – solo piano (selections – 1999/2002)
Swan Songs for voice and guitar (1983)
Dance Suite from “Ring Round the Moon” (1957 arr. 2002)
Jian Liu (piano) / Martin Riseley (violin)
Jenny Wollerman (soprano) / Jane Curry (guitar)
Rattle RAT-D062 2015

PICTURES
MODEST MUSSORGSKY – Pictures at an Exhibition
EVE De CASTRO ROBINSON – A Zigzagged Gaze
Henry Wong Doe (piano)
Rattle RAT-D072 2017

How best does one describe a “classic” in art, and specifically in music?

Taking the contents of both CDs listed above, one might argue that there are two “classic” compositions to be found among these works, one recognised internationally and the other locally, each defined as such by its popularity and general recognition as a notable piece of work. If this suggests a kind of facile populist judgement, one might reflect that posterity does eventually take over, either continuing to further enhance or consigning to relative neglect and near-oblivion the pieces’ existence in the scheme of things.

Though hardly rivalling the reputation and impact in global terms of Modest Mussorgsky’s remarkable Pictures at an Exhibition on the sensibilities of listeners and concert-goers, it could safely be said that New Zealand composer David Farquhar’ s 1957 incidental music for the play Ring Round the Moon has caught the imagination of local classical music-lovers to an extent unrivalled by any of the composer’s other works, and, indeed by many other New Zealand compositions. I would guess that, at present, only certain pieces by Farquhar’s colleague Douglas Lilburn would match Ring Round the Moon in popularity in this country, amongst classical music aficionados.

The presence of each of these works on these recordings undoubtedly gives the latter added general interest of a kind which I think surely benefits the lesser-known pieces making up each of the programmes. In both cases the combinations are beautifully thought-out and judiciously placed to show everything to its best possible advantage. And visually, there’s similar accord on show, the art-work and general layout of each of the two discs having its own delight and distinction, in the best tradition previously established by the Rattle label.

So enamoured am I still with Farquhar’s original RIng Round the Moon for small orchestra (that first recording featuring the Alex Lindsay Orchestra can be found by intrepid collectors on Kiwi-Pacific Records CD SLD-107), I thought I would give myself more time to get used to the idea of a violin-and-piano version (arranged by the composer in 1992). I therefore began my listening with the more recent disc, Pictures, featuring pianist Henry Wong Doe’s enterprising coupling of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and a 2016 work by Auckland composer Eve de Castro-Robinson, A zigzagged gaze, one which similarly presents a series of musical responses to a group of visual artworks.

Mussorgsky’s collection of pieces commemorated the work of a single artist, Victor Hartmann, a close friend of the composer, whereas de Castro-Robinson’s series of pieces, commissioned by the pianist, were inspired by work from different artists in a single collection, that of the Wallace Arts Trust. In the booklet notes accompanying the CD the composer describes the process of selecting artworks from the collection as “a gleeful trawling through riches”. And not only does she offer a series of brief but illuminating commentaries regarding the inspirational effect of each of the pictures, but includes for each one a self-written haiku, so that we get a series of delightfully-wrought responses in music, poetry and prose.

Henry Wong Doe premiered de Castro Robinson’s work, along with the Mussorgsky, at a “Music on Madison Series” concert in New York on March 5th 2017, and a month later repeated the combination for the New Zealand premiere in Auckland at the School of Music Theatre. His experience of playing this music “live” would have almost certainly informed the sharpness of his characterisations of the individual pieces, and their almost theatrical contrasts. For the most part, everything lives and breathes, especially the de Castro Robinson pieces, which, of course, carry no interpretative “baggage” for listeners, unlike in the Mussorgsky work, which has become a staple of the virtuoso pianist repertoire.

While not effacing memories of some of the stellar recorded performances of the latter work I’ve encountered throughout the years, Wong Doe creates his own distinctive views of many of the music’s sequences. He begins strongly, the opening “Promenade” bright, forthright, optimistic and forward-looking, evoking the composer’s excitement and determination to get to grips with the business of paying tribute to his artist friend, Viktor Hartmann whose untimely death was commemorated by an exhibition of his work.

The pianist relishes the contrasts afforded by the cycle, such as between the charm of the Tuileries scene with the children, and the momentously lumbering and crunching “Bydlo” which immediately follows. He also characterises the interactive subjects beautifully – the accents of the gossipping women in “The Market-Place at Limoges” tumble over one another frenetically, while the piteous cries of the poor Jew in “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle” are sternly rebuffed by his well-heeled, uncaring contemporary.

