Tag: song recital

Breaking the song recital drought with a fine, adventurous recital of unfamiliar songs by great composers

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Songbook: ‘Stormy Weather’; songs of the wind

Songs by Wolf, Massenet, Poulenc, Vaughan Williams, George Crumb, Lilburn, Copland, Gurney, Brahms, Rimsky-Korsakov, Frank Bridge, Debussy, Schubert, R. Strauss, Schoenberg, Fernando Sor.

Barbara Paterson and Barbara Graham (sopranos), Elisabeth Harris (mezzo-soprano), Ben Reason (baritone), Simon Brew (saxophone), Catherine Norton (piano)

Adam Concert Room, New Zealand School of Music

Friday 1 April 2016, 7.30pm

Another concert by Songbook, mainly featuring different singers from those in the concert I reviewed favourably last June. The laudatory remarks I made then apply again. Despite the theme, which may have seemed appropriate for Wellington (there was little wind at that stage of the evening, though some light rain), there was huge variety in the programme, not least in the length of the songs, from very short to quite long. The concert attracted a good-sized audience, including numerous singers.

It was a well-constructed programme (would such a concert have been possible pre-Google?) that held the attention throughout. Of the 18 songs presented, three were by Wolf, being settings of poems by Eduard Mörike. Other items were ‘one-offs”. Even Schubert was only represented once. It was splendid to hear a concert consisting of so many unfamiliar songs by leading composers.

Again for this concert, the printed programme had all the words and English translations clearly printed in fine type-faces on quality paper, and dates for composers and poets were given. (I’m horrified that CD booklets do not always give the dates, or poets’ names, even for recordings of famous singers.)

To open the programme, Barbara Paterson sang ‘Lied vom Winde’ by Wolf. It was an exciting song, and given an exciting and accomplished performance by both musicians. The accompaniment Catherine Norton played was quite astonishingly demanding and brilliant. Barbara Graham was up next, singing ‘Pirouchette’ by Jules Massenet, a conversation between a little girl and an unknown person, about the Mistral wind. This was another lively song – the evening’s winds were certainly speedy, so far! It was a wonderful performance, with subtlety and Barbara Graham’s accomplishment in the French language was a delight that continued in the next song, Poulenc’s ‘Air vif’, that lived up to its name.

We then heard from Ben Reason, a younger singer. He has a good, strong voice, but perhaps could have been a little more contemplative in his rendering of Vaughan Williams’s ‘On Wenlock Edge’. The Adam Concert Room is quite a small auditorium; full voice can be a little hard on the ears. Another little point: the way he sang the short ‘i’ vowel, as in ‘it’ and ‘in’, is rather ugly.

Elisabeth Harris sings better each time I hear her, and the George Crumb song ‘Wind Elegy’ suited her voice; she used the words beautifully. Lilburn’s setting of James K. Baxter’s ‘Blow, wind of fruitfulness’ was sung by Ben Reason, accompanied by piano and saxophone (the original setting is for viola), the latter played by Simon Brew. Ben’s tone was pleasing, though the ‘i’ sound again was not quite right in the word ‘wind’. It was a tasteful, interesting and attractive saxophone part. The music sympathetically set Baxter’s marvellous poem, and all the words were very clear, as they were from the other singers throughout the evening.

Barbara Paterson returned to sing Aaron Copland’s ‘There came a wind like a bugle’. From here on, music scores were used for most of the performances. This was very understandable in this case; the music was all over the place in this setting of words by Emily Dickinson. The singer coped well. (Sorry!) ‘Black Stitchel’ by Ivor Gurney was sung by Ben Reason. I would have liked a slightly lighter manner of rendition for this song, from both voice and piano, even though some of the words (by Wilfrid W. Gibson) were quite serious. Again, the singing was overblown at times for this venue.

‘Geistliches Wiegenlied’ by Brahms is a lullaby of Spanish origin, in which the poet (the German Emanuel Geibel) exhorts the wind to be still, because the child is sleeping. The translation was beautiful. Elisabeth Harris sang it, with saxophone obbligato (again, the original was viola). She displayed excellent control of dynamics, and her words were very clearly pronounced. The saxophone was played sensitively, with subtlety appropriate to the theme.

Now for some Russian music; Barbara Paterson sang the language well and confidently, in Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘It was not the wind’; words by Tolstoy. It was a very touching song. A short song ‘Far, far from each other’ by Frank Bridge sung by Elisabeth Harris featured the saxophone (viola) again. It was attractively considered, with meaning given to both words and music.

Barbara Paterson returned with ‘An eine Aeolsharfe” by Wolf. The Aeolian harp was effectively conveyed in the music, which was given dramatic variation by the singer. It ended with a lovely piano postlude. A short Debussy song, ‘Zéphyr – Triolet à Philis’ received from Barbara Graham excellent treatment of the language, and a lively interpretation.

Schubert’s appearance in the programme was with ‘Suleika’, sung by Barbara Paterson. The busy accompaniment underlined the theme of the wind; the song was full of character. The next song (from the same singer) was ‘Begegnung’ by Wolf, who seems to have written a lot of songs about weather.

Strauss tackled the weather, too, with ‘Schlechtes Wetter’, a poem by Heinrich Heine, sung by Barbara Graham. Her low notes in this song were very good; the charming nature of the song was highlighted by the piano accompaniment, especially at the end. Schoenberg may not be particularly noted for his songs, but ‘Einfältiges Lied’ was an amusing song about a king going for a walk. Barbara Graham emphasised its humorous nature, singing it with exaggerated drama, not least in her facial expressions.

Finally, the three women sang an arrangement of a Spanish song by Fernando Sor: ‘Cuantas naves’, or ‘How many ships. This was a light-hearted end to a fine concert of song. Catherine Norton’s accompaniments were simply outstanding. Thank you, Catherine, for giving us another song recital, breaking the drought there has been in this genre for years. (Time was when we had such recitals in the Festival!) Bravo Songbook!

Innovative and fitting celebration of Kiri Te Kanawa with New Zealand Festival: a full MFC

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Voices New Zealand, Terence Dennis (pianist) and conductor Karen Grylls

A New Day – a choral improvisation (Voices New Zealand)
David Hamilton: Un noche de Verano (Voices)
Jake Heggie: Newer Every Day – Emily Dickinson poems (Kiri)
Fauré: Cantique de Jean Racine (Voices)
Mozart: Laudate Domium from Solemn Vespers, K 339 (Kiri and Voices)
Heggie: Monologue from Masterclass (Kiri)
Brahms: Four Quartets, Op 92 (Voices)
Schubert: Ständchen, D 920 (Kiri and Voices)
Johann Strauss II – Benatzky: Nuns’ Chorus from Casanova (Kiri and Voices)
Te Rangi Pai: Hine e hine (Kiri)

Michael Fowler Centre

Sunday 13 March, 6 pm

The Michael Fowler Centre was full for the Sunday early evening concert. A song recital with a few contributions from a local choir would not ordinarily have filled St Andrew’s on The Terrace; the name Kiri Te Kanawa changed everything.

Very few singers are still in business over 70 years of age (Joan Sutherland stopped in 1990, aged 64, and I suspect that even if age was starting to tell in the voice or the appearance (which really it is not) this remarkable singer would still pull them in. It’s a combination of a singularly beautiful voice, a charming and outwardly modest personality and an instinct for presenting a programme with conviction, even though on paper it looked interesting rather than compelling.

For indeed, the programme was hardly orthodox. If you expected, from one of the world’s great opera singers a handful of popular arias plus a couple of unfamiliar though worthwhile items, some well-loved choruses and ensembles from opera or oratorio, making use of the choir; then a couple of groups of German lieder and French songs by famous composers, you’d be disappointed.

But the applause, even between the short songs in a cycle, and the standing ovation at the end, probably showed that most of the audience was there for the name rather than their musical knowledge; it would have been the same whatever she sang.

On the other hand, the programme showed much thought and considerable pains had been taken with the stage presentation, especially the opening where the auditorium was plunged into darkness as choir members murmuring very quietly, crept down the aisles; secretively, they began to sing ‘a choral improvisation’ devised by conductor Grylls and the choir’s vocal coach Robert Wiremu, quoting phrases from ‘All through the Night’ and ‘Early one Morning just as the Sun was Rising’ and others. As lights rose the choir’s singing turned into David Hamilton’s a cappella setting of ‘Una noche de verano’ by Spanish poet Antonio Machado. Its haunting quality was enhanced by the sounding of a singing bowl, akin to such instruments as the glass harmonica.

The more conventional part of the concert began with a cycle of songs commissioned from composer Jake Heggie: set to poems of Kiri’s choice; she chose Emily Dickinson, and she spoke naturally about her affection for Dickinson’s poetry. (Heggie’s operas include Dead Man Walking, The End of the Affair and Moby Dick). The settings were engaging, sometimes droll, witty, touching, and Kiri’s performances with Terence Dennis’s exact reflections at the piano, caught their intimacy and disarming character, accompanied with appropriate, natural gestures. The last song, ‘Goodnight’, sort of mocking the convention of the endless reiteration in many an opera aria, very keen-eyed.

The choir sang Fauré’s much-loved Cantique de Jean Racine, in gentle, slightly uninteresting tones. Here, the absence of an orchestra mattered somewhat, even though Dennis’s accompaniment was as sensitive as possible.

The first half ended with the ‘Laudate Dominum’ from Mozart’s Solemn Vespers, for choir and soprano, a favourite that age (of neither the music nor the singer) does not dim. If the absence of opera arias (apart from the encore) was conspicuous, this wonderful sacred solo offered evidence of the still beautiful voice, smaller and less voluptuous perhaps, but still capable of touching the emotions. Her dress too gave little hint of passing years: white blouse with summery, striped skirt, perfectly suiting a singer who, from mid stalls at least, might have been approaching her fifties: she was animated, looking almost youthful.

Another of Heggie’s notable compositions began the second half: the Monologue from Terence McNally’s play, Masterclass, inspired by Maria Callas’s famous 1972 masterclasses in New York. It’s a moving little masterpiece, richly reflecting the lessons of age that might perhaps apply as well to Dame Kiri as they had to Callas. Expressed and dramatized by this evening’s diva with quiet humour and belief; one line stuck in my mind: ‘The older I get the less I know’. Like much else in the concert, a great deal resonated with the experience of aging which would have touched a lot of the audience, including your reviewer. She spoke too about the work of her foundation, which provides valued guidance and tutoring to many young New Zealand singers.

