Tag: vocal

Soprano Nicola Holt and pianist Nicole Chao at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Nicola Holt (soprano) and Nicole Chao (piano) Songs by Thomas Arne, Schumann (Frauenliebe und –leben, Op 42) and Schubert; Ballade No 4 in F minor (Chopin)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace. Midday, Wednesday 19 August 2009

I missed the first two songs in this lunchtime concert, but was told that the two songs by Thomas Arne, from Shakespeare (‘Where the bee sucks’ from The Tempest, and ‘When daisies pied’ from Love’s Labours Lost) were most delightfully sung.
But I was very happy to arrive just after the Schumann song cycle had started. Nicola Holt’s very musical and beautifully articulated singing created a wonderfully satisfying performance of the charming and varied Schumann cycle. Her voice has a purity and unaffected quality that captures the sadness as well as the ecstatic qualities of the songs. There was hope and a sunny anticipation in ‘Helft mir, ihr Schwestern’ that shifted movingly to anxiety in ‘Süsser Freund, du blickest’, deeply felt.
The piano kept drawing attention to its major role in the songs, reflecting with rare sensitivity their subtle mood changes.
So it was fitting that the recital gave solo space to the piano, with Nicole Chao’s playing Chopin’s fourth Ballade. There was a carefully hesitant start, as much as to say, ‘dare I tell you this tale where distress and ecstasy alternate?’ Her left hand explored the story’s many facets with confident rubato, sometimes of considerable boldness. Chao’s sense of high romanticism was rewarding, producing impassioned playing towards the climax, with an extended, dramatic pause before the coda, which did become slightly muddied.
Nicola Holt then returned to sing three favourite Schubert songs: Auf dem Wasser zu singen, ‘Du bist die Ruh’ and Seligkeit.
Beautifully as these were sung, they never recaptured the exquisite refinement and emotional adventure that she expressed in the Schumann song cycle.
It was a delight that a singer, occasionally, dares to include well-known songs in a recital of this kind. Programming concerts seems to have become too much a matter of proving one’s ability to tackle the unusual, to expand the audience’s musical experience for their own good.
This tendency could lead to those songs that the older generation has grown up with, when there was nothing shameful about performing well-known songs, becoming the unknown songs before long.
It’s good to reflect that music familiar to us is new to the younger members of the audience, and so a part of every concert should be devoted to such music.

NICOLA HOLT – Song Recital

(with Nicole Chao – piano)

An alternative review by Peter Mechen

Nicola Holt (nee Edgecombe) thoroughly delighted her St.Andrew’s lunchtime audience, delivering a most attractive programme with a singing voice as bright, open and engaging as her platform manner. I had most recently encountered her as the soprano soloist in the Orpheus Choir’s St John Passion performance, in which she sang with a similar openness and clarity, and was pleased to be given the chance to hear her perform in a more intimate and unencumbered acoustic. With pianist Nicole Chao proving a sensitive, responsive partner from the outset, the singer opened her programme with two songs by the English composer Thomas Arne, each a setting from Shakespeare, and capturing in each case the winsome out-of-doors effect that the words suggest. The second song, “Where Daisies pied” from the play “Love’s Labour’s Lost” was notable for some lovely bird-call sequences, whose effect was almost antiphonal in terms of differing colour and dynamics.

Schumann’s song-cycle “Frauenliebe und Leben” (A Woman’s Love and Life) is well-known for several reasons, among them the currently unfashionable sentiments of the poetry concerning women’s dependence on men in stereotyped relationships. Fortunately these politically correct strictures haven’t prevented performances of the work, whose heartfelt fusion in words and music of both ecstasy and tragedy within a human relationship for most people transcend any such societal polemic. This was a lovely performance – Nicola Holt’s voice nicely encompassed the soaring quality of the first song’s lyrical outpourings (Seit ich ihn gesehen), and emphasised the upward-thrusting strength of the following Er, der Herrlichste von allen, though she chose not to attempt the ornamentation at the concluding line of each of the principal theme’s verses, robbing the music of some of its wild ecstasy but compensating with her steadiness. Her word-painting in Ich kann nicht fussen gave an urgent, elfin and volatile flavour to the quickness of the girl’s feelings, the perfect counterweight to her reverential Du Ring an meinem Finger. Nicole Chao’s playing gave sensitively alert support in all but one or two of the more extrovert passages – for example, I thought the piano too reticent in places along with the singer’s ritualistic splendours and joyful energies in Helft mir, ihr Schwestern, though the song’s brief concluding processional postlude was nicely done. The beautiful Süsser Freund moved easefully from its tenderly floated opening line through the central section’s animations and back to its beginning with even more breath-catching rapture; and the contrasting exuberant, almost desperate happiness of An meinem Herzen, an meiner Brust made the shock of the final Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan all the more telling. Holt’s singing was here stoic and composed, internalising the tragedy of the beloved’s death, keeping emotion away from the visceral realms, and letting the piano round off the story with its recapitulation of the themes from the work’s opening song. I thought this an extremely fine performance from both artists.

