Tag: violin

Triumphant farewell to Inkinen with a neglected Sibelius masterpiece and standing ovation

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

NZSO Inkinen Festival

Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D Op.61

Sibelius: Lemminkäinen Suite, Op.22

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen, with Karen Gomyo (violin)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday, 13 June 2015, 7.30pm

In an interesting pre-concert talk, attended by a large number of people, David Gilling (co-sub-principal second violin in the NZSO) talked about the unusual introduction to Beethoven’s great violin concerto, particularly focusing on the opening motif from the timpani, and how the rhythm is taken up by the other instruments throughout the work’s first movement.   Incidentally, Gilling gave the lie to the story in the programme notes that the performer of the premiere, Clement, interrupted the work to play his own sonata, with the violin upside down!

The soloist was originally to have been Hilary Hahn, who played with the orchestra throughout its 2010 European tour, but she is now pregnant.  The replacement, Karen Gomyo, plays a Stradivarius violin, and would play cadenzas by the famous violinist of former times, Russian-American Nathan Milstein.

The Michael Fowler Centre was well-filled, including the choir stalls – in fact, I could see very few empty seats.

After the timpani notes opened the concerto, and the delicious woodwind that followed, the answer came in a lovely mellow melody when the strings entered. Inkinen kept things moving forward, and made the listener aware of the structure of the work.

Subsequently, Karen Gomyo’s violin entered, with the beautiful rising phrase that simply grew the musical expression, rather than declaring ‘Here am I!’  She made considerable contrasts in tone and dynamics.  However, after a while I found these contrasts a little too much. Nevertheless, there was beauty of tone and great feeling for the music. The first movement cadenza was very fine – and very demanding.

Despite the smaller orchestra for this work than for the Sibelius, one could feel its power, though sometimes the solo did not stand out sufficiently from it.  However, this is partly a matter of taste; after the concert I heard approval in the words ‘intimate’ and ‘integrated’ from audience members.  Having recently heard a description of a Stradivarius compared with a more modern violin, I wonder if a large hall is not the most congenial venue for such an instrument.

The wonderfully peaceful opening of the second movement brought a rich sound from the orchestra.  Again, I found the soloist’s style rather too mannered for my taste, but I admired greatly her bowing and phrasing.  With the lilting solo was magical pizzicato from the orchestra.  The short cadenza seemed to have less to do with Beethoven than did that in the first movement.

The third movement followed without a break, straight into the jolly dance-like theme of the rondo.  It gave much opportunity for interplay between soloist and orchestra, and a chance for warm and sonorous tones on both sides.  It is less profound than the earlier movements, and featured another dazzling cadenza.  Notable was the distinctive bassoon sound.  The ending was not quite together, but overall, this was an enjoyable performance.

We entered a completely different sound-world with the Sibelius suite – an appropriate work for Pietari Inkinen’s last Wellington concert as Music Director.  He now becomes Honorary Conductor, while his energies will be expended on appointments in Japan and Europe. Since he is also a violinist, a violin concerto was also an apt programme choice.

There were mysteries with the Sibelius – not only from the mysterious atmosphere created through much of it, but also the fact that what was marked in the programme notes as the second movement, the well-known Swan of Tuonela, frequently played as a stand-alone piece, was played third, and what was marked as the third movement, Lemminkäinen in Tuonela followed the first movement.

The opening featured brass, followed by remote-sounding strings and woodwind in this  large orchestra.  Strong cellos were a characteristic, there was a sprightly woodwind dance, and brass had plenty of interesting contributions.  Energy built up, and after a passage for the front desk players, there was a fluttering from all the strings, but nevertheless strong rhythmic drive.  Mysterious sounds from drums and double basses boded evil; the remaining strings put much vigour into their playing, before quietude descended to close the movement, Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari.

The second movement, as noted above, was not as in the programme.  Lemminkäinen in Tuonela began with low tremolo from the cellos, then low woodwind was added, followed by the other strings.  This gave a very spooky effect.  Suddenly, the music burst into a typical Sibelius massive cadence, repeated. Beautiful woodwind solos were part of a continual air of mystery – or is it ‘northern-ness’?  A huge crescendo with everyone playing did not dispel the tragic mood; a cello solo against pizzicato ended the movement.

The Swan of Tuonela is a solemn, even sad piece, with solo cello perhaps epitomising the hero, Lemminkäinen.  Most wonderful, though, were the extended passages depicting the swan, painted in gorgeous tones by the cor anglais (Michael Austin).  Lush sounds from the violas came into prominence, before harp and brass added to the other-worldly atmosphere; the phrases were beautifully spun.

The final movement, Lemminkäinen’s Return, found the mood cheerful, even dance-like, after a busy opening.  Jubilation broke out, before a triumphant ending as the hero returns to life, thanks to his mother’s stitchery, after being killed earlier.

The triumph was echoed by Inkinen afterwards, as he stood the soloists and section leaders.  A bouquet and colourful streamers from the side blocks of seating upstairs, a standing ovation and cheers marked the end of his eight years as Music Director of the orchestra.

Coughing interrupted some of the quiet moments of the Suite.  One may not be able to prevent the impulse to cough, but it should be possible to prevent broadcasting it to over 2000 other people.

Another complaint – time was, in the recent past, when we were allowed to read the programme through the concert.  But now the lighting is too dim, and the typeface is unhelpful too.

 

 

The strings of the School of Music take turn with wonderful Bach programme for St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand School of Music Showcase Week at St Andrew’s

The string players in an all-Bach programme

Violin sonata No 1 in G minor, BWV 1001 – Adagio played by Katie-Lee Taylor
           Fugue played by Matt Cook
Cello suite No 2 in D minor, BWV 1008 – Prelude played by Olivia Wilding
Violin Partita No 3 in E, BWV 1006, Loure and Gavotte en rondeau – played by Grace Stainthorpe
Brandenburg Concerto No 3 in G, BWV 1048 played by the above students plus 15 others

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Thursday 28 May, 12:15 pm

This was the last of the four concerts devoted to student players from the university School of Music.  Perhaps in future years we’ll also have concerts from woodwind and brass players, and singers, even organists and harpsichordists and percussionists; but these four have shown that it’s possible to attract good audiences more than just once a week. The limitation is no doubt the level of energy that the unpaid concert manager Marjan van Waardenberg can call up, and the availability of the church. (And it also should be pointed out that all musicians perform unpaid at the lunchtime concerts).

The first half hour of the concert was taken up with individual violinists and a cellist playing movements from Bach’s unaccompanied suites and sonatas.