Then the choir returned to sing Four Quartets for four voices, Op 92 to Brahms. It was an opus of songs written at different times, to poems by different poets, which Brahms collected and published in 1884. The first is by Georg Friedrich Daumer, the poet of the Liebeslieder waltzes; and the others by Hermann Allmers, Hebbel and Goethe. All use imagery of the night to conjure feelings of fragility and the passing of time. The acoustic of the auditorium, perhaps dampened by the curtain behind, tended to reduce the impact of the occasional rises in the emotion expressed by the choir, which were singing with great sensibility and insight, and there was the subtle, illuminating piano accompaniment.

Schubert wrote several Ständchen (serenades). This was not the most famous one, much arranged for all manner of voices and instruments. Opus D 920, set to a poem by Grillparzer, as beautiful, if not of similar, anthologising quality, was written originally for baritone and men’s chorus; but Schubert also scored it for soprano and women’s chorus, which is how it was sung. I was a little surprised that Kiri sang this reasonably familiar piece using the score. And again, my attention was particularly caught by Terence Dennis’s sparkling and thoughtful playing the of colourful piano part.

Kiri has made something of a signature piece of the Nuns’ Chorus (‘Nun’s’ in the programme! I noticed more than one nun singing in the chorus), almost from the beginning of her career. The melody by Johann Strauss II was not from a waltz or an operetta, but written some 20 years before his venture into the theatre in 1871. It was spotted about 80 years later by Ralph Benatzky (most famous for his Im weissen Rössl – At the Whitehorse Inn) and included, along with other music by Strauss, in the pasticcio operetta, Casanova, which went down well in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic. It was given imaginative theatrical treatment, though it didn’t quite conjure the atmosphere of Viennese (or here, Berlin) operetta.

The concert ended with the predicable Hine e hine; repeated as a second encore after the first encore, the only operatic offering of the evening: ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Gianni Schicchi. And there was long applause, with most of the audience eventually standing.

I should have commented earlier on the excellence of the programme book, which sets a good example with intelligent biographies of Te Kanawa, Dennis, Grylls, as well as interesting musicological and other details about the pieces. The nature and origin of the Fauré chorus and the ‘Laudate Dominum’ were simply described; Jake Heggie’s two pieces were placed in context; the pithy note on Schubert’s Ständchen might have commented on his settings of the other songs with that name; the provenance of the Nuns’ Chorus was clearly attributed; and dates were employed usefully throughout: not a strong point among many annotators.

But you have to go elsewhere (Wikipedia the most accessible) to refresh your memory about Dame Kiri’s origin. Typically, the biography is coy about her birth: born in Gisborne, Claire Mary Teresa Rawstron, on 6 March 1944. (after all, the note on Newer every day disclosed that it had been commissioned for her 70th birthday in 2014). Why doesn’t the feminist movement insist that birth dates of female personalities are routinely published in the same way as men’s are?

In all a splendid recognition of one of New Zealand’s true international celebrities.

 

Delightful Takiri Vocal Ensemble heralds a new era for the song recital?

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Takiri Ensemble
Anna Leese (soprano), Bianca Andrew (mezzo-soprano), Andrew Glover (tenor), Robert Tucker (baritone)
Kirsten Simpson (piano)

Songs and ensembles by Schubert, Schumann, David Hamilton, Ross Harris, Anthony Ritchie, Britten and Vaughan Williams

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday 30 August 2:30 pm

The Takiri Ensemble is a novelty for New Zealand: a vocal quartet that aims to be a permanent presence in this country. It challenges the long-held and flimsily sustained belief that there’s no audience for the song recital; another similar, ill-supported notion is that there’s little appetite for piano recitals. Each prejudice has probably been based on cases that have not been representative or well-conceived, flawed through poor programming, or uninteresting-looking performers.

I should, however, note another straw in the wind: an enterprising song recital inspired by pianist Catherine Norton on 10 June (see the review at that date).

This example looks like winning through the presence of at least the two well-known female singers, and a programme that has a decent proportion of genuinely popular, well-known material. Soprano Anna Leese has become one of the best-known young singers to have established an international reputation; Bianca Andrew, now at the Guildhall in London, has attracted a big following in New Zealand through her vivid persona. Andrew Glover has not been so visible in New Zealand since going to study overseas where he has had substantial professional engagements: Opera North, Garsington Opera, Opera Holland Park and English Touring Opera. Robert Tucker studied with Andrew at the Opera Centre in Perth, and has been singing professionally overseas for some years, including Schaunard in La bohème and Guglielmo in Così fan tutte (which he sang recently, alongside Bianca as Dorabella, with Wanderlust Opera in Wellington).

Pianist Kirsten Simpson is an artist-teacher in accompaniment at the school of music, Victoria University. During her extensive time overseas she has accompanied at the Solti Te Kanawa Accademia di Bel Canto in Italy.

The programme began with what I imagine is still the best known of Lieder: Schubert. All very familiar to me from my teens, though how familiar they are to today’s teenagers, I wonder. I was lucky to have had two music-loving German masters at college who used Lieder, mainly Schubert (also my first hearing of Schumann’s ‘Die Grenadiere’), and German folk-songs to embed the language, and at university, the wonderful Oxford Book of German Verse, very much my Bible, was annotated with details of musical settings.

So it will be obvious that the quartet did not confine itself to music composed or arranged for all four singers; in fact, all of the Schubert songs were sung in turn by individual singers. Because these are generally more familiar, I suspect that the ensemble will be wise to include a reasonable number of such well-loved songs as ‘loss-leaders’ for the more meaty or less easily digested music.

The second group of songs was totally unfamiliar to me: Schumann’s late cycle entitled Spanische
Liebeslieder (Op 138) might have been composed specifically for this ensemble. The piano alone plays a Prelude at the beginning and an Intermezzo in the middle, signalling the significance of the piano as scene or mood painter; it was always rewarding to listen to Kirsten Simpson’s thoughtful and colourful support for the voices.

Each of the eight songs is set for one or two voices and the last, ‘Dunkler Lichtglanz’, for the quartet, and the performances follow the pattern of voices adopted in the famous Graham Johnson Complete Schumann songs, on Hyperion for the bi-centenary in 2010.

Anna sang the first song, Schubert’s ‘Die Forelle’; it was a wonderful exhibition of her fluidity, her easy command of varied articulations and colours and the fisherman theme reappeared with ‘Fischerwiese’, marked with a joyous quality over sparkling accompaniment.

Robert Tucker used dynamic subtleties, especially a hardly audible pianissimo, in ‘An Sylvia’ which used to be popular as sung to Shakespeare’s original lyric from Two Gentlemen from Verona. Then there was firm metal in the voice, and in his later ‘Schwanengesang’ (not the song cycle), pregnant silences, depicting the approach of death.

Andrew Glover’s first song was the heart-felt ‘An die Musik’, with a caressing tone and an almost religious pianissimo, supported by discreet face and hand gestures. Then in ‘Nacht und Träume’, he held long high head notes, beautiful breath control. But in the Schumann cycle, in ‘O wie lieblich ist das Mädchen’ there was a little tightness in his high register.

Bianca Andrew took over, with the powerfully emotional ‘Die junge Nonne’, which she sang with impressively rich imagination; she knows how to use her head and arms to illuminate the music and dramatise the sense of the words.

Though not all the Schumann songs are equal in melodic charm and emotional integrity, this cycle, Spanische Liebeslieder, deserves outings as a whole. Though the notes naturally drew attention to Spanish character, there was little to my ears; both verses and music sounded thoroughly absorbed into a German sensibility. So they stood in the mainstream of the Lied. The two women sang the duet ‘Bedeckt mich mit Blumen’ with special delight, their voices and intent in harmony.

The men too had their duet, ‘Blaue Augen hat das Mädchen’, and their voices showed a delightful unanimity of style and sense.

After the interval came a few New Zealand songs: David Hamilton’s arrangements for these singers of his choral pieces, Three Anzac Settings.  Utterly unpretentious little works, quite different one from the other, handling sharply contrasting aspects of the war, including one, ‘Before Battle’, which dealt with the experience of conscientious objectors, in an idiom refreshingly free of any striving for ugliness or horror. There was a childlike tone in its rhythms, beautifully caught by singers and pianist, very remote from the sanctimonious character found in much music that deals with the tragedy of war.

The third, ‘In Flanders Fields’, was more subdued, in which men’s voices predominated.

Ross Harris composed three songs for Wellington soprano Lesley Graham in appreciation of her role in Harris’s two operas of the 1980s, Waituhi and Tanz der Schwäne. Bianca sang these charming vignettes set to poems by Bub Bridger; short little stories, gently declamatory; ‘Gossip’ had the air of wistful memories.

Two songs by Anthony Ritchie: the more I hear of his music, the more I feel it reflects clearly the happy return to compositional sanity, honesty and musical communicability after the perversities of the late 20th century. ‘He Moemoea’ is a polished, mature little song; ‘Ataturk Memorial’, to me, was somewhat unconvincing, a little prosaic, yet it seemed to work as a song.

Andrew Glover sang two songs by Britten: ‘Let the Florid Music Praise’ and ‘Oliver Cromwell’, the first with an uncanny hint of his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, the second a witty little piece, quite
splendidly done.  Anna Leese sang Britten’s ‘O Waly Waly’, with an arresting edginess and clarity.

Three Vaughan Williams songs brought the programme to an end. Anna and Bianca joined in singing ‘It was a Lover and His Lass’, weaving among the notes joyfully; the two men in ‘Fear no more the Heat of the Sun’, produced tones of touching solemnity, calm, elegiac; and the quartet sang ‘Linden Lea’, a cappella, perfectly fitting.

The quartet had sung already in Kaitaia, Wanaka and Motueka; they go on to Whanganui, Rotorua and Whakatane, but sing nowhere else in Wellington – What A Shame!

Do the other concert promoters still fear that singers will keep their audiences at home? This concert, with its audience of over 300, should persuade them otherwise.

P.S.
My colleague Rosemary Collier, who was also at the concert, has just commented about the excellent diction, which is so important in the singing of Lieder and other ‘art song’ – that they are ‘a marriage of poetry and music’.  (10am, Tuesday 1 September). I totally agree with her.