Nicole Chao played Chopin’s Fourth Ballade as a kind of instrumental interlude, though in terms of musical substance and interpretation, the performance kept the musical juices well and truly flowing throughout. Her playing sensitively caught the “song on the water” aspect of the opening pages, though she exhibited surprising volatility (hardly in evidence during the Schumann song-cycle) in the development section, with perhaps too much pedal used at the climaxes on this occasion, the half-empty church acoustic muddying the music’s textures. From the main theme’s canonic treatment onwards, which was nicely shaped, Chao reined in the music more, with clearer control of the swirling figurations; and waited until the stormy coda before once again pulling our her biggest guns, the ending slightly splashy, but very exciting.

Nicola Holt returned for three Schubert lieder, a beautifully differentiated Auf dem Wasser zu singen with subtle intensifications and variations of mood throughout, a heartfelt, slightly effortful, but properly ardent Du Bist die Ruh, (so sublime but so fiendishly difficult!), and to finish, an engagingly joyous Seligkeit, capturing the music’s “schwung” with keen, brightly-focused high notes, and wonderful gaiety throughout.

All in all, a most rewarding , heartfelt and entertaining lunchtime offering from two very fine artists.

Aivale meets Leontyne ‘n Ella

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Leontyne ‘n’ Ella: two legends, one voice 

Aivale Cole (soprano) and David Wickens (piano) 

Town Hall, Thursday 16 July 2009 

Winning the Lexus Song Quest propelled Aivale Cole towards a career in England, and the money will help. But it takes a lot more and so this concert was a ‘benefit concert’ in all but name (see www.aivale.com). 

Eight big opera arias in the first half (Leontyne Price), and ten (including an encore) jazz and Broadway items in the second (Ella Fitzgerald). 

Aivale made her dramatic entrance with the two arias that clinched the Song Quest: Rintorna vincitor from Aida with every ounce of anguish at the hideous dilemma she is presented with at the opera’s start, and Es gibt ein Reich from Ariadne auf Naxos, where Ariadne not just pines for but demands death, her voice leaping huge, spine-tingling intervals with pin-point accuracy, commanding the entire hall with her ferocious emotion. 

So it continued, with a self-pitying Vissi d’arte (Tosca), a violence, suppressed with white-knuckled rage in Elvira’s Mi Tradi from Don Giovanni, and the fierce loyalty that Fiordiligi swears in Come scoglio (Cosi fan tutte) like I’ve never heard before. And the opera section ended, not with the usual pretty Summertime from Porgy and Bass, but the despairing My man’s gone now.  

The second half began as she walked up an aisle, for a triumphant performance of what is little more than a ditty: A Trisket a tasket (though an Ella one, to be sure). It became a hilarious party piece, with the help of pianist Wickham.  She threw herself into Cole Porter’s Too Darn Hot, rauchiness nothing daunted; I loved her voluptuous low notes in the Arlen/Mercer Come rain or come shine; the comic flair, brilliantly understated, in To keep my love alive and her relishing the verbal wit of It’s delovely – another Porter classic.  

Her pianist David Wickham accompanied with a rare sympathy, his notes planted exquisitely, a fraction before or after Aivale’s. But it was surprising to realize that the odd resonance in the piano was the result of the quite unnecessary amplification. 

It was more acceptable in the second half which was the province of Ella Fitzgerald’s repertoire, where Aivale too used a microphone, though it actually constricted and nasalized her vocal quality. The unthinking use of amplification for popular music of all kinds always seems to me a sad succumbing to the uncultivated tastes of the young and the unlettered: Aivale put it aside for I had myself a true love, her last song, and it was fine. 

