Tag: twentieth century music

Shostakovich and Mozart – different kinds of intensities and delights at Roseneath’s Long Hall in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SHOSTAKOVICH AND MOZART

Helene Pohl and Anna van der Zee (violins), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello) and Nicholas Hancox (viola) play Shostakovich

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartets – No. 11 in F Minor Op,122
No. 13 in B-flat minor Op,138
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART – String Quintet in D Major K.593

The Chamber Pot-pourri Ensemble

Helene Pohl, Anna van der Zee (violins)
Nicholas Hancox, Julia Joyce (violas)
Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

SHOSTAKOVICH -String Quartet No. 11 (1966) – in memory of Vasily Pyotrovich Shririnsky
Introduction, Scherzo, Recitative, Etude, Humoresque, Elegy, Finale

String Quartet No. 13 (1970) – dedicated to Vadim Vasilievitch Borisovsky
(Quartet in One Movement)
Adagio, Doppio movimento, Adagio

MOZART – String Quintet in D Major K.593  (with Julia Joyce – viola)

The Long Hall,
Roseneath, Wellington
Saturday 19th April, 2025

This was the second 2025 “Comfy Concert’ at Roseneath’s “The Long Hall”, part of a benefit series to assist various charities, on this occasion spotlighting the inspirational Arohanui Strings (of which violinist Helene Pohl is the Patron), a visionary Sistema-inspired music-teaching organisation and registered charity based in Lower Hutt. Founded in 2010 by professional musician and El Sistema advocate Alison Eldridge in the belief that all children have a right to a music education, this programme has offered musical instruction to more than 4000 children in some of Wellington and Hutt Valley’s most economically challenged communities.

Though the concert may have been relatively short in performance-time, it surely made amends for any brevity-related aspersions in terms of “moments per minute”. Each of the three works displayed a distinctively wrought sound-world whose singular qualities nonetheless found common cause in their surety of utterance and burgeoning character. And what we heard throughout the afternoon was an “every note counts” quality for which musicians such as Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten have earned unstinted renown over their quartet-playing careers to date, and which their colleagues, Anna van der Zee, Nicholas Hancox and Julia Joyce were readily able to replicate in partnership over the concert’s duration.

In an earlier “Chamber Pot-pourri Ensemble” presentation in this same venue a month previously, we’d heard another Shostakovich String Quartet, the Ninth, along with a new work by Chinese composer Gao Ping which was dedicated to Shostakovich’s memory to mark this 50th anniversary year of his death. On that occasion, the second violinist was Monique Lapins, and the violist Chris van der Zee. Given the remarkable variety of the quartets given thus far in this survey, it might be that Helene’s and Rolf’s necessarily pragmatic choices of colleagues for each occasion could arguably add to the music’s appeal, piquantly suiting the “living dangerously” aura around Shostakovich’s own creative efforts in general. Of course, by the time he had come to writing quartets the composer had ostensibly survived his most hazardous brush with the tyrannical Soviet leader Josef Stalin (specifically over the latter’s reaction to the opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”), and had since embarked on a series of works which he hoped would give rise to less scrutiny than his more “public” works.

By the time he came to write the aforementioned Ninth Quartet it was 1964, and the composer had appeared to have largely “broken free” from the constraints of a system that had told its creative artists how they should make their art. A Tenth Quartet was written in the same year, and the Eleventh was begun the following year. The latter was the first of a group named the “Quartet of Quartets”, and written for  the violinist Vasili Pyotrovich Shirinsky, a member of the Beethoven Quartet, the ensemble  to whom the composer came to entrust the premieres of all of these works right up to the Fourteenth Quartet. Shirinsky actually died before the work’s completion and the remaining players had seriously considered disbanding the quartet – however Shostakovich had argued for the group to continue, as he maintained the group had “acquired the status of a national institution”.