Violinists Katie-Lee Taylor and Matt Cook began playing, in turn, the first two movements, Adagio
and Fugue, from the first violin sonata, in G minor. It was an admirable performance of the Adagio, with all the signs of careful tutorial guidance and music intuition on Taylor’s part, scrupulous attention to dynamics and the shaping or ornaments. There was interesting variety of tone and an organic feeling of life as if the music was breathing.

While she had played with the score before her, Matt Cook played from memory and paid a small price for that in the middle of what is certainly a difficult and complex fugue; so his courage and demeanour were to be admired in his recovery and persistence, though the experience somewhat affected the freedom and elasticity of his playing for a little while. The audience applauded him warmly.

Another minor key piece was the choice of Olivia Wilding – the Prelude from the second cello suite in D minor. Her handling of the bow created a lovely tone, mellow (at one point I craned my head to see whether she had put a mute on) and varied in dynamics, and she allowed herself attractive freedom in her tempi. She used a score.

Grace Stainthorpe ended the solo section of the concert with the Loure and the most popular movement from the violin sonatas and suites, the Gavotte en rondeau, from the third partita. Bravely, she dispensed with the score, with only a minor glitch during the Gavotte. Her playing was careful, and like the others, showed fastidious attention to its phrasing and rhythms, though I thought she might have exploited her opportunities for emphatic bowing occasionally.

There was a lot of stage rearrangement to accommodate the full ensemble – the five cellos (though six were named in the programme) arrayed at the front while violins flanked the violas in the middle of the back row.

While a couple of programmes in this series taxed their audiences (and themselves) by playing unfamiliar music, the strings made no apologies for playing great music, most of which was pretty well known by the average lunchtime-concert-goer. Few works are more loved than the Brandenburg concertos, and No 3 might well be at the top. The music might have almost played itself, but there was no missing the special affection that the players managed to convey in their buoyant, spirited performance. Professor Donald Maurice conducted and he introduced the concerto briefly to draw attention to the Calvinist environment of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen where Bach composed this and much other instrumental music. There was no choir or organ, but a musical Prince who valued Bach who wrote little other than instrumental music for the court.

Maurice noted that the non-existent middle, slow movement was to be supplied by a cadenza played by the orchestra leader, Laura Barton and it was indeed a chance for another excellent solo presentation, involving a splendid crescendo.  Much of the liveliness and warmth of the performance was inspired by Maurice’s expansive, richly expressive conducting, with plenty of cues; whether it did or not for the players, it contributed a fine visual element that the audience enjoyed, and applauded enthusiastically.

 

Spectacular NZSO concert with violinist Janine Jansen in the Tchaikovsky

Posted on by admin

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Daniel Blendulf with Janine Jansen (violin)

Liadov: The Enchanted Lake
Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto in D Major
Prokofiev: Symphony No.5 in B flat Major

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 28 March 7:30 pm

Liadov’s atmospheric painting The Enchanted Lake was a great choice to open an evening of wonderful music, rich with the delights of that fantastic orchestration which marks the pens of the Russian greats in an abundance matched by no other race. There was the opening mystery of the dark, rumbling bass entry, the dreamy lilting melodies that floated in and out from the woodwind, and the clear crystal notes from the harp falling like raindrops into the shimmering, surging waters of the strings. The orchestra crafted this work with wonderful artistry, culminating in dying phrases that simply evaporated into the hanging silence of the auditorium.  Superb.

Janine Jansen is an on-stage tour de force in every way. She proved a spectacular “soloist” but not because she attempted to grab the limelight; rather she shaped the score in a completely mutual conversation with the orchestral players, and whenever her part paused briefly you felt she couldn’t wait for the chance to engage again in the privilege of making music together. She captured the contrasting moods of the opening Allegro moderato to telling effect, and delivered the spiccato episode with masterful grace and clarity. You could have heard a pin drop in the central cadenza. The following flute re-entry was very special, as was the later bassoon countermelody to the solo line. She pulled off the coda at breakneck speed yet somehow with complete clarity – clearly she was excited to be playing this work, and she conveyed her delight without reservation.

The central Canzonetta: Andante opens with a wistful pianissimo phrase which comes and goes throughout, and Jansen presented each appearance with the freshness of first discovery. She and the orchestra wove in this movement a tapestry of wonderful melodic exchanges and a mood of gracious calm. This made all the more dramatic the catapult of sound that launches the Allegro vivacissimo finale. It was taken at incredible speed, yet again with total clarity in each rondo appearance. The stamp of Cossack boots thundered out, interspersed with beautifully languid playing from the woodwind in the contrasting melodic episodes. The whole concerto was performed with consummate musicianship, and the runaway freight train of the closing coda brought a stampede of audience appreciation – amply rewarded with an exquisite encore, an arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir D’un Lieu Cher.

What could possibly follow this riveting Tchaikovsky? A Prokofiev reading that was positively mind blowing.  Blendulf made the most of the huge percussion, brass and string bodies right from the sweeping grandeur of the opening to the last dramatic chords of the finale. The massive demands of this score were embraced by the players with total commitment, huge passion, and the exemplary musicianship and technical mastery that mark all their work. Yet somehow they found an even higher notch than usual in this Prokofiev, emerging at the end with a clear glow of fulfilment on faces that should, by rights, have been etched with exhaustion after such a programme.

Daniel Blendulf’s conducting style was a pleasure to observe. His was an entirely unassuming manner, directing the orchestra with complete economy of gesture. He obviously recognised that no more was needed, given the wonderful resources and musicianship of the NZSO players, and their exemplary ensemble skills. They were the stars of the evening no less than the spectacular soloist, and he rightly called each section to its feet, giving the audience ample opportunity to express their appreciation for an amazing night’s music making. Bravo!

 

Violin and harp in enchanting lunchtime concert at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Tabea Squire (violin) and Ingrid Bauer (harp)

Massenet: Meditation from Thaïs
Saint-Saëns: Fantaisie for violin and harp, Op 124
Mozart/Dittersdorf/Eberl/Thomas: Air with Variations and Rondo Pastorale for solo harp
Pärt: Spiegel im Spiegel

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 25 February, 12:15 pm

The harp seems to be asserting itself at present. Though it’s been a pretty standard orchestral instrument since the early 19th century, and a much loved solo instrument both in its many ethnic forms as well as in its larger, more sophisticated character, there doesn’t seem to be a very large body of chamber music involving it.

This recital may well have been inspired in part by the presence of Helen Webby’s harp at the Adam Chamber Music festival in Nelson in January-February. For both the Massenet and the Saint-Saëns were heard there. The transcription for the harp of the Meditation from Thaïs was played in Nelson by Helene Pohl, leader of the New Zealand String Quartet, and Helen Webby. It is particularly beguiling, and while there might have been a difference in the level of experience and sophistication between the performances in Nelson and here, Tabea brought a big romantic sound to her playing, while the harp seemed to be a perfect medium for such a quintessentially emotional piece, a more natural partner than a piano perhaps.