 

 

Opera Society revives its tradition of presenting promising young singers in tantalising song

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Songs and arias
(New Zealand Opera Society – Wellington Branch)

James Benjamin Rodgers (tenor); Georgia Jamieson Emms (soprano); Elisabeth Harris (soprano); Christian Thurston (baritone)
Piano accompaniment: Catherine Norton

Liszt: Three Petrarch sonnets
Songs by Georg Tintner, Mahler
Arias by Gounod, Leoncavallo, Massenet, Nicolai, Verdi, Britten, Douglas Moore, Weill, Richard Rodgers and Sondheim

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart

Thursday 6 August, 7:30 pm

Once upon a time, the Wellington Branch of the New Zealand Opera Society used to stage almost monthly recitals of mainly opera arias and ensembles. As performances of the real thing increased in the 80s and 90s, with the establishment of Wellington City Opera, annual productions by both Victoria University and Wellington Polytechnic schools of music as well as a variety of adventurous ad hoc amateur groups, the appeal of de-contextualised arias and excerpts diminished.

Now that the number and variety of staged performances has seriously declined, scope for aria recitals should again have developed. So we must welcome a venture of this sort: the audience was large enough to encourage the society to try again.

First thing to exclaim about was the enterprising range of items. Absent were almost all the standard arias from the top 20 operas, as well as the once common scattering of popular art songs by Schubert and Schumann.

James Rodgers
One of the most surprising was the first bracket – Liszt’s famous settings of three sonnets by Petrarch; they were also among the most challenging, and in the hands of tenor James Benjamin Rodgers, not flawless in execution.

My main concern was with his gauging of the church’s acoustic. It’s a fine space for the singer, but very easy in which to misjudge the amount of force required for projection. The expression of passionate and unrestrained emotions in the poems tempts the singer to deliver tempestuously, with too much force. The beginning of No 104 was much more promising as Rodgers captured better the calmer sense of puzzlement, but too often one wanted a little more subtlety, variety of mood, just a softer, less driven voice.

So I looked forward to his later pieces. The first of them was the third act duet between Violetta (Georgia Jamieson Emms) and Alfredo in La traviata; here his voice was beautifully modulated, capturing the confusion between his full awareness of Violetta’s imminent death and his need to support her delusionary dreams of happiness. The pair was excellently matched in tone and dramatic perception.

Unusually, Rodgers sang, from Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, the male chorus’s interlude describing Tarquinius’s ride to Rome to rape Lucretia, the wife of his general Collatinus. An absolutely splendid portrayal, with a peerless piano accompaniment from Catherine Norton.

Next morning Lucretia herself delivers an extraordinary, dignified lament, ‘Give him this orchid’, before killing herself before her husband: it was Elizabeth Harris’s triumph. Incidentally, one must record that the opera was done by the then Conservatorium of Music of Massey University a decade or more ago.

James Rodgers’s final group of pieces clinched his standing as a very fine singer, capable of grasping a wide variety of musical styles and emotional dilemmas. There were excerpts from two Kurt Weill works; the operetta The Firebrand of Florence and his ‘musical tragedy’ Lost in the Stars; and from Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods (here duetting with Emms). Rodgers caught the wit and variety of mood keenly, demonstrating a natural talent for ‘becoming’ the character in question both through vocal nuance as well as facial expression and gesture. The title song from Weill’s Lost in the Stars sat right in the middle of his voice. In ‘Finishing the hat’ from Sunday in the Park his pianissimo conveyed perfectly the tortured conflict that the painter Seurat faced.

James and Georgia ended the concert, together again, with ‘It takes Two’ from Into the Woods, sensitively revealing the nature of the relationship between the couple. The two singers were again beautifully matched in this touching duet.

I am one who has not found it easy to enjoy Sondheim’s musical theatre, perhaps through exposure in live performance only with amateur productions; but the two examples here rather captivated me. Nevertheless, professional productions, which is what these pieces demand, are very unlikely in New
Zealand.

Georgia Jamieson Emms
Georgia had first displayed her interpretative talent with three songs (two by Theodore Storm and one by Hesse) set by Georg Tintner who fled to New Zealand from the Nazis in Austria before WW2 and, typically, found it almost impossible to gain musical recognition here, though he eventually became conductor of the New Zealand Opera Company. I hadn’t come across any of his compositions before; in these three one could hear hints of inter-war Vienna, touches of Alban Berg, Schoenberg and influences from Mahler and even Liszt could be perceived; secure and confident in realisation though nothing strongly memorable. But the performances would have charmed the composer.

Later offerings from Georgia included an unfamiliar aria from Nicolai’s German take on The Merry Wives of Windsor. It’s often done still in Germany but here we know only the overture and perhaps the splendid Drinking Song. This ‘Nun heilt herbei’ was sprightly and expressive, with comic effects that Georgia delivered very well. (Nicolai was a strange case, dates exactly those of Chopin, but a much smaller talent; he wrote a few other operas none of which held the stage).

That was followed by the Traviata duet, in which she created a moving and lively simulation of dying.

Georgia’s last items were an aria from Weill’s Street Scene of 1946, entitled ‘An American opera’, and then the ‘letter scene’ from Douglas Moore’s famous (in America) The Ballad of Baby Doll. In
both she displayed a lovely timbre, with careful control of emotional expressiveness.

Christian Thurston
Thurston arrived on stage in the middle of the first half and sang two opera arias, both amorous yearnings after forbidden fruit: ‘E fra quest’ ansie’ – Silvio’s aria from Pagliacci, and the rather less known ‘Vision fugitive’ from Massenet’s Hérodiade. Unlike the Jokaanan in Strauss’s Salome, here John the Baptist is made to feel quite open lust for the seductive Salome.

In both arias I felt that Thurston was pushing his voice excessively. While it was disciplined and firm, his voice lacked colour and emotional variety and didn’t really convey the trembling, out-of-control emotion that one expects to find in, and to be touched by, the words and the music itself of these two arias.

His third song was addressed to a young lady who was accessible to the singer: Emile’s well-loved ‘Younger than Springtime’ from South Pacific. But here again he missed the gentleness and sentiment of the beguiling melody in spite of a voice of even quality and pleasant timbre. I could not decide whether the problem was his miscalculation of the nature of the acoustic, encouraging needless pressure on his voice, or simply the choice of pieces that suited neither his voice nor his histrionic talents.

Elizabeth Harris
Before her aria from Lucretia, mentioned above, Elizabeth Harris had sung one of Mahler’s songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Das irdische Leben. The subject echoes Schubert’s Der Erlkönig; and she sang it with tremulous intensity.

Then came a much anthologised opera aria from an unknown opera: from Gounod’s first opera, Sapho: ‘O ma mère immortelle’. It’s a touching little piece which she handled with sweet sensitivity. She also sang one of Britten’s brilliant cabaret songs, Johnny, which she carried with sparkling acting and a zaney, daring self-confidence along with Catherine Norton’s dazzling piano.

The concert as a whole has to be rated a considerable success, both as highlighting one singer who has gained some international success and three others of great promise.  As I observed at the beginning, the decline in the amount and variety of live opera in performance should create a renewed thirst to explore opera, through excerpts, that look less and less likely to be performed here. And it is disturbing that such well-schooled and talented singers as these are unlikely ever to find full employment in this country.

 

 

Pianist Catherine Norton initiates delightful, welcome renaissance in song recitals

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Songbook: an anthology of songs about song from five centuries

Songs by Finzi, Telemann, Josquin, Mahler, Canteloube, Vaughan Williams, Browne, Wolf, Schoeck, Stephan, Rachmaninov, Hahn, Farquhar, Bolcom

Amelia Berry (soprano), Elisabeth Harris (mezzo-soprano), Declan Cudd (tenor), James Henare (bass-baritone), Roger Wilson (bass-baritone), Richard Greager (tenor). Catherine Norton (piano), Terence Dennis (piano)

Adam Concert Room

Wednesday 10 June 2015, 6.30pm

Resounding congratulations are due to Catherine Norton, who is not only a superb accompanist, but also is the initiator of Songbook.   She has fairly recently returned from study and performing overseas, mainly in the United Kingdom.  She has worked with the Young Songmakers’ Almanac, descendant of The Songmakers’ Almanac, an English vocal group which toured here some years ago with Chamber Music New Zealand.  This doubtless gave her the idea of doing something similar here.

The presence of Amelia Berry (like Catherine an alumnae of Victoria’s New Zealand School of Music) and James Clayton, from Australia, as soloists in the recent production of La Cenerentola was obviously a spur.  Unfortunately the latter was ill, and at short notice some changes had to be made; two stalwarts of Wellington’s vocal scene, Richard Greager and Roger Wilson, plus the fortuitous presence in Wellington of that doyen of accompanists, Terence Dennis (now Blair Professor of Music at the University of Otago) outstandingly filled the gaps.

I was delighted to discover such an innovation as this concert.  I have bemoaned for years the lack of live song recitals in Wellington these days.  Occasional lunchtime concerts feature singers, but mostly they sing operatic extracts.

There are thousands of wonderful songs out there, in a variety of languages.  The audience was treated to a programme printed in a very readable typeface, with full texts and translations where required, the latter by Catherine Norton herself.  Another excellent feature of the printed programme was that not only were composers’ dates and opus numbers of the songs given where possible, but also the year of composition of the songs, plus the names and dates of the poets.

An eclectic selection of songs about songs, or songs containing songs was a good introduction to what one hopes will become a series of themed recitals.  Included in the mix of singers were cicadas, a donkey, a cricket, a couple of cuckoos, and a nightingale – not to mention the occasional lover, of course.

Elisabeth Harris had the unfortunate task of opening the concert at short notice, with ‘Intrada’ by Gerald Finzi. Some uncertain low notes hardly spoiled the performance of this song (poem by Thomas Traherne) and were understandable in the circumstances.  The voice has matured and become more sonorous since I last heard it.  Catherine Norton was a simply superb accompanist, here and throughout the concert.

Amelia Berry sang a short song, entitled in English translation ‘A new thing’ by Telemann.  A delicious song, it typified Norton’s enterprise in selecting the programme; the words in translation read “Presenting something new, / not after the old tastes, / will depress anyone / who does not hatch anything new himself. / But what kind of slavery is it / to set such narrow limits? / whether it is old, or new, it’s enough if it’s useful and delightful.”