A great audience – the hall three-quarters full – celebrated her rise and vociferously wished her success.

(this review was printed, little changed, in The Dominion Post)

New Zealand School of Music Classical Voice Students

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Music by Rossini, Debussy, Finzi, Mozart, Harris, Head, Messiaen, Schumann, Menotti, Donizetti

Rachel Day, Rose Blake, Issac Stone, Sophie Kemp, Laura Dawson,  Imogen Thirwall, Michael Gray, Olga Gryniewicz

Accompanist: Emma Sayers (piano)

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Wednesday, 20th May

Recitals such as these can amount to less than the sum of their parts if not organised and prepared for well; and the announcement at the concert’s beginning that several of the students had colds as a result of excessively wintry weather didn’t do anything to lift expectations of what was to follow to any great extent. However, what we should have taken into account was the enthusiasm and sheer determination of these young singers to make the most of what this concert offered them; and in fact the listening experience was packed with interest and intensity due to every bracket of songs being that particular vocalist’s chance to shine.

Rachel Day had the responsibility of beginning the recital with two songs by Rossini, from a set of three called “La regatta veneziana”, describing the scene at a Venetian gondola race, during which a girl excitedly encourages her lover, both before and during the event, to try his best to win. Her “salty tang” timbre admirably suited the songs, as did her engagingly focused “out-front” projection, putting across plenty of tumbling warmth and enthusiasm, and finding her high notes well. The two Debussy songs that followed were delivered with contrasting subtlety and atmosphere by Rose Blake, “Clair de lune” demonstrating a nice sense of the song’s shape, and “Fantoches” (Puppets) confidently and entertainingly suggesting storytelling abilities.

Isaac Stone was possibly one of the sufferers referred to at the concert’s beginning, as he seemed not to be able to project the lower tessitura of Gerald Finzi’s “Come Away, Death”, although the lighter, more lyrical episodes were nicely shaped, and the expressive points were well noted. “Who is Sylvia” exhibited a similar lyrical sensitivity. Sophie Kemp overcame some nervousness to sweetly deliver Barbarina’s “hankerchief” aria from Mozart’s “Figaro”, and relaxed somewhat into Ross Harris’s setting of Bub Bridger’s “The Swans”, confidently enunciating the meaning of her words.

Laura Dawson’s bracket of Michael Head’s songs was most impressive, her authoritative singing able to make her softer notes “tell” as significantly as her fuller declamations, and her interpretations of each song capturing a unique atmosphere with subtly-applied variation of emphasis and colour (supported by some superb playing from Emma Sayers). After “The Gondolier” came “Rain Storm”, whose opening notes were delicately-coloured and sensitively placed – the singer survived a slight voice-discolouring on the first of two high reaches towards the end, but beautifully managed the second one –  altogether, these were a memorable pair of performances. Different, less imposing, but as authoritative in a more whimsical manner was Imogen Thirwall’s singing of Messiaen’s Trois Melodies, varying bright and subtle tones and using face and gesturings well to convey the quizzical sense of “Pourquoi?”, then relishing the wistfulness of the reflective “Le Sourire” (another beautiful accompaniment from Emma Sayers), and the drama and resignation of the final song “La Fiancée Perdue”.

Michael Gray’s ardent, thrusting performances of three of Schumann’s “Dichterliebe” songs were also a highlight of the concert, the first “Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen” bright and eager, urgent to the point of vocal tightness, but with the interpretative heart in the right place; then a delicately-delivered “Hör ich das Liedchen klingen” and a forthright “Ein Jüngling liebt eine Mädchen” with lovely “pinging” notes at the beginning. Finally, Olga Gryniewicz demonstrated her communicative and theatrical skills with two operatic exerpts, the first being “The Black Swan” from Menotti’s spooky “The Medium”, sung with elegant phrase-turnings and nicely-shaped notes, if a bit monochromatic in colour during the middle section, though with fine ardour and a confidently floated high note at the aria’s conclusion. Then, to finish, we were treated to Norina’s cavatina “Quel guardo il cavaliere” from Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale”, the opening lyrical and confident, the line drawn strongly, the ensuing coloratura nicely ‘sprung’, warming up as the music dances onwards, and  enabling the singer to triumphantly negotiate without mishap the high work at the end – impressive enough!