Saint-Saëns was drawn to the harp, I suspect by the same factors that drew both Debussy and Ravel to it, respectively, in the Danse sacrée et danse profane and the Introduction et Allegro. This Fantaisie was played in Nelson by the first violinist of the Ying Quartet, Ayano Ninomiya and Helen Webby; it is hardly in the same class as the pieces by his younger colleagues, yet there is enchantment and variety in its four fairly distinct sections; it lies beautifully for the two instruments and both explored its interesting emotional states with sensitivity.

The next piece was a real curiosity, put together by 19th century Welsh harpist, John Thomas, from pieces by Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Anton Eberl and most importantly, Mozart. The process was clearly one that would be abhorred by today’s scholars and many musicians schooled in doctrines of historical authenticity, but if the test is simply the agreeableness of the result, condemnation would be hard to justify.

In any case, the first part, the Air with Variations, offered the harpist scope for a variety of diverting techniques, strongly contrasting dynamics and what seemed to be a muted passage. The second part, the Rondo Pastorale, was the last movement of Mozart’s great Divertimento in E flat for string trio, K 563: one of his most beautiful compositions. Here was pure enchantment; it’s hard to imagine that Mozart would have disapproved of such an enchanting adaptation , so beautifully played.

The last item was one which, like a lot of Arvo Pärt’s music, seems to invite adaptation for different instruments: his Spiegel im Spiegel, which may be the equal of his Fratres in popularity and affection. As with her other introductions, Tabea Squire spoke with careful precision and sensitivity about its basically simple character, a study in triads in various inversions and keys, at each stage of which the home key seemed to be imminent but elusive. The violin carried long sustained notes while the harp suggested that here was the sound that Pärt had really been searching for.

 

Inspiring lunchtime performances from NZSM string players

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Lunchtime Concert Series

Undergraduate Strings of the NZSM

Caitlin Morris (cello), Laura Barton and Julian Baker (violins), accompanied by Rafaella Garlick-Grice (piano)

Music by SAINT-SAENS, JS BACH, MENDELSSOHN, SHOSTAKOVICH

St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace

Wednesday, 22 October 2014

It was nothing short of astonishing to hear the level of musicianship and accomplishment on their instruments that these students demonstrated. As an undergraduate concert it was quite staggering.

The concert opened with the cello of Caitlin Morris, playing a section from Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No.1, Op.33. Hers was dynamic and exciting playing. The tempo was quite fast, despite the ‘non troppo’marking of the opening. It was a little too fast, in my view, to bring to life some of the quick passages and figures in both the cello and the orchestral parts (the latter on piano, of course). Nevertheless, melodies were brought out well, and Caitlin’s playing produced excellent tone and subtlety of phrasing and shading of dynamics.

The double-stopping was executed seamlessly, while the accompaniment was at all times clear but never overwhelmed the soloist. The lyrical passages were very fine on both instruments, and Rafaella rendered the orchestra superbly – perhaps even Saint-Saëns would not have missed the full band if he had heard this excellent performance. The players were rewarded with warm applause from the audience.

Laura Barton played next – three items, all from memory. Bach’s unaccompanied Preludio in E from Partita no.3 BWV 1006 was first. This popular solo piece has its difficulties; there were some intonation inaccuracies, particularly at the beginning. Things improved as the piece proceeded. There was great clarity in Laura’s playing (and in her speaking voice introducing her programme, too); this was a very competent performance.

Saint-Saëns returned, in completely different mood, in the form of the well-known Havanaise, Op.83. It was played with panache and expressiveness. Technically demanding, it produced a few slight fluffs in pitch, but it was played with flair and musicality. Again, the sensitive accompaniment provided all the notes and moods that the orchestral score would have. As well as songs and dances, the music seems to have an element of bravado about it.

The third movement of Mendelssohn’s well-known Violin Concerto in E minor Op.64 followed. It was played with skill and flourish. While the Latin word ‘dexter’ means the right hand, Laura’s left hand was in no way sinister, and in fact was extremely dextrous. I would have liked a little more articulation and phrasing from both instruments at times. However, Laura’s tone was for the most part warm and radiant.

After this considerable contribution, came Julian Baker. He played from Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto no.1, Op.99, the third and fourth movements: Passacaglia: andante, and Burlesque: allegro con brio. The complex and demanding music was played from memory. This violinist makes a lovely sound. The contemplative, sombre mood at the commencement of the Passacaglia was a great contrast to the Mendelssohn we had just heard.The playing was strong and incisive when required; light and shade and a variety of tonal colours contributed to the satisfying interpretation.

Julian was secure technically, including in the extended sequences of double-stopping. The cadenza at the end of the Passacaglia and the solo first two-thirds of the Burlesque were played with consummate skill. Amazing glissando flourishes and the speed that became not merely allegro con brio but furioso seemed to hold no fears for the violinist.

This was an absolute tour de force, and the audience showed their appreciation by demanding that Julian Baker come on for a second bow.

Searing contribution from the WYO to “Recovering Forbidden Voices”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra presents:
SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No.8 in C MInor Op.65
BEETHOVEN – Two Romances for Violin and Orchestra Opp. 40 and 50

Malavika Gopal (violin)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Wellington Youth Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

Monday, 25th August, 2014

This concert was associated with a series of performances, presentations and discussions entitled “Recovering Forbidden Voices” –  programmes organised by Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music and the History and German Programmes of Victoria University of Wellington, and held over the previous few days (22nd-25th August) in the capital. The “Forbidden Voices” referred to music and composers who fell foul of the Nazis in Europe, resulting in many works, particularly by Jewish composers, being suppressed or banned over the period associated with the rise of Hitler to power in Germany.

The music of Shostakovich came under fire in his native Russia at the same time for different reasons – the composer had, during the 1930s, famously fallen foul of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin with his opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” but had rehabilitated himself somewhat as a “people’s artist” with his Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, the latter work celebrating the siege of Leningrad and the heroism of the Russian people. What the composer privately thought of the war, its effects upon his homeland and the events surrounding the conflict was more realistically delineated in his Eighth Symphony.

The work wasn’t received with any great acclaim, reviews being tinged with disappointment and bewilderment at the music’s bleak, pessimistic tone – “significantly tougher and more astringent that either the Fifth or Seventh…..unlikely to prove popular…” commented a colleague of the composer. These were prophetic words, as in 1948 the infamous “Zhdanov decree” issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party attacked the composer and his work, accusing him of “formalist perversions”. As a result, the Eighth Symphony wasn’t performed again until 1956.