Rolf Gjelsten introduced this work, commenting most tellingly that it was “great string quartet music which created powerful effects”. The work consisted of seven closely-connected (all marked attacca) miniature movements, beginning Andantino with a short, rhapsodic violin solo, here, beautifully-focused throughout all its appearances by Helene Pohl – answered and echoed by her colleagues, largely expressing a kind of calm acceptance, briefly spliced by a “wrench of agitation” but returning to an integrated kind of poise. The first violin moved things along with the Scherzo – a repeated-note theme, played more legato than pointed and playful, followed by the viola and ‘cello, “dug in”, and with occasional stinging upward glissandi! Together, the violins gave the motif a sinister element by beginning the phrases in fourths, “worrying” the notes insistently – after this all died away, the players suddenly “attacked” the Recitative, with stinging opening sounds, and dissonant resoundings, briefly playing some uncannily ambient “Vaughan Williams-like” contrasting harmonies before returning to the opening, though letting the “stinging” attacks gradually disperse.

Again, the mood suddenly changed with the “Etude”, the solo violin embarking on a sinuous whirling-dervish episode, to which the other players reacted  almost dreamily at first, but then almost grotesquely as the solo violin intensified its flailing attack, the others enacting a kind of drunken sailors’ dance, before anarchy broke out, with the ‘cello joining the fray, as if possessed of its own accord! Out of nowhere, it almost seemed, came  the Humoresque, with an urgent, warning-like two-note ostinato-like figure from Anna van der Zee’s violin, to which both violin and viola took fright (Nicholas Hancox’s viola matching Helene Pohl’s violin in sheer ghoulishness of tone) – such transfixing sonorities made it seem as if we had taken a brief but scarifying turn into a Little Shop of Horrors!).

The Elegy brought sense and feeling to the proceedings in spadefuls – ‘cello and viola first dark and sombre, but still sonorous  and affecting, then the second and afterwards the first violin returning us to daylight, their sounds emoting like prisoners from dark places espying light. And so the Finale was on us, with the players teasing out by turns the work’s past themes, the process filled with conflicting emotions as the memories returned on the various instruments, and ending with Helene Pohl’s violin reaching the work’s final high C with a variously pre-constituted sense of fulfilment….

Aptly chosen as a companion-work for this concert was the similar-but-different Thirteenth Quartet, of roughly an approximate length though differently constituted, having a single movement, albeit with contrasting episodes – an ABA structure similar to Bartok’s Third Quartet. It’s dedicated to the Beethoven Quartet’s violist Vadim Vasilyevich Borisovsky, who had just retired, leaving his replacement Fyodor Druzhinin to take part in the premiere in December 1970. Shostakovich was by then a sick man, having suffered a heart attack shortly after the Eleventh Quartet’s premiere in 1966, and was receiving treatment throughout 1970 at an orthopaedic clinic – the new work’s largely pessimistic outlook stems from his awareness of approaching his life’s end. It’s reinforced here by a late inclusion in the outer movements of some of the composer’s music for Grigori Kozintsev’s film “King Lear”, originally conceived as “Lamentations” for a string quartet.

In introducing the work Helene Pohl made mention of the remarkable “jazzy” elements in the second part, quoting the composer as saying  to somebody “I’ve written a short little quartet – with a “joke” middle!” – a sequence which another commentator had, I read, characterised as “a jam session from Hell”, and which came across as a grim “dance of death”, the composer joining forces with his great predecessor, Musorgsky, in regard to the latter’s “Songs and Dances of Death”.

Appropriately, it was the viola which began the work, a sorrowful solo with others joining in– bare, astringent sounds  with occasional dissonant note combinations. The players took their time, with the violin taking the lead working up to a “crying  out” sequence with the second violin, and encouraging the viola and ‘cello to join in. When the meditative tone resumed I caught a further reminder of a bleak “Vaughan Williams” voice in the harmony, along with the unsettling half-tone dissonances.

Helene had demonstrated to us the repeated-note phrase that began the more volatile middle section, emphasising for us its mournful rather than playful character with more legato-like phrasing. The murmuring lines from the others developed into harsh, stabbing chords set against an angular descending seventh figure from Nicholas Hancox’s viola – which in turn lead into a wonderful, once-repeated “augmenting” chord, the instruments joining in stepwise, punctuated by the repeated-note figure, and the viola’s falling-seventh declamations!  – jaw-dropping stuff!