Very, very great honour and ample plaudits to the participants on this occasion, for giving us a wonderful concert.

Lexus Song Quest 2009, Auckland, and Wellington recital

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Reviews of the Final of the contest in Auckland and the recital in Wellington by the three prize-winners

1. Auckland

Six finalists with New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Lloyd: Julia Booth, Aivale Cole, Kristen Darragh, Andrew Glover, Wade Kernot, Polly Ott.

Auckland Town Hall. Thursday 23 April

In the second half of the contest, when all six finalists sing opera or oratorio arias with the NZSO, it was the fifth singer who caused the sensation. She sang an aria from Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, not very familiar, entitled ‘Es gibt ein Reich’. She sang it with extraordinary insight, passion, care with its pace and articulation: in short here was a stunning, real Strauss soprano, of which we have only produced one other – Kiri Te Kanawa. Yet this singer has an arresting beauty of voice, an earthiness and power that is different from – I hesitate to say greater than – her great predecessor.

Her name is Aivale Cole and she is from Wellington. I recall first hearing her in a small opera called Classical Polynesia at the 1998 International Arts Festival, and have watched her progress over the past decade, among other things gaining first prize at the prestigious Australian Opera Studio in Perth. And she has started to win principal roles in major opera houses.

The audience burst into a frenzy of shouting and applause as her Strauss aria finished and you could sense a general feeling that most people present knew the result then. And when she sang ‘Ritorna vincitor’, Aida’s great aria from the opera of that name, the big audience did a repeat performance.

Adjudicator, the great German tenor Siegfried Jerusalem, awarded her first prize.

The other finalists were not at all to be dismissed however. Auckland bass Wade Kernot gained second prize; as he had in the 2007 contest. He has a powerful, resonant bass voice that remains firm below the bass stave, but is at its most attractive in the middle baritone range. The first half of the contest comprised lieder and songs, accompanied by pianist Terence Dennis, and Kernot impressed at first with a Brahms lied, ‘Verrat’, investing it with convincing drama. His arias were ‘Se vuol ballare’ from The Marriage of Figaro, effective if not spectacular, but the great monologue of Philip II of Spain in Verdi’s Don Carlo, ‘Ella giammai m’amo’, did seem to put him in serious contention, with its deep insight into a lonely king reflecting on the path his barren life had taken.

Of the three not rewarded, I felt Kristen Darragh had been unlucky, for her song by Hahn was gorgeous, the aria ‘O mio Ferrando’ from Donizetti’s La Favorita arresting, and she gave a very impressive rendering of Lucretia’s aria from Britten’s opera on the Shakespeare poem. However, she was vindicated by inclusion in a principal role in L’Italiana in Algeri shortly afterwards.

This was one of the strongest contests of the many I have attended: all we need now is enough real opera activity to employ all the talent that emerges from our academies and universities.

(an edited version of the review for The Dominion Post)

2. The winners’ recital in Wellington. Aivale Cole, Wade Kernot and Julia Booth with Terence Dennis (piano)

The Opera House, Wellington; Thursday 30 April

There was a big audience at the Opera House for the Wellington recital by the three place-getters at the Lexus Song Quest held the previous week in Auckland.

This was the first time the contest has presented such recitals, believed to be compensation to the rest of the country because Lexus has stipulated that the finals should be held every time in Auckland. It will be recalled that Mobil, based in Wellington, had rotated the final around all the main cities and that, ironically, some of the smallest audiences were usually in Auckland.

The recital was a quite different experience from the competition final. The atmosphere allowed singers to respond more openly, in a more relaxed manner without the competitive tension. The singer who responded best to this was runner-up Wade Kernot. His Brahms lied, which had been dramatic enough, but monochrome, was now a most interesting and varied narrative. In addition he sang a droll Beethoven song, ‘Der Kuss’ with sufficient gestural accompaniment to make its ironical points amusing.

Instead of ‘Se vuol ballare’ which he’d sung in Auckland he sang the Catalogue aria from Don Giovanni which was a brilliant showcase for his studied comic skills and for a voice capable of pointed tonal variety. On the other hand, his great Don Carlo monologue was rather more involving than Fiesco’s ‘Il lacerato spirito’ from Simon Boccanegra which he sang in Wellington. And ‘Ol’ Man River’ suited him, not merely because of its low notes but because he could invest it with such a feeling of defeat.