The Russian view of the symphony that has endured was expressed a number of years later later by the great pianist and associate of the composer, Sviatoslav Richter, who called it “the decisive  work in Shostakovich’s output”. While perhaps not as popular in the West as the aforementioned Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, the C Minor work’s greatness and incredible  depth of tragic expression has come to be acknowledged everywhere.

While the symphony’s performance readily associated the occasion with the “Recovering Forbidden Voices” theme, the concert’s first half presented a dramatic and perhaps a welcome contrast in anticipation to Shostakovich’s conflict-torn work. This was supplied by both of Beethoven’s Romances for violin and orchestra, performed by soloist Malavika Gopal, currently a player with the NZSO, and back home in Wellington after a period of study and performing experience overseas (including a stint with the famed Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra).  However, before the concert proper began we were properly welcomed by three speakers, firstly Professor Donald Maurice representing the School of Music, and then by the Mayor of Wellington, Celia Wade-Brown, and the Government Minister for the Arts, Chris Finlayson, all of whom talked about the “Forbidden Music” venture.

Once the music got under way, Malavika Gopal’s quality as a violinist was instantly apparent, the opening solo of the first of Beethoven’s Romances as sweet-toned as one could wish for, and the contrasting middle section properly gutsier and grainier, as befitted the music. Naturally all the attention seemed to be on her, except that if Hamish McKeich and the orchestra’s accompaniments had faltered in any way we would surely have noticed!

I have a slight preference for the less ritualistic, more rhapsodic No.2 of the pair of Romances, and Malavika Gopal didn’t disappoint with this one either, if anything sounding even sweeter-toned in the music’s freer, more soaring lines.Though reluctant to pass judgement to any great extent on her musicianship after such brief encounters with her playing, I would nevertheless be anxious to hear her tackle some more extended solo repertoire, which her return to take up a place with the NZSO “firsts” will hopefully enable her to do here in Wellington.

An interval decently distanced the two very different listening experiences for us, after which it was “all posts manned (sic)” for the Shostakovich. Though feeling hopeful as regarding the capabilities of these young players (thanks in part to my hearing a wonderful recent performance by the School of Music Orchestra of Vaughan Williams’ difficult “Pastoral” Symphony) I did have reservations regarding their abilities in sustaining Shostakovich’s vast and bleak vistas of pessimism and deep sorrow, punctuated by frighteningly intense outbursts of fear and anger. And I wondered how on earth this group of young players was going to be able to generate sufficient tones to fill the spaces of the Michael Fowler Centre. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.

Right from the beginning, the playing seemed galvanised by a kind of spirit akin to grim determination, Hamish McKeich getting the lower strings to dig furiously into the textures, and, together with the chilling entries of the winds and the brasses, catch the “edge” of the music. Each section of the orchestra seemed to “speak its name” and assert its character in full measure, the treble voices across the sound-spectrum by turns plaintive and shrill, the middle voices properly insistent, and the basses both brooding and massively weighty as required.

Though the upper strings occasionally had problems with their intonation when essaying those great contrapuntal passages, the players kept the intensities to the fore, keeping the argument strongly and inexorably ploughing forwards, the winds and brasses rising spectrally from growing disquiet mid-movement and brutalising both the themes and their interaction, with incredibly powerful onslaughts of sound, leaving the cor anglais and the clarinets to try and pick up the pieces. Despite the strings’ on-going struggle to hold those long mezzo-forte lines together, and the trumpet with its sudden declamatory phrase having a bad moment (probably after the player had delivered the passage  perfectly at rehearsal umpteen times!) the music’s purposeful strength was tenaciously held to the movement’s end.

What amazing, garish, full-on sonorities were hurled at us over the course of the two following scherzo-like movements! Such tremendous, playing-right-out work from the winds – and to such ghastly, ghoulish effect – in the first scherzo, Allegretto, piccolo, bassoon, clarinet, and then piccolo again, were all superb! Here, the strings occasionally had that nightmarish “wartime air-siren” aspect, which galvanised the brass and percussion into brutal sequences, harrowing ostinati torn by savage climaxes – however, Hamish McKeich took care to preserve the music’s shape with his players, maintaining a sense of ebb-and-flow, which held things in check, albeit temporarily, the contra-bassoon having a few droll soundings of its own, helping to ease the tensions.

All, it seemed, to little avail, as the savage, relentless viola ostinati which began the third movement allegro lashed out and flailed away at our sensibilities. My favourite part of the symphony (sensation-monger that I secretly am), I’ve always found the Russian recorded performances of this movement in particular streets ahead of those made in the West, with conductors like Kondrashin and Mravinsky requiring of their players such raw, unbridled attack and relentless, unequivocal savagery when addressing the music’s machine-like rhythms. I had been told by McKeich that he had studied the work with Valery Gergiev in Europe, and that he was fully aware of the special “Russian” performance characteristics, which for him informed the playing of that repertoire. In this movement, as with the rest of the symphony, his direction was as good as his word.

It actually sounded for much of the time as if a Russian orchestra was playing, so determined and up-front were the efforts of the players to give what their conductor was asking for – and for me it put some of the professionally-polished, but much-too-genteel efforts of some crack ensembles I’d heard on record in the shade. Full marks in particular to the trumpeter and side-drummer in the crude, ironic trio section – the strings couldn’t quite match the “bite” of the solo instruments here, but they made up for it when the opening returned. And the brass and percussion at the climax overwhelmed, as they ought to have done, the timpanist lashing out mercilessly, underlining the brutality of the composer’s nightmarish depiction.

So it was we were plunged into the great Passacaglia of the fourth movement, brass announcing the crack of doom and the string lines utterly despairing, the winds adding to the desolation with their helplessly-lost utterances, piccolo, bass clarinet and tongued flutes expressing the “fumbling in the despairing dark” referred to by one commentator – here it all sounded exactly like that, the impulses and gestures well-and-truly “gutted”.

Which is why the transition to the finale effected by the bassoon solo was such balm to the senses, even though the resolutions which followed remained properly haunted and bruised to the end. When questioned, the composer told a friend that the C Major transition to the concluding Allegretto had cost him “so much blood”, but that the end of the symphony was optimistic, despite the reiterate of moments of anxiety – though nothing further from the tub-thumping of the Fifth Symphony’s finale could be imagined than this work’s closing pages.