Josquin’s amusing ‘El grillo’ (The cricket) was sung by a quartet of the four School of Music graduates.  Their blend and matching dynamics, pronunciation and excellent diction in this unaccompanied piece allowed the audience to enjoy it amply.

From Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Roger Wilson and Terence Dennis performed ‘Lob des hohen Verstandes’ (translated as ‘In praise of higher understanding’).  This amusing song about a singing contest between a cuckoo and a nightingale, judged by a donkey, had Mahler writing in picturesque style, especially when it came to narrating the donkey’s judgement.  It was performed with much
gusto by these two splendid musicians; a dramatisation could hardly have given us much more.

Amelia Berry returned to perform a Languedoc folk song arranged by Joseph Canteloube in 1948: ‘O up!’  A cuckoo featured again, and a cicada.  The excellent French and the style with which Berry put it over embodied the humour. She sang next a Vaughan Williams song ‘Orpheus with his lute’.  She has great tone throughout her range, and her phrasing and enunciation of words are very pleasing. Sometimes I found her a little too loud for the size of the venue.

Catherine Norton had chosen two songs by men who died 100 years ago this year, during the First World War, one English, one German.  Richard Greager sang ‘To Gratiana dancing and singing’ by William Denis Browne, to words by Richard Lovelace – a fine poem.  In this the accompaniment was particularly lovely – and not easy.  Like Roger Wilson, Greager demonstrated that he continues in good voice, and sang this enchanting music so well that it was hard to remember it was at short notice.

This range of gorgeous songs, some familiar; others not, did not even touch on the most famous song writers, except Wolf; his was the next song: ‘Was für ein Lied soll dir gesungen werden’, sung by Amelia Berry.  Again, her language was extremely good, and she introduced light and shade into her rendition.

A poem ‘Ravenna’ by Herman Hesse was set by Othmar Schoeck, a Swiss composer who died in 1957.  The words revealed that Hesse was not particularly impressed by the town, and the setting was unusual musically.  However, James Henare sang it well in his wonderfully deep bass voice.

Tenor Declan Cudd performed ‘The canticle of night’ by the other war victim, Rudi Stephan.  Cudd was the only one of the singers to perform his song from memory, and his full tenor voice was very lively; his performance had plenty of volume when required, and the song demonstrated yet again that all these composers set their poets’ words very well.

The best-known item was Rachmaninov’s ‘Vocalise’, written in 1915 (another centenary).  Amelia Berry demonstrated superb breath control, and varied her voice and dynamics beautifully.  Catherine Norton brought out the melodic phrases in the accompaniment splendidly.

Richard Greager gave great feeling and expression to the French song ‘Le souvenir d’avoir chanté’ by Reynaldo Hahn.  (Wikipedia gives the date of composition as 1898; the 1888 given in the programme seemed a little improbable, even though Hahn was a child prodigy – he was born in 1874).

The New Zealand element, ‘Synaesthesia’ by David Farquhar, a setting of a poem by Cilla McQueen, was sung by Elisabeth Harris.  The repetitive nature of the  accompaniment and also of the vocal line were part of an effective and commandingly sung item.  Like Berry, Harris has learned to use her resonators well.  And Norton demonstrated that she is well able to work in a huge variety of styles throughout what was only three-quarters of an hour.

The programme ended with a song by American William Bolcom (born 1938): ‘Over the piano’, a cabaret song.  Amelia Berry sang it in suitable style, leaning against the piano and supplying appropriate gestures and facial expressions.  The poem ending with ‘Goodbye’ made it an apt end to the recital, although another was in the programme which could not be performed given the absence of James Clayton.  However it would have been fitting: a Hindemith setting of words by Francis Thompson, beginning “Go, songs, for ended is our brief, sweet play”.

It was a treat to hear a programme like this.  Thanks to all concerned – do it again soon!

 

Cantoris tackles imaginative programme exploring Hungarian influence in Brahms’s music and related musical phenomena

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Zigeunerlieder

Cantoris, conducted by Bruce Cash with pianist Thomas Nikora

Zoltan Nagy: from 25 Hungarian love songs
Beethoven: Songs – Elegischer Gesang and Meeresstille und GlücklicheFahrt
Rossini: Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age) – La passagiata and I gondolieri
Brahms: ‘Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen‘ from the German Requiem, Op 45; and Geistliches Lied, Op 30
Brahms: Prelude and Fugue in G minor (organ)
Brahms: Zigeunerlieder,Op 103 (Gypsy Songs)

St John’s church, Willis Street

Wednesday 6 May, 7:30 pm

Some musical programmes cry out to be heard and experienced because the music is famous and/or promises emotional excitement: expect a big audience; others offer little-known music that rings no emotional bells: expect a thin house.
This was a concert of the latter kind.

Yet the theme of this concert was interesting – the exploration of Brahms’s handling of Gypsy or Hungary-influenced music, and the concert reflected intriguingly on its origins and presented other music that might have tapped a comparable vein, perhaps tenuous, such as music touched by nature, with notions of liberty, freedom of the human spirit, some of Beethoven’s that touched the grand aspirations of the Congress of Vienna of 1815; but the connection of some, such as Beethoven’s Elegischer Gesang and the two spiritual items by Brahms was harder to divine.

Bruce Cash, Cantoris’s current music director, talked interestingly about the music and its contexts, especially about Brahms’s personality, the Vienna of his times and his relationships with patrons. To introduce the theme of Hungary he spoke about Brahms’s two important Hungarian musician friends Eduard Reményi and Joseph Joachim, and his lasting affection for Hungarian music. So they began with a couple of real Hungarian songs collected by Zoltan Nagy, difficult to capture idiomatically as they sang a cappella, and then their arrangements by Brahms in his Zigeunerlieder which they sang in its entirety in the second half of the concert, accompanied by pianist Thomas Nikora.

The two songs by Beethoven were from around the time of the post-Napoleonic Congress of Vienna in 1815, when he no doubt shared Europe’s general feeling that Eureope was free to revert to the old forms of more or less absolute monarchy, freed from Napoleon’s imposition of French Imperial hegemony combined with enlightened governmental and administrative reform.

There was no mention of the Mendelssohn overture, Meeresstille und Glückliche Fahrt, of around 1828 which was probably inspired by the Beethoven cantata. Here, in particular, the problem that tended to affect most of the choir’s performances became clear: the rather too small body of singers that could both lend important support to each other and consequently sing with adequate confidence.

Two Rossini songs from his retirement years in Paris were nicely accompanied though a solo soprano had an unenviable, lonely task.

After the interval and before the Gypsy Songs, Cantoris retreated from the floor to the organ gallery above the sanctuary to sing a couple of Brahms’s religious choral pieces: ‘How lovely are thy dwellings’ from the German Requiem, and the Geistliches Lied (Spiritual Song), Op 30, both sung with appropriate piety. Bruce Cash took the opportunity to talk about Brahms and Hamburg where he was born. He mentioned St Michael’s Lutheran Church where Brahms was christened and which featured in some of his activities during his return to his birth place from 1856 to 1863; I missed what he said about St Michael’s other than that it was where his Frauenchor (women’s choir) often performed.  (In 2013 I spent a delightful week in Hamburg, at the last three parts of Simone Young’s performances of the Ring cycle, exploring all five principal churches including the wonderful St Michael’s, and both the Brahms and Telemann museums in Peterstrasse). Before leaving the organ gallery Cash played Brahms’s youthful Prelude and Fugue in G minor, chosen for its own sake as well as deriving from the same years as the two preceding choral pieces.  

Then came the eleven Gypsy Songs; though they may have derived from the much earlier relationship with the Hungarian violinist Reményi, much of a Hungarian or Gypsy character seemed to have faded from Brahms’s soul by the time of their composition, ten years before his death.  They were written for four voices, no doubt with four trained voices in mind. For an amateur choir, especially one without enough singers able to contribute in any section in a soloistic manner, it was a struggle to create any real Hungarian character or, to be honest, to make of these fairly slender songs anything very interesting. Sadly, their successful interpretation, including an injection of ethnic and stylistic character, colour, rhythmic fun, rubato, commitment, calls for performers with a certain flamboyance and distinguished musical gifts. These qualities showed themselves all too rarely in this performance. 

 

Great New Zealand tenor Keith Lewis in rare recital

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Fundraiser for The New Zealand Singing School (Hawke’s Bay)

Songs by Scarlatti, Caccini, Durante, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Bellini, Bizet, Tchaikovsky, Guridi and Piazzola, aria by Cilea and aria and duet by Puccini

Keith Lewis (tenor) with Susan Melville (piano) and Tania Dreaver (soprano)

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Tuesday, 10 February 2015, 7.30pm

Keith Lewis presented the audience with an evening of great artistry, ably accompanied by Susan Melville, a Hawke’s Bay musician.  Current doyen of New Zealand tenors, he is little heard, or even known, in his own country.  He gave lovers of the singing voice much to enjoy.  The word ‘mellifluous’ was invented for voices like Keith Lewis’s.

Right from the outset, in Scarlatti’s appealing song Le Violette, Lewis impressed with his enunciation of the words (in six different languages through the course of the recital) and his supreme control and beautiful tone on soft, high notes.

Although the church was fairly well filled, it is a pity that there were not more people present to hear this marvelous singer.  A side benefit of more audience would have been to absorb some of the resonance, which for me was a little too much at times.  Not that Lewis sang too loudly, but the acoustic of the church enhances the sound of the singing voice.

In Amarilli by Caccini (1546 – 1718) Lewis told the story of the love song beautifully, with top notes ‘to die for’, exquisitely projected in the softest of pianissimi. Francesco Durante (1684 – 1755) wrote Danza, danza fanciulla.  It was sung energetically, but tone never suffered.

Switching from Italian to German-Austrian repertoire, Keith Lewis began by singing in English.  The words of Shakespeare from Twelfth Night ‘She never told her love’ were delightfully set by Haydn.  Like so much of Shakespeare, the words ‘like patience on a monument’ have become a frequently used expression.  Here, every word was sung expressively and with meaning.

Beethoven followed, with the wonderful, varied song Adelaide (not with the Australian pronunciation).  The romantic poem was by Friedrich von Matthisson.  Another love song was the well-known Im
Frühling (In Spring) by Schubert.  The gorgeous, lilting piano part added immeasurably to the effect of the song.  The sentiments were beautifully conveyed.