Away from comparison with the other three singers, the gap between Julia Booth and the first and second place-getters was more noticeable; she seemed to have lost some stature on account of the greater maturity and assurance of the other two singers. In ‘Die Forelle’ her voice seemed smaller and less warm than in the Auckland Town Hall and her second lied, Böhm’s ‘Still wie die Nacht’, sort of lesser-Schumann, though nicely sung, was less interesting. In comparison, her adventurous Britten song, ‘A Poison Tree’ had marked her Auckland performance as well-schooled and well-understood.

Her arias in Wellington were generally more comfortable. She sang none of the same pieces as in Auckland: now it was the touching ‘Il est doux, il est bon’ from Massenet’s Herodiade (made familiar on CD by Gheorghiu), and ‘Ain’t it a pretty night’ from Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah. Her voice tends to thin at the top, but her middle register is attractive and expressive. After Cole’s and Kernot’s consummate duet ‘Bess you is my woman now’, Julia was not well placed for her singing of Gershwin’s early song ‘The Man I love’  (originally for inclusion in Lady Be Good of 1924). An interesting tune for sure, but in Booth’s hands too fragile.

The third prize went to soprano Julia Booth, Canadian-born to New Zealand parents, a Waikato University graduate. She probably gained credit for a challenging Benjamin Britten song, ‘A Poison Tree’, which she handled very intelligently; and perhaps for Dvorak’s Song to the Moon, and Liu’s last aria from Turandot, ‘Tu che di’ gel sei cinta’.

Ensembles were an interesting feature. The Flower Duet from Lakmé was a fetching blending of Julia Booth and Aivale Cole, the trio from Così fan tutte, slightly less so, alongside Wade Kernot’s imposing Alfonso.

I was anxious that my opinion of Aivale Cole’s triumphant singing of the aria from Ariadne auf Naxos (‘Es gibt ein Reich’) would be vindicated by her singing in Wellington. While in this piece her voice was more even and opulent in the recital than in her earlier items, it was perhaps the one time that I missed the Strauss orchestra, as wonderfully supple and sensitive as Dennis’s accompaniments were.

But before that she had sung the three songs from Korngold’s Op 22; the first two were good if not really demonstrative of her quality, which appeared more convincingly in the flowing melody of ‘Weil ist stille eingeschlafen’. Her other opera offering was the famous La Wally aria, ‘Ebben? Ne andrò lontana’, which, rather expectedly, displayed her talents at their best, her tone dramatic, vividly expressing her anguish.

In her last bracket of American songs, her choice, apart from her duet from Porgy and Bess with Kernot, was ‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child’, arranged by John Carter, easy and fluent; again it revealed a voice and a musical sensibility capable of finding the authentic style and spirit of almost anything.

Mulled Wine at Paekakariki: singing with cello and piano

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Handel arias: ‘Cara speme’ (Giulio Cesare), ‘Credete al mio dolore’ (Alcina); Schubert: ‘Du bist die Ruh’, Suleika and Suleika’s 2nd Song;

Dorothy Buchanan: The Man who sold goldfinches (to words by Jeremy Commons);

Fauré: ‘Après un rêve’ for cello and piano, songs ‘Clair de lune, Nell’, ‘C’est l’extase’. ‘Notre amour’; Duparc: ‘Chanson triste’, ‘Extase’, L’invitation au voyage; Poulenc: ‘C’, ‘Fêtes galantes’.

Rhona Fraser (soprano), Richard Mapp (piano), Paul Mitchell (cello)

Paekakariki Memorial Hall; Sunday 29 March 2009

Once a railway township and down-market beach settlement, Paekakariki has become an artists’ haven in recent decades, with good reason, for it has most of the virtues sought by those for whom material goodies are not a priority. The sea, wide coastal open spaces, mountains to the east, the home of a railway preservation society and a nearby tramway museum, both with functioning trains and trams together with a bravely preserved and restored railway station, perhaps the last survivor of the grand refreshment stations from the tragically devastated passenger network that we now need more than ever; and of course, the presence in the village of others of like minds and values.