What these young musicians and their conductor gave us was a deeply-felt, incredibly-committed and stunningly-delivered emotional journey, thrills and spills all part of the human experience. It deserves to be remembered as a landmark performance by any standards, but certainly as a glowing achievement on the part of Hamish McKeich and the orchestra, and a cause for warm appreciation on the part of those fortunate enough to be present.

 

 

Forbidden Voices liberated in NZSM conference on music and musicians banned by Nazis

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand School of Music: Recovering Forbidden Voices:
 Responding to the Suppression of Music in World War Two

Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday)
Schreker: Sonata for violin and piano in F major
Zemlinsky: Serenade in A major
Korngold: Violin Sonata in G major, Op 6

Duo Richter-Carrigan (Goetz Richter – violin and Jeanell Carrigan – piano)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Saturday 23 August, 8:15 pm

This evening’s concert was session number 11 in the weekend’s conference of talks, concerts and panel discussions dealing with the suppression of music and other arts during the second world war, primarily through the Nazi suppression of what they considered ‘Entartete Kunst’ – ‘Degenerate Art’. It’s been a mixture of music and the spoken word, the latter examining aspects of the hideous impact of Nazism on art and artists wherever the regime gained control. Jews were by no means the only artists, musicians, writers to suffer, and music by Shostakovich and Messiaen have been heard in the concerts.

To this point there had been a performance of Hans Krasa’s children’s opera Brundibar (reviewed by us), concerts of chamber music by Schulhoff, Weinberg, Ullmann, Gidon Klein, Schoenberg and Shostakovich, as well as contemporary composers whose lives were deeply affected by fascism and communism; lectures and discussions about the repression of Jews and other minorities, and musicians in exile like Martinu; a celebration of the work of conductor/composer Georg Tintner, who sought refuge in New Zealand from WW2, but was largely ignored. He began to make musical headway only after going to Australia in 1954.

One of the ironical effects of the Nazi treatment that made so much art, music and literature disappear, was the West’s pursuit of the avant-garde in many of those fields since the end of World War 2, resulting in those composers remaining ignored for several decades, only now being revived, as here.

For Middle C the conference has presented a bit of a problem as various things have prevented each of us from paying the kind of attention that we should have liked, and which it deserved.

This lecture-recital began with a brief talk by the violinist Goetz Richter expanding on the theme music and the aesthetic of revenge – the revenge being that of Hitler against the bourgeois society that had rejected him as a creative artist (according to Richter). Unfortunately I was not sitting close enough to hear it well and Richter delivered it at a pace that was not well adapted to a thesis that was dense with complex propositions and argument.

Goetz Richter is a violinist, trained at the Hochschule für Musik, Munich. with a PhD in philosophy from Sydney University, a past associate concertmaster in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, now an
associate professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Jeanell Carrigan is senior lecturer in ensemble studies at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, having obtained her musical education in universities in Queensland, Sydney, Wollongong and studies in Europe with various piano pedagogues including Alfons Kontarsky and Karl Engel.

The duo has been playing together for 30 years.

The programme included works by three German or Austrian Jewish composers born with 25 years at the end of the 19th century. Each was written when the composer was young: the Schreker aged 20, the Zemlinsky at 24 and the Korngold at the age of 15. It was the Korngold piece that was the longest and most ambitious, and may have proved the most challenging in execution.

The three movements of Schreker’s piece are: Allegro Moderato, Andante con Moto, Presto. While his sonata bore the marked influence of Brahms, and sounded the most conventional of the three, given the time of its composition, after major chamber music by Debussy for example, Korngold’s sonata of only 14 years later was much more complex technically. Though, unlike the music that Schoenberg was writing by then, it was melodically still accessible; however, it does not sound as imposing or perhaps as promising as does Strauss’s violin sonata of ten years earlier.

Schreker’s second movement was quietly meditative, breathing calmly with a performance that was warm and burnished, yet quietly adventurous harmonies peep through. There may well have been hints of the later Schreker of the operas such as Der ferner Klang, Die Gezeichneten, Der Schatzgräber – which I’ve just missed during visits to Germany over the past decade as they have been unearthed, given interesting productions and been widely acclaimed.

The Zemlinsky piece of 1895 was a Serenade (or suite) in five fairly short movements: Massig; Langsam, mit grossem ausdruck; Sehr schnell und leicht; Massiges Walzertempo; Schnell. It was a charming piece, distinctly lighter inspirit than a sonata, its rhythms and melodies more striking and engaging than some of Zemlinsky’s music of more serious intent. The main theme of the first movement was quite joyful, while the second, that I’d noted, in the absence of movement names in the programme, as a Largo, was lit by its variety of twists in melody and rhythm and quixotic mood changes, ending with a passage of heavy piano chords. The fourth movement, a waltz, risked becoming schmaltzy had it not been so well crafted, so inventive and playful – tossing the waltz rhythms back and forth between the two instruments. The last movement called the Schumann of the early piano pieces to mind.

Then the astonishing Korngold sonata. One of the characteristics that caught my ear was the melodic tendency of spirit-lifting upward grasps such as Scriabin performs, and from then on I tended to feel the presence of the Russians like Rachmaninov and Medtner. A long work, it presented the players with daunting technical challenges with mighty fistfuls of notes at the piano and passages of both dazzling virtuosity and quiet beauty from the violin – in the third movement especially. Though later in the Adagio it slipped into a commonplace, late romantic character.

The four movements are: (1) Ben moderato, ma con passion; (2) Scherzo: Allegro molto (con fuoco) and Trio – Moderato cantabile; (3) Adagio: Mit tiefer Empfindung; (4) Finale: Allegretto quasi andante (con grazia).

The last movement impressed me however as more rigorous in shape and structure, with quite striking melody: the piano soon announced a fugue which evolved interestingly between the two instruments. Perhaps as a result of the discipline imposed by the fugue, and the commanding and illuminating performance by Richter and Carrigan, it came to seem the most imaginative and substantial music in the whole sonata.

So this was one of those recitals that the timid or unadventurous would avoid, but which revealed three composers and three works by those composers that were revelatory and most important of all, thoroughly engaging and enjoyable at the hands of two musicians of the top rank. It served to show how little we know of the Australian music scene that such splendid players, who have been playing as a duo for three decades, were unknown to me and, I imagine, to almost all the audience (which was sadly small).

 

Inspiring concert by young students of Donald Armstrong

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Lunchtime concert at Old Saint Paul’s

Andrew Kelly – Brahms: Violin Sonata No 3 – First movement
Claudia Tarrant-Matthews – Elgar: Violin Sonata, Op 82 – First movement
Melanie Pinkney – Bruch: Violin Concerto No 1 – First movement.  François Schubert: The Bee
The Elegiac Trio (Andrew Kelly, Josiah Pinkney – cello, Claudia Tarrant-Matthews – piano) – Rachmaninov: Trio élégiaque No 1, in G minor
Catherine McKay was the accompanying pianist for the three violinists.