With a return to the Italian language, we heard three Canzone from Sei Ariette by Bellini.  After a robust, spirited opener Malinconia, ninfa gentile, Vanne, o rosa fortunata had the singer varying voice and words enchantingly.  The soft tones were more supremely lovely than I have heard from other tenors.  Following the third song, Ma rendi pur contento we turned to French songs by Bizet, which the singer told us he felt particularly close to; they were ‘like little jewels’.  La chanson du fou (Song of the clown) employed  considerable vocal range that was readily encompassed by Lewis.  The language was projected with model enunciation. The song had much character in both the vocal and piano parts.

The second Bizet song, Ouvre ton coeur (Open your heart), was in the style of a Spanish serenade; Bizet’s fame rests largely on the opera Carmen, set in Spain and employing much Spanish idiom.  This song, too, was full of character.

After the interval, we moved to Russia, with Lensky’s aria from Eugene Onegin.  Susan Melville did her best to be an orchestra, and in the main she succeeded.  Lewis gave us much feeling and expression of Lensky’s thoughts and the drama of his situation, facing a duel with his old friend.

Still with opera, we then had two arias from soprano Tania Dreaver, a participant in last year’s New Zealand Singing School.  She sang, from memory, an aria from Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, then
Mimi’s aria from La Bohème (‘They call me Mimi’), which was succeeded immediately by her singing the following duet with Rodolfo (Keith Lewis).  While Dreaver’s vocal technique seemed good on the whole, some of her top notes were slightly metallic and strained, and there were occasional lapses of pitch.  She has plenty of power to deliver the notes and words, but needed more variation of timbre and volume, in what is admittedly a difficult aria.  The duet was sung by a meltingly gorgeous Rodolfo, but again, Dreaver seemed to be straining and forcing at the top, and again there was variation of pitch.  Susan Melville’s accompanying in the Puccini items was particularly fine.

The Spanish song, no.4 of Canciones Castellanas by Jesús Guridi (1886-1961), demonstrated Lewis’s marvellous projection, and also what I was once told: “Do something with every note”.

Another Spanish song followed, by Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992): Milonga Carrieguera, from  an operetta of his.  The emotions of the song came over clearly, and there was much lilting light and shade.  The bitter-sweet mood was perfectly conveyed.  Lewis’s amazing breath control was particularly apparent in this song.

As an encore, Lewis sang an arrangement by Susan Melville of Pokarekare ana, in which birdcalls featured.  It was certainly a different, and attractive, arrangement.

A few criticisms of the printed programme: a few composers’ names were misspelt, and none of their dates were given; it is always helpful in placing lesser-known composers in historical context.  Also, I always appreciate being given the names of the poets whose words the composers set.  After all, songs are a marriage of poetry and music.  The one inspires the other, so it is good to know who has written the former as well as who has composed the latter.

The recital tour continues in Nelson (16 February), Christchurch (22 February), Hastings (27 February) and Auckland (3 March).

 

Last three days of the triumphant 2015 Chamber Music Festival in Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson 2015
29 January to 7 February 

Part Three

The Nelson Cathedral and Old St John’s church

Thursday 5 to Saturday 7 February

Thursday 5 February

For the first time, at this festival, two trips out of Nelson were organised, primarily as part of the full festival pass package; on Tuesday it was St Arnaud on Lake Rotoiti; today, to Upper Moutere to visit Höglund’s glass studio, the Neudorf Winery and a concert by The Song Company in a beautiful country church.

I decided to remain in Nelson in spite of that meaning foregoing the concert which included songs from the late Middle Ages – the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The song, Crist and Sainte Marie by St Godric, is one of four, ‘the oldest songs in English for which the original musical settings survive’, according to Wikipedia. I will record a personal reference, that Godric spent many years in the famous Lindisfarne Priory (indirectly giving me my name), where the beautiful illuminated eponymous Gospels were probably written in the early eighth century.  There was also a song by the enlightened Castilian King Alfonso X (13th century), English madrigals by Tomkins, Morley, Gibbons and Weelkes; and then a song cycle by Gareth Farr, the Les Murray Song Cycle, and modern madrigals from Australia and Denmark.

In Nelson the concert by the Ying Quartet that I heard on Tuesday at the lake was repeated.

French piano music
Thus there was only the 7:30 pm concert at Old St John’s, entitled Joie de vivre. That was on account of the full programme of French music in which Kathryn Stott was the still point of the turning world.

The earliest piece was five dances by Marin Marais (recall the film, Tous les matins du monde). Phillip Ying took Marais’s viola da gamba part on his viola which might not have altered it materially, but did remove the music from a particularly idiomatic 1700ish sound, partly the effect of a piano in place of a harpsichord or similar instrument of the period. The dances were varied and charming.

A Ravel rarity, which I’d not heard before: Trios beaux oiseaux du paradis, was sung by the Song Company, a cappella.

Kathryn Stott returned to join Rolf Gjelsten’s cello to play first, Fauré’s Après un rêve and then Debussy’s Cello sonata. Rolf read us a translation of the poem by Romain Bussine, a poet and singer who co-founded, with Saint-Säens, an important society in Paris, the Société nationale de musique, for the promotion of French music in the face of, mainly, Germanic influence. It included Franck, Fauré, Massenet and Duparc and several others. The former is very well-known and its performance was enchanting, not at all sentimental (which it rather lends itself to). The Debussy sonata may not be quite as assured a work as the violin sonata but this was a most attractive performance that both distinguished and brought together the distinct lines of the two instruments.

The New Zealand String Quartet joined Stott in César Franck’s Piano Quintet, in a performance whose spirit was very much guided by Stott’s playing, poised and restrained, with space between the phrases, her chords lean and clear. These remarks were true for the first two movements, following the composer’s indications, but in the third, Franck’s marking ‘con fuoco’ was licence for the release of the feelings it was rumoured that Franck had for a particular student at the Conservatoire. The big throbbing melody seemed steadily to increase in speed and dynamics, to quite a climax.

This most welcome performance added to the little effort initiated with Stott’s performance on Tuesday of the splendid Prelude, chorale and fugue, no doubt driven by the pianist, to pay attention to Franck’s unjustly neglected masterpieces.

Friday 6 February

Waitangi Day has usually fallen during the festival and offers an obvious excuse to explore New Zealand music, familiar and unfamiliar.

Nicola Melville remembers Judith Clark and shared friends
The 1pm concert served to showcase former Wellington pianist Nicola Melville who now teaches at Carlton College Minnesota, in music associated with her teacher and mentor at Victoria University, Judith Clark who died last year.

The programme note explained that the pieces were by composers dear to Judith’s heart. And there was a second set of pieces by composers who are among Nicola’s favourites.

The first played was Lilburn’s Three Sea Changes, the first two written in 1946 and the last in 1981. They have become familiar through the sensitive performances by Margaret Nielsen of 40 years ago, and it was good to hear them played by a pianist with a couple of generations’ longer perspective, of their acceptance as among the most characteristic of Lilburn’s piano music.

Then followed a new commission called simply, Gem, by Gareth Farr, a kaleidoscope of shifting tones, sentiment and sparkle. Its performance was full of affection and delight.

Ross Harris recorded in note about his offering, In Memory – Judith Clark, which was written for her 80th birthday, that she addressed him ‘you flea’. In it there was an immediate feeling of sadness, the notes spaced in a gentle and thoughtful way. It seemed to touch a deeper vein, especially in Nicola’s delicate and sensitive performance.

Eve de Castro-Robinson marked her tribute to Judith, “free, capricious, whimsical”, and that was the case. It might have been a characterisation as much of Eve as of Judith, with its scampering, quirky wit, that may well have enlivened the meetings between the two.

Jack Body’s offering was changed from the advertised Five Melodies to two pieces labelled ‘Old Fashioned Songs’, in Body’s inimitable treatment of them: Silver Threads among the Gold and Little Brown Jug. The expected and the unexpected in ‘Threads’, diversions from cadences that the ear and mind might have expected, yet enough of the original remained to tease. The ‘jug’ was treated to semi-staccato, spaced plantings of notes, it increased steadily in complexity, liveliness and interest, and Melville played them both with clarity and a keen sense of their wit and eccentricities.

Nicola in America
The music then moved abroad, to the United States. The first composer was an avant-gardist with wit and a mind to entertain: Jacob TV which is the American version of his Dutch name, Jacob ter Veldhuis. The Body of Your Dreams is a scathing look at the mindless world of TV advertising, using tapes and loops, rock idioms, of an advert for an electronic weight-loss programme, using repeated words a few of which I could pick up like ‘fat’, ‘press the button’ ‘no sweat’, ‘amazing’, the language of the bottom end of youth culture, advertising and the electronic media.

The piano was very busy in collaboration with the junk-burdened noises on the tape, good for a moment’s contemplation of the meaning of music, satire and what passes for culture.

And finally, a return to a composer I think ranks high in Melville’s pantheon: William Albright who wrote a number of rags, among much else. These two were entitled: Dream Rags, comprising The Nightmare Rag, with the parenthesis suggesting Night on Rag Mountain (though I detected no hint of Mussorgsky) and Sleepwalker’s Shuffle. They were, I have to confess, closer to the idiom of ragtime than the pieces by Novacek heard a few days before. In any case, Melville was very much at home with them and they delighted the audience.

Verklärte Nacht in the evening
The 7:30pm concert called on The Song Company and both string quartets. The Song Company sang songs from the 14th and 16th centuries. William Cornish’s ‘Ah Robin, gentle Robin’ with the singers taking varied roles, the men first and then the women while conductor Peelman accompanied with a drum; voices and the drum steadily rose in pitch and intensity, as the words revealed the singer’s despondency at the realisation of his lover’s likely faithlessness.

‘Where to shud I expresse’ possibly by Henry VIII followed, along with the anonymous, c1350 song ‘The Westron Wynde’, each a lament on a lover’s fickleness, or at least, absence. Here was the style of singing that best suited The Song Company, capturing lovers’ troubles with individual voices most advantageously on display, between their coming together to create beautiful vocal fusion.

Two New Zealand pieces were Lilburn’s Phantasy for Quartet, and John Cousin’s Duos for violin and viola of 1973. The Lilburn was a 1939 exercise written at the Royal College, for Vaughan Williams, winning the William Cobbett Prize. Here was a nice link with the previous song bracket, as Lilburn used the tune from The Westron Wynde, at first with restraint, and then increasingly energetic. The New Zealand String Quartet gave it a sweet, loving performance; apart from an early performance in Christchurch, I think it was said to be the near premiere in New Zealand.