What developed next seemed to me almost Dada-like! – a viola tremolando, pizzicato figures from the others, and rapid-fire exchanges of the same activated the ‘cello with Rolf Gjelsten giving us a “grooving-along” kind of running jazz pizzicato, prompting the violins into a “cool” dotted- rhythmed note pattern to which the players occasionally beat the wood of their instruments with their bows in syncopated strokes! – these jazzy, syncopated rhythms proceeded to “fight” against mournful, downwardly-sighing  lines from the viola, which grew to resembling a kind of all-out aerial attack on the scurrying inhabitants below! – all so visceral and palpable!

Violin pizzicati provoked a full-blooded response from the cello, whose  mournful lines eventually prevailed against the jazzy rhythms,  with murmuring lines gathering to subdue the ground zero activities and establish an uneasy, ghostly, tremolando-like calm – a couple of  bleak pizzicato repeated-note whimperings from the violin stimulated another startling, though short-lived  outbreak of the repeated note pattern before it too gave up the ghost. All of this was thrill-a-minute stuff, brought into being with an immediacy that, especially in such unprepossessing settings, simply took the listener’s breath away!

Out of the thicket emerged sighing violin lines and trenchant ‘cello responses, with the violin ascending heavenwards in search of some form of redemption/oblivion, its companions resonating in support, the exchanges again briefly sounding that distinctive “Vaughan Williams” ambience that brought to my mind the latter’s Sixth Symphony – most affecting! Then came the viola’s solo, augmented by cadaverous tappings from the second violin – after which the viola continued, joined by the first and second violins in an extended B-flat which slowly burgeoned towards a piercing climax.

Julia Joyce (viola) and the Chamber Pot-pourri Ensemble play Mozart

The intrinsic greatness of Mozart’s music would, of course, have easily survived a cheek-by-jowl placement with these twentieth-century goings-on intact, but the interval break was nevertheless appreciated at that point! It did give one the chance to ponder what we had heard in relative isolation, and especially apposite given the cultural “head start”  enjoyed by an eighteenth-century classic work when pitted against a later “arrival”. I had enjoyed my own particular “first encounter” with Mozart’s K.593 many years ago, courtesy of a fellow bus-driver I befriended during my “mis-spent youth” period of exploration! This particular individual was a Rastafarian-like figure, complete with dreadlocks! – one who completely belied his appearance by frequently conversing with me about art, literature and music, and ultimately making a present for me of a recording of two of the Mozart Quintets in question, one of which was K.593 (and which he himself adored!).

It was a “head-start” of sorts for me with this work, of course, which I grew to love all the more – and on a later, box-set pressing of the same recording (the stereo Amadeus with Cecil Aronowitz)  I also got to know the “alternate version” of the finale’s opening, the phrase written chromatically, rather than in stepwise fashion, and which is now recognised as the “authentic” opening – Helene Pohl pointed this out, playing both versions for our delight, though stopping short of proposing an “audience vote” on the matter!

It was one of a number of delights associated with this performance, another being Rolf Gjelsten’s engagingly individual way with the ‘cello phrase that began the work, repeated in different keys in ways that made the player on my Amadeus recording sound relatively po-faced and non-commital! Also, I’d never before properly “connected” this episode with the music of Haydn, despite owning recordings of things like the “Drum Roll” and “London” Symphonies for years and years, works with similar kinds of slow introductions, and with the same returning at the end of the opening movements! And finally, the presence of the NZSO’s principal violist, Julia Joyce, in the ensemble gave the performance a wonderfully “burnished” glory of exchange, particularly evident in the slow movement, with its frequent conversational violin/viola passages – all very theatrical, as well, I thought, with the tuttis bursting almost to full with expression.