Old Saint Paul’s church

Tuesday 29 July, 12:15 pm

This concert, in the regular Tuesday lunchtime series in the former Pro-cathedral, was the last appearance of The Elegiac Trio before they took part in the final stage of the Schools Chamber Music Contest, held this year in Christchurch on the coming Saturday. It proved a remarkable exhibition of young talent by the three members of the Trio as well as the 12-year-old violinist Melanie Pinkney. All three violinists are tutored by NZSO associate concert-master Donald Armstrong.

Andrew Kelly established at once what could easily be felt as the prevailing quality in the violin playing: a warm and even tone that provided the foundation for playing that was rich in dynamic subtleties; in which the central section of the Brahms sonata was so magically hushed, demonstrating the composer’s essentially romantic and emotional character, though cast within broadly classical shapes. It prepared the audience thoroughly for his role in Rachmaninov’s elegiac trio at the end of the concert.

Claudia Matthews, 16, is a little younger than Andrew, but showed greater confidence, though their playing was invested with very similar degree of painstaking care and finesse in handling the bow. Elgar’s sonata is not nearly as familiar to most people as Brahms’s three sonatas: perhaps it does not have the same immediate melodic charm and memorable character; it’s one of those works whose beauties are slower to become embedded in the mind. Claudia’s confidence, firmness and accuracy matched her ease in navigating Elgar’s particular way with the notes, bending them secretly, creating an air of remoteness and gentle drifting, speaking of a maturity that seemed well beyond her years.

Melanie Pinkney is only 12, and I imagine I was not alone in feeling that her musical gift was in the class of the musical prodigy. The Bruch concerto in G minor is a truly grown-up masterpiece; it opens with Catherine McKay’s piano, capturing the orchestra’s character hypnotically, drawing the audience mysteriously towards the memorable first theme by the violin.

Melanie planted her notes with mature assurance, giving no suggestion that it presented any difficulties, since it all lay so comfortably under her fingers. She dealt with every musical colouring and decoration as if she was improvising, yet also with beguiling musical feeling that held you spellbound.

The fine Bruch structure was followed by a little Schubert piece that I haven’t heard for many years. Yes, it IS by Franz Schubert, but he goes under the French version, François – and that’s because it’s a fellow born in 1808 in Dresden, not Vienna, and died in 1878 and though he lived more than twice as long as the eponymous Viennese musician, he didn’t gain immortality. Though The Bee, from his Bagatelles, Op 13 (No 9), named in French, L’Abeille, published in the 1850s, survives.

In any case, it offered another display of a wonderfully fluid bowing arm that produced perfect tone.

After all this precocious virtuosity, one might be surprised at nothing, and that was the case with Rachmaninov’ first piano trio – he wrote two, both called Trio Élégiaque. This first is in G minor while the second in D minor, which is much longer, was inspired by the death of Tchaikovsky.

The tremolo opening of the piece seemed to emerge mysteriously from the dim timber recesses of the church, as the arrival of each instrument each seemed in turn to pick up the same emotion and tonal character of the previous one. They seemed to have paid scrupulous attention to each other’s sound; as the violin took up the theme from the cello it seemed simply to be an extension upward of the latter’s sound, not a different instrument.

Admittedly, this is a gorgeous acoustic for chamber music, but the raw material needs to be there for it to flourish. These musicians seemed not only to have worked together to integrate their sound but also to have judged successfully how their playing needed to be adapted to the space.

Much credit is due to the teacher of the violinists, Donald Armstrong, who oversaw the concert as a whole, but also to Andrew Joyce who coaches cellist Josiah Pinkney and Claudia Tarrant-Matthews’s piano teachers.

 

Winner’s tour for Nikki Chooi, 2013 Michael Hill Violin Competition: a finished artist

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Nikki Chooi – violin, Stephen de Pledge – piano and Ashley Brown – cello
(Chamber Music New Zealand and the Michael Hill International Violin Competition)

Mozart: Sonata for piano and violin in E flat, K 302
Smetana: Piano Trio in G minor, Op 15
Beethoven: Violin Sonata in E flat, Op 12 No 3
Jack Body: Caravan
Ravel: Tsigane

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 20 June, 7:30 pm

Canadian Nikki Chooi won the 2013 Michael Hill International Violin Competition and this concert was in the middle of a series of sixteen concerts and recitals around New Zealand, which forms part of the prize.

Oddly, the biographical notes in the programme only listed the competitions in which he’s had success, orchestras with which and places where he has played. It neglected to say where and when he was born and had his early music education. Almost all the concerto engagements mentioned, like those in New Zealand, seem to have followed competition successes, mainly in Canada and Belgium.

He was born in Victoria, British Columbia, to parents of Chinese descent, began to learn the violin at the Victoria Conservatory at the age of four, and at  fourteen entered the Mount Royal University in Calgary. In 2012, he graduated Bachelor of Music from the Curtis Institute of Music and was awarded the Milka Violin Artist Prize upon graduation. Though no website discloses his date of birth, he was under 28 when he won the Michael Hill Competition. He now studies at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, under Ida Kavafian and Donald Weilerstein.

Chooi played three programmes round the country, the common pieces throughout being Ravel’s Tsigane and the piece Jack Body was commissioned to compose for the competition itself.

Wellington’s allocation began with one of Mozart’s two-movement sonatas (in E flat, K 302) that he wrote for his ill-fated Paris tour of 1778.  The players eschewed any attempt at ‘historical practice’ since, after all, few halls are equipped with a fortepiano or harpsichord and one such as the Michael Fowler Centre would lose a lot of the sound. In truth, the character of Chooi’s playing seems to flourish with the music of the 19th century, with its warm, voluptuous tone and his genuine instinct for expressive ‘Romantic’ music.

These sonatas are titled with the piano first and the violin seeming to be the accompanying instrument. But there was no sign here of the violin being secondary, their contributions were equal and in accord. The two movements are not strongly contrasted, as the second, Andante grazioso, though different in rhythm and mood, was not markedly different in tempo.

Chooi’s violin was flawless, its tone opulent. It might have been a Beethoven of 20 years later.

After the interval, they did play Beethoven of 20 years later: the last of Beethoven’s first three violin sonatas, Op 12. It is common to approach Beethoven’s early, pre-1800 music as if it was more like Mozart and Haydn than his own later music. But the current broadcasts by RNZ Concert of Michael Houstoun’s piano ‘re-cycle’ series of all the piano sonatas last year has illuminated the gulf that exists between even his early works and his predecessors.