Cousin’s three duos were Waltz Lee, Lullaby for Peter and Polka for Elliot, very much a family affair. These early examples of the composer’s work are charming, characteristic, offering a nice opportunity to hear other than his more commonly encountered electro-acoustic music. They were played engagingly by Janet and Phillip Ying.

The Ying Quartet returned in full to play their own arrangement of an Alleluia composed by Randall Thompson in response to the early years of the Second World War. There were hints of Samuel Barber sure enough, but its somewhat incongruous lamenting character in contrast to its title, led to an interesting, quite complex contrapuntal piece; the quartet may well have made it something of a personal utterance.

Which left the rest of the concert to Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night (Verklärte Nacht). The programme note described it rightly as ‘his glorious Sextet’, and this performance by the New Zealand String Quartet, plus the violist and cellist from the Ying Quartet, made a wonderfully rich and emotional job of it.

Saturday 7 February

Cornerstone Classics – Haydn and Mozart
Here, on the festival’s last day, was the chance to hear three New Zealand players not otherwise represented. Their style however, conformed with the approach to early music that was one of the hall-marks of the Song Company. Douglas Mews at the fortepiano and Euan Murdoch on the cello are well-known exponents of ‘period performance practice’; the violinist replacing the advertised Catherine Mackintosh, Anna van der Zee, is a regular member of the NZSO’s first violins, but proved to be fully sensitive to the playing style considered appropriate for the ‘classical’ period.

Two Haydn piano trios (Hob.XV/18 and 19) enclosed Mozart’s violin sonata in C, K 403. The feathery decoration applied to Haydn’s G minor trio enhanced the fortepiano’s lightness of sound, which in turn coloured the playing by the two stringed instruments. Even for one who is perfectly used to music played in accordance with historical practice, the first impression when a new and, I must confess, unfamiliar piece is played, is of a touch of the insubstantial. But the ears quickly adjust. Haydn’s trio in A (No 18), played after the Mozart, was as full or ornaments as was No 19, but more lightened with wit, and quirky gestures as well as the modulations that even one quite used to Haydn’s behaviour finds surprising.

I really enjoyed Mozart’s violin sonata, played in comparable, genuine style, it sounded closer to the Romantic era than Haydn, even though written ten years earlier; it’s part of an incomplete set that his friend the clarinettist Anton Stadler tidied up/completed. The first movement is marked by a strong rhythm, with an unusually emphatic first note in the bar, or at least that is the way it was played (I hadn’t heard it before). It seemed that the Andante might have been marked molto andante on account of its rather imposing slowness. I found the whole thing very attractive and so it did surprise me that I hadn’t come across it before.

Grand finale –cries of the cities
No doubt the big crowd at the final concert in the cathedral was there mainly for the Brahms Sextet. Yet there may well have been a good deal of curiosity about the set of seven ‘cries’; they filled the first half.

They involved, again, both quartets and the Song Company. The order departed from that in the programme. First came not the earliest, but the Cries of London by Orlando Gibbons, inspired by the earlier Cries of Paris. It’s a far cry from Gibbons’s familiar madrigals and keyboard pieces with its colourful and probably sociologically interesting words and atmosphere.

Louise Webster’s Cries of Kathmandu succeeded in using music of a generalised Indian character embroidered with Hindu religious imagery to paint an intriguing though on balance, distressing picture of a once charming subalpine city largely ruined by capitalism and mass tourism.

It was a short step to Jack Body’s Cries from the Border, a piece typifying the composer’s profound human and political concerns, now coloured by his own imminent mortality. The tale of the fate of German-Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin, trapped on the French-Spanish border attempting to escape from Vichy France and the Nazis in 1940. Body wrote: “Unlike Benjamin, I am a traveller reluctant to transit. But the sentence has been pronounced…”. Musically it expressed these complex emotions committedly and convincingly.  Jack Body was there to stand for the applause.

The Cries of Paris of c. 1530 by Clément Janequin was a predictable sequel. Like that of its imitator Gibbons, it did contain the cries of the city’s street vendors, which were no mere medieval phenomenon, but petered out only around the First World War. The performance left no doubt about the reason for their survival and now renewed popularity.

Then came two New Zealand latter-day efforts: Cries of Auckland by Eve de Castro Robinson which dealt with the anti-Springbok Tour and the cries of the protesters throughout the country, still vivid in the memories of all of us who were involved: “1 2 3 4, we don’t want your racist tour! … Shame! Shame! …Amandla, Amandla”  and hints of later protests about asset-sales and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

And Chris Watson contributed a comparable political offering from Wellington. More words, and a wider lens: the morning commuter trials (cries of frustration?), the dramatic revealing of Wellington Harbour at the bottom of Ngauranga Gorge (cries of spiritual uplift?), but then the realities of political Wellington at the time of the negative, dirty politics, election campaign – the cries of debate, perhaps the cries of hopelessness, from the victims of the victory of inequality.

Brahms Sextet
The Ying Quartet plus the violist and cellist of the New Zealand String Quartet had the last word, with the glorious second string sextet by Brahms (Op 36). Reference is usually made, and was here, to the belief that it contained hidden reference to Agathe von Siebold with whom he had been in love with a few years before, encoded in the first theme of the first movement. Typically, Brahms shied away from commitment, which he apparently later regretted. The work’s high emotional intensity, especially the Adagio, slow movement, can colour the listening experience, but it hardly matters what specific narrative the listener allows to accompany a performance, for it is such a transcendent experience from the young composer, aged 33.

These festivals have often succeeded in bringing things to a conclusion with a musical creation of unusual splendour and emotional power. This one achieved that very movingly.

 

Nelson chamber music festival: the second three days, with a trip to St Arnaud

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson 2015
29 January to 7 February 

Part Two

The Nelson Cathedral and Old St John’s church

Monday 2 to Wednesday 4 February

Monday 2 February

PianoFest I: Dance
Sunday’s rain which had been threatened to continue today, disappeared and there was sun first thing, but clouds soon returned and umbrellas reappeared as we set off for the 10.30 PianoFest I: Dance.

It featured four prominent New Zealand pianists: David Guerin, Jian Liu, Stephen de Pledge and Sarah Watkins. ‘Dance’ was a rather approximate term as the first piece, Ravel’s Mother Goose, in the original piano duet form, was not designed for dancing; though Ravel’s later orchestration was in fact expanded into a ballet in 1912. I don’t know how successful it was or how much it is performed today. But predominantly it consists of charming, quiet depictions of some of Perrault’s (and others’) famous fairy stories. It was played by Jian Liu and Sarah Watkins, who brought to each scene a wonderful delicacy, precision, an awareness of the spirit of each tale and the pianistic colours demanded by that character. There were vivid revelations in each of the five movements – a special finesse in the depiction of the Beauty and the Beast (Les entretiens de la belle et de la bête).

There were three pieces by New Zealand composers: David Hamilton’s Three Rags were genuine dance material, closer to the Scott Joplin originals than the elaborate and over-sophisticated rags by Novacek, heard the day before. These were for eight hands at two pianos, positioned face to face, Watkins and de Pledge on the Steinway on the left and Guerin and Liu at the Yamaha on the right. Lilburn’s rather untypical Tempo di Bolero written when he was flatting in his twenties in Christchurch with Leo Benseman and Lawrence Baigent, both pianists. So it was for three pianists, in very close proximity; the three this time were, treble to bass, Guerin, Liu and Watkins. It was an energetic piece, that rather burdened the bolero rhythms with complexity, but nevertheless made one rather wish that Lilburn had been drawn into the business of composing for the theatre, to find the sort of popular success that Farquhar found with his Ring round the Moon music. Though the three Canzonettas, that were played on Wednesday in the Stabat Mater concert were teasing hints at what might have developed if the climate had been different.

The last piece in the programme was an extended exploration of Bottom’s characterisation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘A Tedious Brief Scene: Bottom’s Dance’ by Leonie Holmes. The employment of all four pianists (left: Watkins, Guerin; right: de Pledge and Liu) imposed a certain chaos on the music that depicted Bottom, the butt of jokes and teasing, through rhythms and in the handling of musical ideas.

Also in the hour-long programme was the third Slavonic dance from Dvořák’s first set, in the composer’s original piano duet form. It occurred to me that we could use a couple of nationwide recitals featuring the two pianists, de Pledge and Guerin, doing the entire two books of these small masterpieces.

The only music by Scharwenka that I knew till a few years ago was this Polish Dance (Op 3 No 1) that both my wife and I were surprised to confess to have played, after a fashion, in our youth. The programme note explained how commonplace our experience was, noting that it had been one of the ‘greatest hits’ of its time, the sheet music selling in millions.

Prokofiev’s own piano arrangement of parts of his Romeo and Juliet ballet is for one pianist – here, Stephen de Pledge alone. The Lily Dance of the Maidens: curious and careful, contrasting with the heavy, confrontational Montagues and Capulets.

In the afternoon we got PianoFest II
It was advertised as ‘World Voyage’, for the usual reason of widespread composer birthplaces, though the distribution was pretty normal: France and Germany, the United States and a couple of pieces by New Zealanders.

This festival has been given a certain quirky interest by pairing music that has been transformed, generally by the composer from the original instrumentation to something else.

Beethoven featured twice. Late in his life, he had rewritten his third piano trio (heard on Sunday), as a string quintet (heard on Saturday); and on Monday we heard his Piano Sonata in E, Op 14 No 1 which he later transcribed as a string quartet to be heard on Wednesday from the young Nelson quartet, The Troubadours.

The Piano sonata was the first piece in the PianoFest II programme and it was played by Jian Liu.

I was enchanted by Liu’s playing of this unpretentious sonata, evincing a very carefully considered, understated performance of beautiful delicacy, with fleet little decorative passages, that, again, made me long to hear Liu in performances of a lot more Beethoven.

The contribution from France was Messiaen’s Regard du silence from the huge canvas, the Vingt regards sur L’Enfant Jésus, played with enormous authority by David Guerin. From the United States: John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction for two pianos, from Stephen and Sarah who exploited the interesting sonic possibilities that Adams wrote into his boisterous piece.