Let’s focus on the music.

At the concert’s heart was a newly written collaboration between opera historian and occasional impresario and librettist Jeremy Commons and composer Dorothy Buchanan. They have worked together before, notably in another Mansfield opera, an opera trilogy based on three of her stories. This time Commons combed the Wellington stories for words, impressions, events and the very words of the stories and on which she may have reflected in her last days in the institute run by the probable charlatan (though her biographer Anthony Alpers thought not) Gurdjieff, near Fontainebleau.

The result was a sort of prose poem, The Man who Sold Goldfinches, that Buchanan set to music that I felt rather failed to ignite, to achieve memorableness: perhaps the emphasis on the obvious phrase about the goldfinches rather revealed a struggle to find musical inspiration.

Yet the setting had its integrity, accompanied sensitively, appropriately, by Paul Mitchell’s cello (Katherine herself played the cello), and it was that, as much as the perceptive singing of Rhona Fraser that sustained interest through the performance.

The rest of the concert was a happy opportunity to hear an under-exposed singer whose career has included singing with English National Opera and elsewhere in Europe. Since returning to New Zealand I’ve heard her, notably, as Galatea in New Zealand Opera’s production of Handel’s masque Acis and Galatea a few years ago. 

It indeed included a couple of dramatically sung Handel arias: ‘Cara speme’ from Giulio Cesare and ‘Credete al mio dolore’ from Alcina, drawing some too strident high notes not well treated in the hard acoustic of the hall. The other songs – Schubert, Fauré, Duparc, Poulenc – were beautifully sung, with considerable dynamic variety and tonal colour, none more brilliant than Poulenc’s Fêtes galantes. Her encore, the lovely ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Gianni Schicchi, simply posed the question why she is not in high demand by our opera companies.

 

 

 

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Floating Bride

Songs, violin sonata and piano trio by Fauré, Harris, Elgar, Brahms

Jenny Wollerman, Piers Lane, Douglas Beilman, Helene Pohl, Rolf Gjelsten

Nelson School of Music, Saturday 31 January

Piers Lane is a top international pianist and he should fill a house of reasonable size anywhere in the world. Here he did not play solo and was happy to be simply a collegial musician: he accompanied singers, a violinist and took the piano part in a trio. But his presence, his modesty and ready collaboration as equal partner with other musicians were a constant delight.

It opened with Jenny Wollerman singing, first, three Fauré songs: Les roses d’Ispahan, Au bord de l’eau and Après un rêve. There was a little much graininess in Wollerman’s voice in the first but her normal purity of tone returned in the second; for the third, her voice was perhaps a bit too wide awake to portray her state on waking from a dream.

Then came Ross Harris’s new song cycle, The Floating Bride, The Crimson Village, settings of poems by Vincent O’Sullivan that were inspired by paintings of Chagall; a project that Harris had himself suggested to O’Sullivan. They were sung most skillfully and imaginatively by Jenny Wollerman whose discreet gestures and body movement – in The Dancer for example – helped her interpretation: and though the settings did not always aim to reflect the sense or feeling of the words, they often created visual images that were surprisingly evocative of Chagall’s paintings.

The piano part was quite elaborate, sometimes even, as in The Ladder to the Moon or Give me a Green Horse, drawing the attention away from the voice and Lane did them proud with careful, detailed handling.

Piers Lane’s next job was to play Elgar’s Violin Sonata with Douglas Beilman. This late piece, of the vintage of Elgar’s Piano Quintet and the String Quartet, demands warm and passionate playing and it flourished with Beilman’s flawless performance on his opulently-toned instrument and Lane’s fluent and commanding playing, from the dramatic to the feathery and lyrical. The thoroughly prepared, beautifully balanced partnership made it something of a revelation both to those familiar with it and to others.

In Brahms’s Second Piano Trio Lane was joined by Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten; the opening passage was magically subdued but there was full-blooded playing later in the movement and a sparkling, quirky Scherzo. For all Brahms’s alleged antipathy to the Romantics around him, this work proves he’s a fully paid-up composer of his age of high Romanticism.

The riches of the entire concert reinforced the disappointment that it had not attracted the full house that it deserved.