This E flat sonata was evidence. Again, the two musicians were in total sympathy in this, the most sophisticated of the set, with its combination of bravura and melodic inventiveness. In the slow movement, with charming quavers rippling from the piano, there was delightful ease and gentleness quite without self-attention. Can musicians who produce music of such evenness, tonal beauty and fluency really get to the heart of Beethoven? Well, yes, in this instance.

I became familiar with Smetana’s piano trio when it seemed to be quite frequently played, twenty years or so ago – perhaps in the days when Czech musicians used to visit more often; perhaps it was coincidence that led me to think it was somewhat central to the trio repertoire. But what prompted its inclusion here? It flows from the piano trio phase of the competition, in which cellist Ashley Brown was involved.

The Romantic character of the piece seemed to suit the players, especially the violinist for whom Smetana’s elegiac and tempestuous music offered broad scope. Opening with the violin, alone, in a strong, sombre announcement of the work’s prevailing character, even the first movement develops in various ways after cello and piano enter.

The Trio section of the second movement is divided into two distinct parts, continuing the quixotic mood changes that characterize the whole work, and which the players handled with aplomb. Often passionately rhetorical, occasionally calm, then agitated, this music offered the players scope for more passionate and grieving performance than they actually embraced, especially the violinist, whose commitment to producing beautiful sounds played down the pain in the music.

The last two pieces fall into the class of bravura, designed to tax the player(s) to the utmost. Caravan, for solo violin, might have seemed a little out of character for Jack Body for, in spite of its origin as a Persian song, there seemed little Persian in the style of the ‘arrangement’, as it was rather overwhelmed by the flamboyant music that proved ideal for its purpose. Chooi had its measure and delivered a spectacular performance. The same went for Ravel’s Tsigane in which the violin has a long, virtuosic, solo introduction before the piano entry. The piece is no mere aural spectacle however; it has musical substance and both musicians handled its pianissimo phrases and subtlety with considerable musical discretion.

Remembering David – a Farquhar tribute from the NZSM

Posted on by Peter Mechen

REMEMBERING DAVID
A concert of music by David Farquhar (1928-2007)

Presentation curated by Jack Body
Music performed by staff of
Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music
Jenny Wollerman (soprano) / Martin Riseley (violin)
Jane Curry (guitar) / Jian Liu (piano)

Works:
Sonatina for piano (1950) / Three PIeces for Violin and Piano (1967)
Eleven Pieces from Black, White and Coloured for piano (1999-2002)
Swan Songs for voice and guitar (1983)
Six Movements from Ring Round the Moon for violin and piano (1953 arr. 1992)

Adam Concert Room, Victoria University, Kelburn

Thursday 8th May

This extremely timely concert was organized by Jack Body as a tribute to one of his former teaching and composing colleagues, David Farquhar, on the seventh anniversary of the latter’s death.

Born in Cambridge in 1928, David Farquhar was one of a group of fledgling composers which included Larry Pruden, Edwin Carr, Dorothea Franchi and Robert Burch who studied composition with Douglas Lilburn at the renowned Cambridge Summer Music School during the late 1940s. Afterwards, on completing his degree in Wellington at Victoria University, Farquhar then took himself to England, joining Burch, Carr and Pruden for two years of further composition studies at the Guildhall School of Music in London under the tutelage of Benjamin Frankel.

Returning to New Zealand in 1953, Farquhar joined Professor Frederick Page’s Music Department at Victoria University, managing to balance teaching duties with composition, and producing at least one landmark piece of home-grown music along the way – the Dance Suite for small orchestra, “RIng Round the Moon” written to accompany a stage production by the New Zealand Players. Another work which achieved something of a public profile, albeit briefly, was the 1962 opera “A Unicorn For Christmas”, performed for Queen Elizabeth during a 1963 Royal Visit.

Of course, “Ring Round the Moon” in its various guises has captured people’s affections like none other of Farquhar’s works – I think partly because it doesn’t have any of the slight austerity that seems to me, rightly or wrongly, to be hung about the neck of much of the composer’s output. Even so, there’s so much more of Farquhar’s music which ought to be better-known, some of which we were able to hear performed in this concert.

Other pieces – the most shamefully-neglected of which I think is the First Symphony – await their turn in the scheme of things. Farquhar wasn’t a self-promoter of his music, unlike his contemporary, Ted Carr, though the music of both has entered that realm of curious neglect which composers Ross Harris and Jack Body touched upon in a radio interview prior to the Farquhar concert.

There’s grown up a kind of “lost generation” of New Zealand music, being the work of composers who came immediately after Douglas Lilburn, a list including, of course, David Farquhar, and (as Jack Body pointed out) that of HIS teacher, Ronald Tremain.  Yes, one or two works by these people did “cut through” the Sleeping-Beauty-like thicket and get themselves established – besides “Ring Round the Moon” one thinks of Larry Pruden’s “Harbour Nocturne” as a kind of “Kiwi classic”. And one remembers both Farquhar’s Third Symphony and Pruden’s String Trio being performed in Wellington, well, relatively recently.

But apart from these good deeds shining out like candlelight in a naughty world, the gloom that’s here overtaken the compositional output of people such as the aforementioned Ted Carr and Ronald Tremain, as well as that of Robert Burch and Dorothea Franchi, not to mention slightly later figures like John Rimmer and Kit Powell, has been pretty London-foggish. Another figure whom I’d include is Christchurch’s John Ritchie, whose music seems to get little more than parochial attention, when there are pieces by him which should be well established in our regular concert programs.

Perhaps, as Ross Harris seemed to me to suggest, this process of neglect has a kind of inevitability – like T.S. Eliot’s cat, “The Rum Tum Tugger”, who ” will do what he do do, and there’s no doing anything about it!” In which case, the same process obviously creates in time a kind of need to fill the void, which in turn propagates concerts like the present one – thanks, of course, here, to that “nurseryman extraordinaire”, Jack Body.

As well, there’s a current crop of performers who are ready, willing and certainly able to assist with whatever rehabilitation process is mooted, as was demonstrated to us in the Adam Concert Room on this occasion. After Jack Body’s welcoming speech, the concert proper began with a Sonatina for piano, dating from 1950, written by Farquhar after he’d left New Zealand to take up studies in the UK at Cambridge University. A note in the program told us the the work was published only in 2009 by Waiteata Music Press!

In this three-movement work, pianist Jian Liu revelled in the first part’s explorations of keyboard timbres – at first, brief phrases created a somewhat restless feeling, though the colourings held the angularities together. Then the music gravitated towards the lower piano registers, less agitated in effect, but deeper and slower, almost leviathan-like – not menacing, but sombre and sonorous, with upward irruptions of impulse keeping a kind of spatial awareness of things alive. These bright, glint-like sequences led to a quiet, enigmatic coda.