I liked Wong Doe’s sense of spaciousness in many places, such as in the spectral “Catacombs”, and in the following “Con Mortuis in lingua mortua” (the composer’s schoolboy Latin still manages to convey a sense of the transcendence he wanted) – the first, imposing part delineating darkness and deathly finality, while the second part creating a communion of spirits between the composer and his dead artist friend – Wong Doe’s playing throughout the latter properly evoked breathless beauty and an almost Lisztian transcendence generated by the right hand’s figurations.)

Only in a couple of places I wanted him to further sustain this spaciousness – steadying a few slightly rushed repeated notes at the opening of the middle section of “Baba Yaga”, and holding for a heartbeat or so longer onto what seemed to me a slightly truncated final tremolando cadence right at the end of “The Great Gate of Kiev”. But the rest was pure delight, with the fearful witch’s ride generating both properly razor-sharp cries and eerie chromatic mutterings along its course, and the imposing “Great Gate” creating as magnificent and atmospheric a structure of fanciful intent as one would wish for.

Following Mussorgsky’s classic depiction of diverse works of art in music with another such creation might seem to many a foolhardy venture, one destined to be overshadowed. However, after listening to Wong Doe’s playing of Auckland composer Eve de Castro Robinson’s 2016 work, A Zigzagged Gaze, I’m bound to say that, between them, composer and pianist have brought into being something that can, I think, stand upright, both on its own terms and in such company. I listened without a break to all ten pieces first time up, and, like Mussorgsky at Viktor Hartmann’s exhibition, found myself in a tantalising network of connection and diversity between objects and sounds all wanting to tell their stories.

The work and its performance here seems to me to be a kind of celebration of the place of things in existence – the ordinary and the fabulous, the everyday and the special, the surface of things and the inner workings or constituents. As with Mussorgsky’s reactions to his artist friend Hartmann’s creations, there’s both a “possessing” of each work’s essence on de Castro-Robinson’s part and a leap into the kind of transcendence that music gives to things, be they objects, actions or emotions, allowing we listeners to participate in our own flights of fancy and push out our own limits of awareness.

As I live with this music I’m sure I’ll develop each of the composer’s explorations within my own capabilities, and still be surprised where and how far some of them take me. On first hearing I’m struck by the range of responses, and mightily diverted by the whimsy of some of the visual/musical combinations – the “gargantual millefiori paperweight” response to artist Rohan Wealleans’ “Tingler” in sound, for example. I’m entertained by the persistent refrains of Philip Trusttum’s “The Troubadour”, the vital drollery of Miranda Parkes’ “Trick-or-Treater” and the rousing strains of Jacqueline Fahey’s “The Passion Flower”. But in other moods I’ll relish the gentle whimsicalities inspired by Josephine Cachemaille’s “Diviner and Minder” with its delight in human reaction to small, inert things, and the warm/cool beauties of Jim Speers’ “White Interior”, a study of simply being.

Most haunting for me, on first acquaintance, however, are “Return”, with Vincent Ward’s psychic interior depiction beautifully reflected in de Castro Robinson’s deep resonances and cosmos-like spaces between light and darkness, and the concluding tranquilities of the initially riotous and unequivocal rendering of Judy Miller’s “Big Pink Shimmering One”, where the composer allows the listener at the end space alone with oneself to ponder imponderables, the moment almost Rimbaud-like in its powerful “Après le déluge, c’est moi!” realisation.

Henry Wong Doe’s playing is, here, beyond reproach to my ears – it all seems to me a captivating fusion of recreativity and execution, the whole beautifully realised by producer Kenneth Young and the Rattle engineers. I can’t recommend the disc more highly on the score of Eve de Castro-Robinson’s work alone, though Wong Doe’s performance of the Mussorgsky is an enticing bonus.

Turning to the other disc for review, one featuring David Farquhar’s music (as one might expect of a production entitled “Ring Round the Moon”) I noted with some pleasure that the album’s title work was placed last in the programme, as a kind of “all roads lead to” gesture, perhaps to encourage in listeners the thought that, on the face of things, the journey through a diverse range of Farquhar’s music would bring sure-fire pleasure at the traversal’s end.

Interestingly, the programme replicates a “Remembering David Farquhar” concert on the latter’s seventh anniversary in 2014, at Wellington’s NZSM, curated by Jack Body and featuring the same performers – so wonderful to have that occasion replicated here in preserved form. The disc is packaged in one of Rattle’s sumptuously-presented booklet gatefold containers, which also features details from one of artist Toss Woolaston’s well-known Erua series of works, and a biography of the artist.