A quickly-flowing Menuetto followed, less about “beats” and more about emotion ”flowing like oil”, as the composer would have said, and, with the Trio, a showcase of ascending arpeggios, a veritable welter of them on at least two occasions, both collegial and celebratory. As, of course, were the wry interlockings of the finale’s workings, where the sheer contrapuntal elan of the writing becomes an “Anything you can do” kind of musical feast with an “Of course!” series of  rejoinings, the exhilaration of matching knife-edged impulses and resplendent tones a glorious display, and one for all of us to savour and remember for a long while to come.

Orchestra Wellington – heroically fulfilling the need for music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
A MODERN HERO

EVE de CASTRO-ROBINSON – Hour of Lead
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – War Requiem

Morag Atchison (soprano)
Daniel Szesiong Todd (tenor)
Benson Wilson (baritone)

Orpheus Choir, Wellington
Wellington Young Voices

Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (music director)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 7th December, 2024

What could possibly preface in concert a work such as Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem?  Here, on Saturday, at Orchestra Wellington’s epic presentation “A Modern Hero”, that challenge was taken up by Auckland composer Eve de Castro Robinson with her brief but searingly concentrated orchestral composition “Hour of Lead”, a sonorous meditation on a similarly-titled poem by Emily Dickinson.

The poet’s words explore the consciousness of pain in a variety of forms and processings, its progressions variously rapier-like, systematic and torpid, with responses paralleling thought, reflex and movement, as do the different characters of the four movements of de Castro Robinson’s work, with each outwardly signing inner turmoil. The first, Searing, takes just milliseconds to live up to its name, with an opening ostinato suddenly pierced by screams. The rhythms trundle jazzily onwards, set upon by punch-drunk szforzandi, whose assaults bring forth raucous clamourings, and building to a tutti for the tumultuous ages. After this comes music of the air, Bittersweet, a vertiginous scenario whose incessant movement quixotically dissolves into a juicily-flavoured hymnal, and reaching zany volume levels with a single, tumultuously constituted chord that eventually self-destructs!

Next is Leaden, with its “quartz contentment”, deeply-wrought sounds with richly-purposeful rumblings, its darkness countering the previous movement’s scintillations. A flowing viola/cello melody sings above the rhythms as winds and brass emit birdlike sighs and cries, which brass turn into gargantuan earth-groans – how wonderful to hear the  strings playing an Orpheus-like role here, their sounds taming the beasts’ convulsions, raising their spirits, and suggesting an ecstasy on the other side of the darkness which reclaims the last few bars.

“Remembered, if outlived” says the poem; and the beginning of the final Chilling scintillates on percussion, winds and high-register-strings before becoming almost extra-terrestrial, freed from gravity and atmosphere! –  all impulses are drawn towards a super-galactic kind of rendition of “Abide with Me”, a kind of invitation for sensibilities frozen in the manner of “centuries before” . Perhaps the “stupor – then the letting go” is the reawakening of human consciousness via the bringing into being a gloriously aleatoric-like pitchless chord which grows to fullness before being “taken up” by the same players’ stamping,, clattering, and then gradually receding footsteps – whether “taken up”, or “being taken”, one is not quite sure, but what an enigmatically human way to end the piece! After such colourful coruscations, the appearance of the piece’s composer, Eve de Castro Robinson, called to the platform at the end, seemed like some kind of angelic or otherwise blessed visitant, come to lift the spell by which her work had held us all in thrall.

And so, to the Britten – after the extra players and singers and their conductor had all made their entrances and set themselves up to begin, conductor Marc Taddei raised his baton and the first sounds of the War Requiem were made by the strings, awkwardly-pulsating figures gradually brought to life. For some reason I felt a proper sense of “atmosphere” lacking, without being able to put my finger on just what was missing – and only right at the work’s ending did I experience what could have made an enormous difference at the beginning. Accompanying the final exchanges between the children’s choir at the words Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis, and the main chorus’s Requiescant in pace, Amen  was the stunning effect of gradual dimming  the stage lighting to near-darkness, the voices’ diminuendo contriving the sounds to disappear as if by magic. How wonderful, I thought, if the work had begun this way, and the lights gradually brought up as the music threaded its way towards its first climax at the choir’s first full-blooded Et lux perpetua luceat eis joined by full-throated bells and percussion!