New Zealand composer Sarah Ballard wrote a set of four pieces representing the four medieval elements: earth, air, fire and water, and here we heard the four pianists (treble to bass, left to right: de Pledge, Guerin, Watkins and Liu) in two that portrayed an ancient Mexican cave and Mount Erebus.

A different disposition of the four pianists then played Gareth Farr’s Bintang, probably danceable enough, but a stimulating and impressive listen.

Bach by Candlelight
The evening concert was the focus on Bach which has become a key element in the festival. It was made particularly distinguished as the first appearance of The Song Company; and the forces also included both resident string quartets Douglas Mews (organ), Robert Orr (oboe) and Loan Perernau Garriga (double bass).

To start, Ying Quartet’s leader Ayano Ninomiya gave an impressive performance of the Prelude from Bach’s Partita No 3 for solo violin, and followed with Eugène Isaÿe’s astonishing treatment of the music  in his second sonata for solo violin. The performances of both pieces were distinguished by extremely high technical brilliance and artistic integrity.

The first of Bach’s vocal pieces on the programme was Jesu meine Freude. This is one of Bach’s real masterpieces and demands exquisite balance and blending between parts and both richness and dramatic characterization. Inner parts sounded too prominent, and though each voice was technically assured, the tone was not uniform; I am not bothered by vibrato in baroque music, but here it obtruded occasionally. Here was an example, I felt, when the possibly authentic use of one voice to a part made it very hard to meet achieve a simple, beautiful, dramatic performance.

Hannah Fraser sang the best-known aria from the St Matthew Passion, ‘Erbarme dich’. I’d loved her Brahms songs the night before, but was not so convinced by this, perhaps on account of a voice that was so warm and emotional, beautifully adapted to the 19th century, but didn’t meet the stylistic expectations that have become normal for Bach today. Her lovely accompaniment was from a blend of players from the two quartets plus bassist Joan Perarnau Garriga and organist Douglas Mews.

Soprano Mina Kanaridis sang the gorgeous aria, ‘Mein gläubiges Herze’, from Cantata No 68, with a real sense of ecstasy and conviction. But the real triumph of the concert was the performance by bass Alexander Knight of the cantata Ich habe genug (Cantata No 82), with a simply superb voice, and a stage demeanour that commanded the entire space both by means of his penetrating gaze at his audience and the sombre expressiveness of his singing. He was supported admirably by oboist Robert Orr, and again bassist Perernau Garriga and Mews at the chamber organ, all three of whom had given comparable backing to Mina Kanaridis.

A second instrumental piece was the third of Bach’s not often played Gamba Sonatas (BWV1029): on Gillian Ansell’s viola, accompanied by Douglas Mews, it was modest and unpretentious, and free of artifice of any kind.

 

Tuesday 3 February

To St Arnaud on Lake Rotoiti
This was the day of the lake: when the music and the pass holders go to St Arnaud on Lake Rotoiti where the Ying Quartet play in the lovely little chapel whose windows give on the beech forest and to the distant mountains. We walk to the School of Music where the bus will depart at 9.30am. The uncertainty of the weather, though the sun was shining then, means there is a wide variety of dress, from optimists to pessimists: I was in the middle with a light jacket and proper shoes.

Most of the way in through varied farmland and the series of villages south of Nelson till we turn off after about half an hour; the road becomes more winding and we travel through more plantation forest; almost no native trees apart from occasional patches of totara till within about five miles of St Arnaud. Why did the State allow land sales and native forest felling to make way for exotics so close to this beautiful lake? However, the immediate environment is largely beech.

After morning tea at the Visitor Centre we go to the little chapel where the Ying Quartet is already seated, backs to the windows, while the audience gets lovely views of close kanuka and more distant beech.

Quartets by Haydn and Tchaikovksy and a trio by Anthony Ritchie
 The acoustic is gorgeous in the small timbered space with its curved laminated beams that create the feel of a vaulted gothic crossing; and the first few minutes are spent wallowing in the immediacy of the individual and collective sounds of the Haydn first movement. Better than at earlier performances we could here enjoy the quartet’s elegant and sensitive playing, Haydn’s wit and teasing, all with such care for the ebb and flow of phrases and dynamics.

The programme is Haydn, Op 20 No 4, Tchaikovsky, Quartet No 1 and a trio by Anthony Ritchie, entitled Spring String Trio. The Tchaikovsky drew more power and drama from the players, their painstaking attention to fluctuating dynamics and rhythmic effects more exploited.

In introducing Ritchie’s little piece, in which leader, Ayano Ninomiya stood down, giving the violin part to second violin Janet Ying, Phillip Ying referred to the piece as Spring String Ying Trio. Though commissioned as a birthday present, its tone was initially serious though quite brisk: getting older is no laughing matter.

But it was a delight to hear Janet Ying’s fine, confident violin playing, unobscured by her leader’s dominance, which is the common fate of the second violin. Its slower second section cemented its place as a small but substantial work.

Helene Pohl talks with the four PianoFest pianists
Back in Nelson later in the afternoon, it was the turn of the four pianists participating in the PianoFest, to chat with Helene Pohl. As well as exploring each pianist’s early experiences, and how a commitment to a professional career emerged, there was interesting discussion on the sense or otherwise of multi-pianist performances such as we had at the first and second ‘PianoFests’: the consensus was that it was fundamentally an eccentricity and perhaps stupid, except for Schubert’s which were justified as a means of getting very close to members of the opposite sex.

Kathryn Stott
Kathryn Stott’s major piano recital was in the evening. It demonstrated her special interest in French music with Ravel’s Sonatine, a nocturne by Fauré, L’Isle joyeuse by Debussy and Franck’s formidable Prelude, chorale and fugue. Their variety, and the rare hearing of the splendid Franck made it a memorable and, for the many probably unfamiliar with Franck, a revelatory event. The second half was dominated by Stott’s illuminating playing of the original piano version of Grieg’s Holberg Suite, too rarely heard, that restored Grieg’s place as a great piano composer; the rest was from South America, Villa-Lobos’s Choros No 5, Guanieri’s Danza negra and Ginastera’s Dance No 2 from Argentinian Dances. It ended terrifyingly with a rather extended, killer piece she had commissioned from Graham Fitkin called Relent, evidently a mark of his sense of humour since its speed, ferocity, complexity and sheer impossibility for anyone less than a Stott, was utterly unrelenting.

Wednesday 4 February  

The anchors of the festival
Three main groups provide the backbone of this year’s festival. The New Zealand String Quartet of course; the Ying Quartet from the United States; and the Song Company from Australia. Some festivals are very particular in the range of musical genres, but most like to include players that lie perhaps a little apart from the popular central element of a festival’s character.

Several times it has been a singer or singers. That is excellent because the world of chamber music tends to give rise to somewhat narrow areas of acceptability for quite a few, who might just surprise themselves if they ventured out of their narrow comfort zone.

So the Song Company had an important role to play in a festival like this, and they tackle it on several different levels: inserting a couple of Brahms Lieder in a chamber music programme; doing several of Bach best loved choruses and arias alongside violin pieces; testing the water with a wide variety of styles and musical periods – Medieval and Renaissance polyphony and madrigals, the Baroque, the classical and the romantic periods, the modern or twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

And of course, there are factions within each of those categories, those who turn off early music, or scorn romantic music, or art songs, or opera but love religious choral music, find English music boring, and so on.

Roland Peelman and The Song Company
A challenge to all these limiting fads and fashions was offered on Wednesday morning in the vigorous and wide-ranging discussion between Rolf Gjelsten and Roland Peelman, the director of The Song Company.

As with all these sessions designed to shed light on the making of a musician, this began with Peelman’s description of the unmusical life in a small Flemish town in Belgium where, from nowhere, a strong musical impulse arose, that sought out a music teacher at about age eight and induced the family to buy a piano. Then a quite rich musical life at a boarding school, a useless year at a local conservatorium (he mentioned almost no Belgian place names apart from Ghent), but more fruitful general education at university.

His learning went on to Cologne, the base of the post-Darmstadt, avant-garde school led by Stockhausen, and it included the important (for Peelman) teaching of Alois Kontarsky (you’ll remember him from a chamber group at one of the very early New Zealand Festivals in Wellington in the late 1980s).

Insights into conducting came mainly from those with almost no standing as a conductor but with a flair for giving invaluable guidance and inspiration. One had said he could tell him everything about conducting technique in an hour but it would take a lifetime to learn.

While he had initially said that the impression of Australasians that Europe was seething with culture was delusional, his later account of rich and flourishing arts and music scenes in at least the main centres of Europe, hardly supported his argument. Much of what he said seemed to place high value on wide general cultural awareness and knowledge instead of on narrow, music-only, highly technical, and detailed analytical study.

His own wide exposure to literature, several languages, history, the arts generally and music in particular was enviable, especially in a country with steadily narrowing cultural and intellectual horizons.

Peelman was interesting about the close relationship between musicians who inhabited the avant-garde and those who explored early music performance practice from the 1970s. The one had spawned and informed the other; especially the realisation that one could not live on the former but there were growing audiences for the latter.

To Australia
His account of his shift to Australia in 1982 was fascinating. His contact with Aboriginal ‘Dreaming’ music at Waggawagga left a mark on his brain; his first job was at Mt Gambier on the South Australia/Victoria southern border teaching keyboard and singing and conducting the brass band.

Life became serious when he was appointed assistant chorus master at Australian Opera in Sydney, in the far-off days when the company had 22 productions in its annual repertoire (now about half that in a good year; it was the late 80s when I started going to Australia to make wonderful opera discoveries). Though he allowed himself reservations about aspects of opera as spectacle and its perception as amusement for the wealthy (“music takes second place”, he said – maybe, but not for me), he gained varied and valuable skills, describing the hectic, non-stop life as intoxicating.

Then in 1990 came an offer of appointment with The Song Company, Australia’s only full-time professional small choir. He had much to say about its evolution, about the fundamental contrast between four and six voices. A finally he disclosed that, after 25 years, he’s ready to take on something else.

PianoFest IV
After lunch on this fine day, when the rain had gone, the fourth in the series of PianoFests, which had been planned and organised by Stephen de Pledge as a mini-festival-within-a-festival, took place in Old St John’s, as its deconsecrated embodiment is now known.

More multi-pianist performances, this one subtitled ‘Opera’. Official participants were: David Guerin, Jian Liu, Stephen de Pledge, Sarah Watkins.