Beginning the disc is Sonatina, a work for solo piano from 1950, which gives the listener an absorbing encounter with a young (and extremely promising) composer’s music. Three strongly characterised movements give ample notice of an exciting talent already exploring his creativity in depth. Seventeen years later, Farquhar could confidently venture into experimental territory with a Sonata for violin and piano which from the outset challenged his listeners to make something of opposing forces within a work struggling to connect in diverse ways. A second movement dealt in unconventionalities such as manipulating piano strings with both fingers and percussion sticks, after which a final movement again set the instruments as much as combatants as voices in easy accord.

The Black, White and Coloured pieces for piano, from 1999-2002, are represented in two selections on the disc – they represent a fascination Farquhar expressed concerning the layout of the piano keyboard, that of two modal sets of keys, five black and seven white. By limiting each hand to one mode Farquhar created a kind of “double” keyboard, with many opportunities for colour through interaction between the two “modes”. Altogether, Farquhar had twenty-five such pieces published in 2003.

I remember at the NZSM concert being less than enamoured of these works, thinking then that some of the pieces seemed too skeletal and bloodless compared with the originals, especially the settings of Negro Spirituals – but this time round I thought them enchanting, the “double harmonied” effect producing an effect not unlike Benjamin Britten’s treatment of various English folk-songs. A second bracket of these pieces were inspired by diverse sources, among them a Chopin Mazurka, a Landler from a Mahler Symphony, and a theme from a Schubert piano sonata, among others. Again I thought more highly of these evocations this time round, especially enjoying “Clouds”, a Debussy-like recreation of stillness, stunningly effective in its freedom and sense of far-flung purpose.

Swan Songs is a collection of settings which examines feelings and attitudes relating to existence and death, ranging from fear and anxiety through bitter irony to philosophical acceptance, using texts from various sources. Written originally for baritone voice and guitar in 1983, the performances I’ve been able to document have been mostly by women, with only David Griffiths raising his voice for the baritonal record. Here, as in the NZSM Memorial concert, the singer is Jenny Wollerman, as dignified and eloquent in speech as she is in song when delivering the opening “The Silver Swan” by Orlando Gibbons (it’s unclear whether Gibbons himself wrote the song’s words or if they were penned by someone else). Throughout the cycle, Jane Curry’s beautiful guitar-playing provides the “other half” of a mellifluous partnership with both voice and guitar gorgeously captured by producer Wayne Laird’s microphones.

Along with reiterations of parts of Gibbons’ work and a kind of “Swan swan” tongue-twister, we’re treated to a setting by Farquhar of his own text “Anxieties and Hopes”, with guitarist and singer interspersing terse and urgent phrases of knotted-up fears and forebodings regarding the imminence of death. As well, we’re served up a setting of the well-known “Roasted Swan” sequence from “Carmina Burana”, Jenny Wollerman poignantly delineating the unfortunate bird’s fate on the roasting spit. As in the concert presentation I found the effect of these songs strangely moving, and beautifully realised by both musicians.

As for the “Ring Round the Moon” set of dances, I suspect that, if I had the chance, I would want to hear this music played on almost any combination of instruments, so very life-enhancing and instantly renewable are its energies and ambiences. I’m therefore delighted to have its beauties, charms and exhilarations served up via the combination of violin and piano, which, as I remember, brought the live concert to a high old state of excitement at the end! And there’s a lot to be said for the process of reinventing something in an unfamiliar format which one thinks one already knows well.

What comes across even more flavoursomely in this version are the music’s angularities – though popular dance-forms at the time, Farquhar’s genius was to impart the familiar rhythms and the easily accessible tunes with something individual and distinctive – and the many touches of piquant harmony, idiosyncratic trajectory and impish dovetailing of figuration between the two instruments mean that nothing is taken for granted. Martin Riseley and Jian Liu give masterly performances in this respect – listen, for example, to the ticking of the clock leading into the penultimate Waltz for a taste of these musicians’ strength of evocation! Only a slight rhythmic hesitation at a point midway through the finale denies this performance absolutely unreserved acclaim, but I’m still going to shout about it all from the rooftops, and challenge those people who think they “know” this music to try it in this guise and prepare to be astounded and delighted afresh.

Michael Houstoun memorably opens Waikanae’s chamber music recital series

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Waikanae Music Society
Michael Houstoun (piano)

Bach: English Suite No 2 in A minor, BWV 807
Chopin: Four Ballades (Opp. 23, 38, 47, 52)
Mozart: Sonata No 8 in A minor, K 310

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday 18 February, 2:30 pm

This is the season of series launches. The Waikanae Music Society, in contrast to certain other comparable chamber music groups, is in good shape, thanks to an immediately attractive programme of eight concerts, with no patronisingly-popular concerts that fail to touch those likely to be interested in real chamber music; plus an enticing ticketing policy that makes it cheap to subscribe and to attend most concerts.