Britten’s use of the tritone, the interval C-F-sharp, in medieval times known as “diabolus in musica” (the devil in music) dominates these opening exchanges, here brought off tellingly by both voices and orchestra, the composer seeking to suitably “haunt” the text’s idea of “eternal rest”,  usually, in conventional requiems, given the most consoling music possible.  Increased tensions crackled and blistered with the tenor’s first solo entry intoning the first of poet Wilfred Owen’s bitterly challenging verses “What passing bells for these who die as cattle?” – though I found Daniel Szesiong Todd’s enunciation of the words less than clear, he still conveyed the words’ terrible ironies, along with the sounds depicting the battlefield slaughter and the “tenderness of silent minds”. All of the forebodings were then given full vent in the brutal contrasts which followed, the rapt “Kyrie/Christe eleisons” and the great onslaught of instrumental and vocal sounds of “Dies Irae”. Just as awe-inspiring and pitying were the poet’s words in the at once tranquil and fearful, “Bugles sang” which followed,  redolent with echoes of the “Dies Irae” in baritone Benson Wilson ’s hushed but growingly apprehensive conveyance of the bugles’ tones, sounding their sorrowful calls and catching the portentous mood.

Though Morag Atchison’s soprano tones “spread” when put under pressure in the “Liber Scriptus”, she effectively and sonorously “nailed” the text’s message that nothing would remain unjudged or unavenged, sentiments echoed by the chorus’s troubled utterances at “Quid sum miser tunc dicturus?” and by the soprano’s stentorian “Rex tremendae majestatis!” Then, the poet’s supremely ironic “Out there” verses came bounding in, the two soldiers teasing death as a playfellow, an “old chum” , and never as an “enemy of ours”. (we could have done with surtitles for the poetry as the auditorium was too dark to be able to properly follow the words in the programme)!

The chorus splendidly contrasted the women’s prayerful “Recordare Jesu pie” with the men’s later, jagged-edged “Confutatis maledictis”, halted by the timpani’s introduction to the baritone’s saluting of the great gun – “thou long black arm” – ironically addressing its malevolence before uttering a curse upon its being (though the words were not clear the tone of voice was unmistakeable! – great timpani and brass playing, here!). Its brazen function then became clear as the music burst once again into ”Dies Irae”, again magnificently  delivered, but then dramatically slowing, and holding everything in cosmic thrall for the “Lacrimosa” to make its heart-wrenching appearance  – Morag Atchison’s singing was to die for, here!  Britten brilliantly uses the “Lacrimosa” in tandem with what are perhaps Wilfred Owen’s most moving verses in the entire work – “Move him gently into the sun” – no matter that the words were not entirely clear in places, as the overall sense of grief was here palpable beyond description. I think we needed to have been told, somewhere, that there was an interval at this point, because we were uncertain as to what to do at first, after the choir had breathed its concluding “Dona eis requiem” – still, our somewhat mesmerised state wasn’t inappropriate!

As with every note these angelic voices sang this evening, the Wellington Young Voices’ Choir covered itself in glory  with the Offertorium that began the work’s second half – and, not to be outdone, the Orpheus voices then launched into the text with sterling orchestral support, firstly at Sed signifier sanctus Michael, and then giving us a deliciously-crafted fugal romp through Quam olim Abrahae promisisti, one whose conclusion then tossed the momentums into the introduction to another of  Owen’s poems. This one was a setting based on part of the composer’s earlier canticle, “Abraham and Isaac”, but this time with a different and brutal ending to the story. Both soloists here projected their texts more clearly, combining their voices particularly beautifully when describing the “Ram of Pride” sent by God for sacrifice –  glorious singing again from the Young Voices here, in heart-breaking response to the story’s murderous end, in which we were told Abraham “slew his son, and half the seed of Europe, one by one!”, the soloists obsessively repeating the final phrase of the poem. Afterwards, the choir and orchestra then returned to the “Quam olim Abrahae” fugal passage to complete the savage irony of the tale.