The second movement, marked Andante, I found almost ritual-like in its step-wise aspect, with an accompanying flourish, the latter following the melody as a train follows a bride’s dress – counterpointing voices played hide-and-seek, the pursuers then throwing their victims in the air to sparkle and scintillate before coming to earth and taking up the stepwise gait again, the flourish somehow detaching itself and leaving us with a piquant impression. The finale’s running, angular figurations were brilliantly activated by Liu, whose energies exuberantly realized the toccata-like middle section, and, after a breath-holding pause, signalled the end with a grand flourish.

I scribbled lots of notes during the next item, the 1967 Three Pieces for Violin and Piano – however, the marking for the first movement, “Improvisando”, says it all, really. I was reminded here of my own youthful, awkwardly shy attempts to engage girls I fancied in conversation, by the piano’s fitful, broken fanfare-like figurations, to which the violin responded with edgy, distant held notes, frequently with harmonics and occasionally punctuating its iciness with impatient, dismissive gestures.

I’m not sure whether the second movement’s “Pizzicato” represented a kind of thawing-out of relations, but the pianist’s plucking of the strings in the piano’s body and activating the lowest ones with a timpanist’s stick seemed to accord more readily with the violinist’s pizzicato notes at first, the increased engagement continuing with the violinist’s fly-buzzing sonorities enjoying the pianist’s strumming of the instrument’s strings. The final piece, “Risoluto” had fanfares (violin) and strumming harps (piano) each player demonstrating a kind of determination suggested by the music’s title, the pianist at one point knocking on the instrument’s body with his knuckles, and the violinist amplifying the fanfare figures before skittishly delivering an abrupt payoff.

Then came the first of two exerpted brackets from a piano solo collection called “Black, White and Coloured” – a typical Farquhar-ish exploration of the different characteristics of music written using either white or black piano keys and their treble/bass/inverted combinations. The first “bracket” was dominated by song, realizations of Negro Spirituals and of songs by Gershwin amongst the items. While finding the idea interesting, I thought some of the pieces too skeletal and bloodless compared with the originals, especially the Negro Spirituals – had I not known the pieces’ origins, I wouldn’t have missed those bluesy intensities put across by various great singers I could recall in my memory, and perhaps given the composer more credit for his relative austerities.

Similarly in the second set I thought the idea worked better the more obscure the music – so while I thought the opening “Silver-grey moonlight” too simplistic in its treatment of Clair de lune, the famous folk-melody, some of the others worked well, though there seemed a reluctance on the composer’s part to do very much with the basic thematic material. I thought the most successful realizations in the second set were “Chorale Prelude” and “Clouds”, in particular, the latter, which brought from Farquhar’s sensitivity to detail some timeless, floating ambiences of beauty and nostalgia.

More successful – in fact, spell-binding in effect – was the song-cycle “Swan Songs”, a 1983 work for voice and guitar, performed here by soprano Jenny Wollerman and guitarist Jane Curry. Framing the cycle at its beginning, middle and end were quotations from Orlando Gibbons’ well-known madrigal “The Silver Swan”, hand-in-glove with traditional song, and texts from Carmina Burana as well as by the composer. On the face of things, a kind of hotchpotch, but in performance, a magical evocation of worlds within worlds, bringing together instances of creative impulses leapfrogging over centuries to make heartfelt connections, one I found delightful, piquant and extremely moving.

With sonorous and evocative guitar-playing from Jane Curry setting the scene, Orlando Gibbons’ evocation of beauty brought forth spoken exclamation at first from the singer, and then, briefly, melody. Together with limpid guitar notes  the singer continued through through a section of the traditional “Swan swam”, evoking stillness and grave beauty. The third section, “Anxieties and Hopes” used the composer’s own text, a setting urgent and anxious, with darting impulses and broken figurations, guitar and voice overlapping, breaking off for a sequence of soaring, impassioned beauty before returning to the previous agitated state of things.

Gibbons’ music returned as a kind of “quiet centre” of things, before the work took a somewhat bizarre turn, quoting the “roasted swan” text from Carmina Burana (also famously used by Carl Orff in you-know-which-work!) – a droll lament for the sweetness of times past, affectingly sung and played by Jenny Wollerman and Jane Curry. After a brief reprise of the singer’s call to the swan, over a guitar ostinato, Gibbons’ music made its concluding appearance, the singer arching the voice over a lovely guitar solo with the words “Farewell, joy……” – brief, and ambient, and beautiful.

Before the programme’s final music item, composer Ross Harris contributed a brief but moving reminiscence of David Farquhar, constructing an engaging picture of a colleague with a number of distinctive traits – a concise and ordered thinker and creative spirit, responsive to challenges, (fiercely competitive especially when playing tennis, which was a great love – in fact the end of tennis for Farquhar seemed to symbolize the end of life…..). Ross Harris talked about a composing legacy of finely crafted music, describing its composer as “ultimately modest”.

The evening’s final, appropriately-chosen item (how COULD it have been left out?) was the violin-and-piano transcription of “Ring Round the Moon”, an arrangement made by the composer for the concertmaster of the NZSO, Isador Saslav, in 1992. I remember, a goodly number of  years ago, introducing myself to David Farquhar as an “admirer” of the work, and the composer graciously acknowledging the gesture by way of seizing his then wife Raydia D’Elsa around the waist and dancing a few steps with her in front of me, explaining that they would dance their way through the music he composed at the time to “try it out”. I’m sure the composer would, had he been present, have relished the playing of violinist Martin Riesley and pianist Jian Liu, despite his well-documented frustration at what he considered the piece’s disproportionate popularity.

Somehow, the immediacy of the violin-and-piano textures brought this memory of our meeting back to me more readily than did any of the orchestral versions of the dances – everything came across as more flavoursome than I ever before remembered, the violin’s piquant re-echoings of the linking motif at the conclusions of some of the pieces, the crunchy harmonies of the Galop, the bar-room atmosphere of the Tango, complete with exhausted-on-their-feet couples, the contrariwise harmonies in the Trio of the Polka, and the alterations between instruments in the Two-Step, complete with the link-motif’s lovely “falling-down-the-slope” effect. To finish, the Finale was encored, the music in this performance as angular, chunky, exuberant and wonderful as ever.

For those people who’ve read to this point, my humble apologies for the lengthy review! – but I hope you’ll conclude from all of this that Jack Body’s and the musicians’ efforts on behalf of David Farquhar’s music were eminently worthwhile.