The first, played by De Pledge by himself was Liszt’s transcription of Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’ from Tristan und Isolde. Liszt had the taste to ensure that Wagner’s scoring did not lose anything in the process, and the piano version moved just as ecstatically from calm grief to necro-erotic frenzy.

Nor did the transcription of the prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg suffer with four hands at two piano (Stephen on piano A, left, and David Guerin on piano B, right); in the transcription by Max Reger, its lines were if anything etched with more clarity than in the original.

Norma
But the real revelation was the fantasia drawing melodies from Bellini’s wonderful opera, Norma, by Czerny, a contemporary of Bellini, as well as of Rossini and Schubert. He was a piano teacher and composer of piano etudes and impossible exercises: this one for six hands at one piano. The emotions remained alive and well, and the rhythmic pulse under the final heart-rending melody, rather undid me.

It lay in the way he spread the melodies to the very limits of the keyboard, with not inappropriate adornments; inter alia, it called for De Pledge, in the treble position, to reach repeatedly with his right arm across Sarah Watkins to plant notes outside of his own territory; Sarah was wedged between, with David Guerin at the bass. The combination, towards the end, of exciting, pulsing bass rhythms and gorgeous, heart-rending melody, rather undid me. As I remarked yesterday, I felt, as the result of the glorious music that Bellini wrote for this great opera, and Czerny’s sensitive and exciting treatment, that this piece had a serious independent existence, vindicating the genre of six or more hands at one piano.

Freddie
Then came another kind of novelty, though it was not altogether clear whether Double F for Freddie, had another life as some kind of opera, it was, as described, a humorous romp at the very limits of one piano: viz. four at one keyboard – from top to bottom, Guerin, Watkins, Liu, with de Pledge offering, as far as I could see, just the final deep bass note at the end.

Carmen for the madhouse
Then came an indescribable, extraordinary party piece devised by De Pledge for all four pianists in riotous disarray. It’s mainly Carmen, but there are other impertinences: Die Fledermaus, and Sarah suddenly interrupting Stephen doing Micaela’s act 3 aria with the opening of Grieg’s piano concerto, which was the signal for the arrival of other players, of growing chaos, of shifting piano stools, of forcible position changes at different keyboards, some corruptions like the Habanera delivered by Jian with feminine delicacy.

Carmen herself arrives (Rae de Lisle), tosses the rose to the pianists and then joins the riot. Five at two keyboards is unbalanced however, and De Pledge set out to find another pianist in the audience, and finally forcibly arrests Kathy Stott; she puts up a considerable fight to avoid this unseemly press-gang musical recruitment but joined the chaos of six at two keyboards with gusto to deliver the coup-de-grace to Carmen.

Troubadours
The third event of the day was at 6.30pm in the Cathedral, restoring a more orderly and civilised tone. The Troubadours, the noted student string quartet, who have been spotted around the city during the week, playing at schools and charities, were here to play Mozart’s Divertimento K 136, and the old filmic hit, Over the Rainbow. In particular, they played Beethoven’s own arrangement for string quartet of his piano sonata in E, Op 14 No 1.

These players, students variously at Auckland, Waikato and Victoria universities, were Julian Baker, Hilary Hayes, Jin Kim and Heather Lewis. Their playing was stylistically idiomatic, beautifully articulated, nicely phrased and judged for gentle rhythmic and dynamic variations.

Stabat Mater
This title referred of course to the great Pergolesi cantata that filled the second half. Sung by two sopranos from The Song Company, Mina Kanaridis and Anna Fraser, it was accompanied by the Ying Quartet, minus Janet Ying, plus Donald Armstrong and Douglas Mews at the chamber organ.

For a work that is so famous and so well-loved, I have heard it too few times, more in other countries than in New Zealand. I think it is no longer spoken of as it once was, with a degree of scorn or superciliousness, the result of a piece of music being too much loved on account of its beauty, not a virtue in mid-20th century avant-garde circles.

This performance was truly beautiful, fully justifying the employment mainly of the festival guests from Australia and the United States. The voices expressed the overwrought religious grieving that lies at the heart of the medieval poem, with sobriety and restraint, as well as extraordinarily sensitive control of tempi and expressive gesture. Led by Ayano Ninomiya’s strong but scrupulously handled violin, the ensemble gave a performance that would have impressed the most discriminating audiences anywhere in the world.

The earlier part of the concert had comprised a lovely Song without Words by Gillian Whitehead from Rolf Gjelsten’s solo cello. Donald Armstrong and Gillian Ansell played Lilburn’s entrancingly lyrical Three Canzonettas for violin and viola. Ayano Ninomiya delivered a Kreisler piece of high virtuosity and musical interest, breathtakingly.

Then the Song Company appeared to sing El fuego by Mateo Flecha, a 16th century (and so, contemporary with Tudor England) Spanish (Catalan) ‘ensalada’, in five parts, or was it six?  Vividly Hispanic, it and its performance were a delight.

All this highly heterogeneous material made it one of the most unexpected and delightful programmes of the festival.

 

Intelligently constructed programme exquisitely sung by Lisette Wesseling

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

TGIF lunchtime recitals at the Cathedral
Lisette Wesseling – soprano, with Richard Apperley – organ and Michael Stewart – piano

Music by Vivaldi, Handel, Mozart, Schubert, Glanville-Hicks, Finzi and Sondheim

Cathedral of Saint Paul

Friday 25 October, 12:45 pm

The Anglican Cathedral is now running two classes of Friday lunchtime recitals. The monthly organ recitals are ‘Great Music’ (even if they are played on the Choir or the Swell manual) and there are others, just called ‘brief recitals’, which are also often at the organ.

I’ve heard Lisette Wesseling several times over the years, though I seem not to have written reviews of the performances. As well as singing in the Cathedral Choir she has, I imagine among much else, sung solos in Bach’s B Minor Mass and a concert that included both Bach’s Magnificat in D and Jesu meine Freude.

Lisette is blind and you will find material on her website and other websites which also discuss what she feels is a much more troubling burden – stammering. Her degree in psychology (as well as music) no doubt helps to make her comfortable in openly exploring her difficulties and her continuing efforts to deal with the stammering; blindness is an affliction for which there are well understood ways by which a ‘normal’ life can be led. But look at the BSA website (www.stammering.org/stammeringblindness.html‎), where she writes in answer to the question which is more difficult: “The answer I give usually surprises people: stammering is much more difficult to live with than blindness.”

Last year, at the production of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, I was not amused at the depiction of Vašek as a figure of fun, inept and stammering. But that’s how librettist and composer conceive him: what should a director today do with the role? Much like directors’ dilemma with roles like Monostatos who was treated in 1791 by Da Ponte and Mozart very differently from the way he might be today.

Thus she reads both the notation and the words in braille as she sings; though it struck me that with the enhancement of other faculties that blindness develops, her memory would have made reading the score unnecessary.

Here is a bright, accurate, distinctive voice that was demonstrably at home in all the musical style that this short recital covered, from late baroque to Broadway musical. She began with two early 18th century pieces by Vivaldi and Handel. The programme leaflet gave no details of the pieces beyond the bare name of the song or aria.

Both the first pieces were accompanied beautifully by Richard Apperley at the chamber organ. The Vivaldi, the first movement of a sacred motet, Nulla in mundo pax sincera, RV 630 (“In this world there is no honest peace”) is a delightful aria in an almost dancing rhythm, light and high, seeming to be written for her kind of voice, and, as with so much Vivaldi, one is astonished that earlier generations ignored the huge quantity of his music that is so rich in melodic invention.

The same goes for the Handel  aria, Süsser Blumen Abaflocken, one of his German songs (Neun deutsche Arien), HWV204, called in Hyperion’s CD note, “a sensual evocation of the scent of Amber flowers, in which the middle section describing the soul soaring heavenwards bears a resemblance to Cleopatra’s ‘Piangerò’ from Giulio Cesare”. Lisette’s high notes truly relished the range she was called on to inhabit, and I loved the cathedral’s long echo here, giving me more of the voice than she was actually producing.

Mozart’s Idomeneo is no doubt more familiar to opera-lovers than to those who may have come across the previous two songs. ‘Zeffiretti lusinghieri’ (‘Pleasant Zephyrus’), sung by Ilia in Act III. This too revealed a happy, summery atmosphere as Ilia, the daughter of Priam, the defeated King of Troy, sends her love to Idamante, son of Idomeneo the King of Crete. It was yet another song brimming with hope and joy which Lisette obviously relishes and performs in a voice coloured with happiness. The accompaniment here was by Michael Stewart at the piano.

Frühlinsglaube, Schubert’s setting of a harmless lyric by Ludwig Uhland, is also filled with the delights of Spring (‘Faith [or belief] in spring’), one of the best-known, happiest, most guileless songs.  Here her voice floated easily, revealing an instinctive affinity with the Lieder genre.

Next was a song by Gerald Finzi: ‘It was a lover and his lass’ from As You Like It. This was perhaps the only song in the programme that suffered a little from the acoustic, calling for faster speed and given more to harmonic variety which a reverberant acoustic tends to muddy.

But it provided a nice link with the next song, in imitative Tudor/Stuart style.

Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912-1990) was one of Australia’s earliest woman composers (along with Margaret Sutherland and Miriam Hyde) and her music has found its way into the mainstream of Australian music. Her music is accomplished and attractive, demonstrating an approach that owes much more to contemporary European models than to anything that might suggest Australia.  You can find this song on You-Tube: ‘Come Sleep’ is a setting of a poem by playwright John Fletcher (of ‘Beaumont and Fletcher’, and a collaborator with Shakespeare in Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen) and the setting suggests the style of the Tudor/Stuart composers.

Finally, a song from one of Stephen Sondheim’s most popular works, Into the Woods, which inter-twines Grimm fairy stories. ‘No one is alone’ presents a comforting message along the obvious lines, at the end of the musical. There’s a gentle swing as the melody moves easily in short phrases which Lisette sings with all the clear unpretentiousness that is Sondheim’s secret.

This series of concerts hasn’t yet taken off in terms of audience support. The Cathedral does not have quite the convenience and welcoming atmosphere that St Andrew’s does.

But we should hope that the attention given to the series over the years by Middle C might eventually persuade Wellingtonians whose Fridays weigh heavily on their spirits that here is the answer.