Came the Sanctus, resplendent in its glory and especially so in the wake of the Parable’s bitterness – a plethora of shimmering instrumental tintinnabulations and with ecstatic acclamations from the soprano, after which the choir divided into eight parts for Pleni sunt Caeli in terra (the choir stood up section by section, which created great visual excitement!), using the rapidly-repeated words to create an excitable babble of ever-burgeoning voices to the accompaniment of a great instrumental crescendo!  A pause, and then brasses and voices began firstly, the Hosanna in excelsis and then, led by the soprano, the gentler, more processional  Benedictus, the interactive flow here kept alive with great presence by Morag Atchison interacting with voices and orchestra under Marc Taddei’s expert control.

A final Hosanna from chorus and orchestra produced a concluding flourish, and the baritone began Owen’s thoughtful meditation, The End, the poem questioning  the Earth’s capacities for forgiveness of humankind for the carnage, with the beautiful instrumental colourings accorded the words’ images emphasising the bleakness of  the previous music’s religious exaltation. Again, the solo singer’s words were difficult to make out, but the sense of desolation held fast.  The tenor’s rendition of the following verses from At a Calvary Near the Ancre intersected here with the choir’s sing of “Agnus Dei” from the Requiem Mass, the words again highlighting the poet’s angst and anger with war – here, Owen castigates the institutionalisation of  Christian faith and patriotism  by clergy and polilticians. with Britten’s own pacifism never more unequivocally articulated than in this part of the work.

The Libera me, as with Verdi’s setting in his famous Requiem Mass, contains some of the most searing and heartfelt writing, with again, in Britten’s work the universal plea for deliverance and mercy extended to include the “pity of war”.  The opening here was as portentous as anything by Berlioz or Verdi, with the writing filled with vertiginously fearsome chromatic shifts of harmony and colour, gathering momentum and fervour, and brought into sharp focus for us by the soprano’s sudden entry (“Tremens! – Factus sum ergo!”) when she spits out her words, bring the choir’s voices with her, and realising with the orchestra a cataclysmic ferment of energies and strengths –  a truly apocalyptic threshold through which we were taken and left gasping as the sounds gradually died away, leaving the  two soldiers about whom this work has told us such a lot, and, of course, very much on our behalf!

Which left the poet’s last text, a poem called “Strange Meeting”, bringing to us a dream-like sequence  in which Owen describes an encounter involving two soldiers who had been on opposing sides in a battle, one of whom had killed the other in combat – “I am the enemy you killed, my friend”…. exchanging as well “the undone years, the hopelessness” along with “the pity of war, the pity war distilled”, and bringing to bear the desire to cleanse the human spirit with water from the “sweet wells we sunk too deep for war”. And it was difficult to remain dry-eyed throughout the music of reconciliation, with the two men sharing the line “Let us sleep now” in a sequence magically wrought all about its perimeters by the choir’s intoning the Latin hymn In Paradisum – “Into Paradise may the Angels lead thee”, but with Britten again disturbing the conventional idea of “eternal rest” of such commemorations by using the tri-tone interval for the Children’s Chorus’s final utterances of “Requiem Aeternam….” as a kind of “warning” for mankind.

Then came a stunningly evocative ambient withdrawal from the work’s world, achieved by the slowest of diminuendi throughout the work’s final chord sequence, allowing the performers and their sounds to magically and memorably dissolve into the darkness. It was only then I found myself wishing that the musicians had brought the work’s beginning out of the same darkness at its beginning – a work that everybody had so brilliantly recreated for our on behalf of the genius who wrote this music…..