And that’s compounded by a big population of older people, many of whom seem to be cultivated and musically inclined. The proof of their success lay in the huge audience – I’d guess around 600 – which was of course in substantial part because of Michael Houstoun.

To recruit Houstoun to launch the series was a very good move (and the society chair Germana Nicklin presented flowers and life membership of the society to patrons Sir Rodney and Lady Gillian Dean, in particular, for their help with this concert). It was Houstoun’s 15th recital for the society, and he marked that by playing the same Mozart sonata that he’d played at his first one in 1987: the A minor, K 310.

Bach English Suite
But the concert began with Bach’s English Suite No 2 in A minor (chosen to chime with the key of the Mozart?). Houstoun’s Bach sounded immediately comfortable in the acoustic of the big auditorium and he exploited fully the Fazioli piano’s warmth. Considering its minor key, it was full of positive energy and in complete sympathy with piano rather than harpsichord; Houstoun didn’t subject his playing unduly to the harpsichord’s subtle dynamic boundaries which can obviously be relaxed on the piano. The sparkling Prelude was perfectly conceived.

There are six movements (counting the two bourrées as one); the elegant calm of the Allemande quieted the emotion that the fluid Prelude had established. The varied dance-derived movements might suggest greater distinctness than actually emerges in these, and in most of Bach’s suites. The Courante returns to a mood of sparkling cheerfulness and the Sarabande, in very slow, chaconne-like triple time, sometimes a hard-to-discern rhythm; it’s by far the longest movement.

The last two (three) movements are based on livelier dances. Houstoun’s Bourée I seemed to climb cheerfully up the hill, and then relaxed coming down, at a gentle pace. The Gigue was far from a boisterous peasant romp, but flowed evenly and stayed within the dynamic limits already set.

Chopin Ballades
Chopin’s four Ballades make a thoroughly rewarding package, and the performances by Houstoun the instinctive Chopinist, never sounded simply like a hundred other more routine accounts. There were discreet tempo (No 1 started uncommonly slowly) and dynamic shifts that always seemed just what the composer might have had in mind. (Incidentally, Houstoun clearly intended them to be listened to in pairs, with no applause between Nos 1 and 2, as he remained seated, hands poised for the next: the message didn’t seem to penetrate the audience for clapping again separated Nos 3 and 4. These things are not recondite affectations; they are sought by the performer and the audience should watch body language).

I can never hear No 1 now without recalling the diverting account by amateur pianist-cum-ex-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger (Play it again), of his year-long struggle to master it. Houstoun certainly made it sound rather easier than Rusbridger found it, but its mighty challenges were still, very evident.

Though they can hardly be heard as four parts of an integrated suite, with their very different spirits and narratives (Chopin apparently had narrative backgrounds, but never revealed them) it is rewarding to hear them all together; after all, Chopin chose to use the same word to describe all four. So No 2, in F major, is more sanguine and less tortured than parts of No 1, though its sudden shocks never fail to surprise no matter how many times you’ve been there. Long pauses were an interesting, very telling aspect of Houstoun’s performance.

Nos 3 adopts an easy triple rhythm, never quite a waltz: subdued, with less drama, though with a turbulent left hand that created a feeling of unease. And No 4, after its hesitant opening, led to an uneasy passage with its complex left hand underlay; Houstoun evoked its spirit of uncertainty, embroidered with insight and sympathy. Typically, after a long pause and a prolonged episode of indecision, it hurls itself into a short, tumultuous finale.

This was the end of the concert and Houstoun played an encore: a less familiar Chopin Nocturne, Op 15 No 1.

Mozart’s sonata K310
But the second half of the concert had begun with Mozart’s A minor sonata, one of the great ones which, in a 1950s performance by Walter Gieseking, introduced me in my late teens properly to Mozart’s sonatas. It entranced me (and yes, you can now find it on YouTube!). I have to get used to the reading of the opening bar with an acciaccatura (if I have the term right) rather than an appoggiatura, which seems to be the convention today; Houstoun’s account was considered and absorbing, appropriate to its description Allegro maestoso. In the slow movement, Houstoun’s occasional stretching and slight swaying of the rhythm accorded with the description ‘cantabile con espressione’, even though it might have seemed somewhat unMozartian. Such touches contributed to a performance of one of only a couple of Mozart’s sonatas in a minor key, as masterful, authoritative and beautifully poetic, fleshing out a recital that very obviously fully rewarded the large audience which almost entirely stood in admiration at the end.