Colour and excitement aplenty – Monique Lapins and Jian Liu play Bartók for Rattle

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Rattle Records presents:
BARTÓK – Violin Sonata No. 1 Sz 75
Violin Sonata No. 2 Sz 76
Rumanian Folk-Dances Sz 56 (arr. for Violin and Piano by Zoltan Székely)
Sonatina for Piano Sz 55 (arr. For Violin and Piano by Andre Gertler)

Monique Lapins (violin) and Jian Liu (piano)
Producer: Kenneth Young
Recorded: Graham Kennedy
Mastering: Steve Garden
Cover and Booklet Art: Night Music II by  Ernestine Tahedl

RATTLE RAT-D130 2022

Both violinist Monique Lapins and pianist Jian Liu are well-known to me via various recent live concert experiences, though I’ve yet to see them perform together (my Middle C colleague Steven Sedley reviewed a St.Andrew’s Lunchtime Concert at which the pair performed Béla Bartók’s First Violin Sonata – https://middle-c.org/2021/05/monique-lapins-and-jian-liu-give-consummate-performances-of-bartok-and-debussy-at-st-andrews-of/). Rattle’s new CD devoted to Bartók’s works for violin and piano certainly whets the appetite for more from the pair! Backed by stunning visual presentation (the fantastical Bartók-inspired work of Austrian-born Canadian domiciled artist Ernestine Tahedl adorns the front cover and the booklet pages), everything about the production is so  attractively wrought and sonorously captured one can’t help but be drawn willingly into the music’s colour and excitement.

Bartók’s extensive researches in to and collecting of Hungarian folksongs strongly permeate both of the major works on this recording,  given that, at the time of their writing (1921-22) he was also expressing  interest in the Second Viennese School’s modernity and atonal explorations, along with the works of Debussy and Stravinsky. The folk-song element is evident at the opening of the First Sonata when the impressionistic whirlwind of piano tones introduces a folkish lament-like song from the violin.  An ebb and flow of exchange between the instruments dominates the first section, now forceful now rhapsodical, with the piano often set a-dancing by the violin’s roller-coasterings! The “great calm” that settles over the music’s central sequences is beautifully caught by the recording, the piano’s crystalline patternings augmented by the violin’s delicately-sculptured lines – all so haunting and magical, and gorgeously realised by both Lapins and Liu. Though interspersed with further trenchant violin lines and monumental piano tones, a sense of contained calm (with echoes of a “Dies Irae” chant!)  returns at the movement’s end.

The slow movement is begun raptly and wistfully by Lapins’ violin,  a gorgeous outpouring of tone, eventually joined by Liu’s piano – the plaintive and heartfelt exchanges bring to my mind the Debussy of Canope,, from his Book II Preludes,  the sounds suggestive of a deep yearning, so tender and inward. Distant gongs which sound mid-movement then build in weight and focus,  the rhapsodic mood gradually made excitable as the violin pours forth folk-like declamations, though the piano grounds the music once more, planting footprints in the music’s snow – we hear some ethereal high violin notes and responses of limpid beauty from the piano, before the enchantment of it all regretfully draws to an end.

The third movement is a foil to all of this, something of a madcap house,  not unlike the contrast between the second and third movements of Ravel’s G Major Piano Concerto – though Bartók’s differing moods in his finale are even more quixotic than Ravel’s! Wild, combatative chords from the piano issue a call to arms, a challenge taken up by the violin, its wild dance hotly pursued by the piano (lovely smoky, pesante-like tones from Lapins’ violin) resulting in a right old set-to between the instruments – extraordinary declamations, each blaming the other for the ruckus! – the instruments plunge into the “friss” again and again, but come to grief each time with different issues, one of them marked by almost grotesquely clumsy figurations from the piano, to which the violin cocquettishly responds, and another a sudden salon-like gesture of genteel insouciance – but both are whirled away once again by almost (at this stage) “silent-movie-galloping” sequences, with Lapins and Liu both on fire, the piano dancing and the violin rocketing up and down! – when, perhaps at the brink of exhaustion’s point,  a couple of mutually wrought, no-nonsense gestures conclude the mayhem!

The composer described the violin parts of both his two Violin Sonatas in a 1924 letter as “extraordinarily difficult…..it is only a violinist of the top class who has any chance of learning them” – though violinists “of the top class” may proliferate today, the difficulties of this music remain formidable, both technically and interpretatively. The Second Sonata has two movements, replicating the traditional “verbunkos” (translated as a “recruiting dance”), a sequence featuring a slow lassu introduction and a concluding friss. Lapins and Liu launch the work with expressive, long-breathed gestures right from the beginning, the opening folkish phrases beautifully sung by the violin and resonated by the piano, creating atmospheric and gorgeously-modulated sequences burgeoning with intent.  They “grow” the composer’s slow-motion intensities patiently, the playing by turns suggestive and full-throated, keeping the music’s exploratory musings and the folk-like figurations poised and expectant throughout as the movement comes to its tremulous conclusion.

As for the second movement, Lapins and Liu keep the listener virtually on the edge of the seat throughout the music’s brilliantly kaleidoscopic energies, beginning with portentous piano rhythms, brash string pizzicatos and impetuous running sequences, the exchanges growing wilder as the music develops. Along with an improvisatory kind of feeling – the music lurches from quiet and brooding to raucous and energetic almost without warning throughout – there’s a strong sense of striving towards somewhere the music might call home, expressed most convincingly in the folk-like themes that recurs on each instrument by turns throughout, a lyrical fragment of which eventually calls the work to rest. But along the way one relishes some familiar Bartókian gestures, such as the “tipsy” sequences mid-movement, during which one can almost smell the wine on the music’s breath; and the suggestions of “night-music” in places, though more hinted at than actual in such capricious music as here.  Elsewhere, the quicksilver volatility of these players’  exchanges and responses to the music are remarkable, from the brooding expectancies to the more trenchant, full-on engagements, the music seeming to reach out and summon the questing, exhausted spirit home at the end….

I enjoyed comparing Lapins’ and Lui’s playing with that on another New-Zealand-made recording of the same sonata, that by violinist Justine Cormack and pianist Sarah Watkins on the Atoll label (ACD 101) coupled with sonatas by Debussy and Janacek. I thought Cormack and Watkins found more light and shade in the work’s various sequences, their lighter touch enabling a quicker tempo for the first movement and lighter textures in places in the second. Having said that one couldn’t possibly nominate a preference for one performance or the other based on anything except raw feeling – suffice to say that I felt the Bartók performance by each duo was engagingly of a piece in style and intent with their presentations of the other music on their recordings.

It was a good idea for Lapins and Liu to present each Sonata with a kind of “makeweight” top provide some “breathing-space” for the listener in the wake of such intensities! – thus after the First Sonata we hear a set of “Romanian Folk Dances” which first appeared as a piano solo, but has since been arranged for various instruments as well as in an orchestral version by the composer – Bartók’s friend Zoltan Szekely made this particular arrangement. I first heard this music in its solo piano form on my very first Bartók LP featuring the pianist Gyorgy Sandor – on the sleeve of that disc the LP’s contents were described as  “A timid soul’s approach to….” (in small lettering) “BARTÓK” (in big print)! With works like the “Out of Doors” Suite and the ”Allegro Barbaro” on the disc, it was all an exhilarating experience,  here replicated for me by Monique Lapins and Jian Liu but without a trace of timidity!

After the Second Sonata the disc concludes with another arrangement, that of a Sonatina for solo piano SZ55, originally titled Sonatina on Romanian Folk Tunes when written in 1915 by Bartok, and subsequently reset for violin and piano by violinist Andre Gertler, who frequently performed with the composer. Lapins and Liu give these pieces all the fun and directness one imagines first attracted the composer to the “original” melodies. I felt sorry for the poor captive bear, in the middle “Medvetanc” (Bear Dance), but the concluding Allegro vivace restored my jolly listening mood. Throughout, as with the rest of the disc, I was lost in admiration at the players’ ability to adapt their style to the material, these dance-like items for me as warmly spontaneous and fun-loving to listen to as the performances of the two Sonatas were gripping and profound.