New Zealand Opera School, Wanganui

Posted on by Lindis Taylor
New Zealand Opera School, Wanganui

Grand Final Concert in Royal Wanganui Opera House. Monday 12 January

Review by Lindis Taylor

The survival of a musical organization over 16 years is no mean feat.

The New Zealand Opera School has survived that long. It is the kind of musical education institution that the State, in a more civilized country, might well provide; in fact it is not too much to expect that such a summer course might have been established by a university music department.

But the State in New Zealand has not taken many steps to make fuller and more imaginative use, of their facilities during vacations.

A summer school of singing has flourished for many more years in Hawke’s Bay and it has usually overlapped with the Wanganui school. A few years ago attempts were made to coordinate the two schools so they would not clash. But it proved impossible because both depend on overseas vocal tutors who typically have only a short time free at the beginning of January to travel to New Zealand.

But each school caters for singers at rather different levels and pursuing different singing ambitions. The National Singing School in Napier caters for jazz and music theatre and cabaret singers while the Wanganui school has confined itself to singers who have already made progress up the ladder, even having won roles in professional opera productions.

Thus the big public concerts at the end of each school has been an opportunity to hear a number of our most promising singers at an interesting stage of their training and early career.

So often it is one person who has had the energy and leadership skills to initiate and hold together valuable enterprises, inspiring others and giving them a sense of involvement and satisfaction.

That has been the gift of Donald Trott since the school began: erstwhile banker, but better known as a baritone with the Perkel Opera Company and long-serving board member of successive Auckland opera companies.

He presides over the whole enterprise, recruiting tutors and accompanists, negotiating with Wanganui Collegiate School for the use of their music facilities, but most importantly persuading potential funders that here is by far the best investment for funds that shareholders can do without.

His public face appeared on this occasion as compere and general factotum, suave, debonair, generous in his acknowledgements and encouragement, ensuring that the success of the evening brings its rewards to everyone who gives their time to it.

Guided by British vocal lecturer Paul Farringdon, several notable New Zealand voice teachers (Margaret Medlyn, Barry Mora, Richard Greager) and others such as stage director Sara Brodie and Italian coach Luca Manghi, the concert is no mere string of arias.

Several others made for the great success of this concert and the entire running of the school: most notably Donald Trott’s assistant director, Ian Campbell, his wife Sally Rosenberg and Bryan and Marion Wyness; the accompanists, a different one for each bracket: Greg Neil, Phillipa Saffey, David Kelly, Francis Cowan, Iola Shelley and Bruce Greenfield; long lists of sponsors and benefactors; and a group of friends who have managed to raise the school’s profile in the city through recitals, masterclasses, a chapel service on Sunday, during the school: Wanganui Opera Week..

Each bracket of arias or ensembles had a theme and various devices were used to move from one item to the next, so that a feeling of a tenuous story was sometimes created.

The Spoils of War opened with Frances Moore’s performance of ‘Chacun le sait’ from La fille du régiment, accompanied by a platoon comprising the whole company, bearing arms. In another scene involving guns, Jason Slade brought a nice baritonal quality to the tenor showpiece in the last act of Tosca, ‘E lucevan le stelle’. But Catherine Leining captured the false sincerity well in the usual aria from Samson et Dalila, not that it really suited her.

Each group was separated by theatrical business: here, before the group entitled The Things we do for Love, Luc Manghi suffered the first of his comic misadventures which led to Rachel Day’s effective performance in Monica’s aria from The Medium, which was enlivened with quite elaborate production elements.

Elizabeth Daley was not well advised to tackle Ilia’s role in Idomeneo – ‘Zeffiretti lusinghieri’, as it simply calls for more intensity than she can summon now, but is certainly within her reach. From Mozart’s last opera seria, La clemenza di Tito, Felicity Smith displayed some polish and dramatic ability with her ‘Parto, parto’.

The group bearing the name Desire Takes Flight strung together Claire Barton’s performance of ‘O mio Fernando’ from Donizetti’s La favorite and others by Granados (Anna Argyle singing the ‘The Maja – Woman – and the Nightingale’) and Bizet: Brent Read in the Flower song from Carmen.

Then Julia Booth sang an unfamiliar aria from Floyd’s Susannah, invoking tender longing in a quasi-American, near-Broadway idiom. She sang against a backdrop of a starry night sky which also served the quartet from A Midsummer Night’s Dream that showcased four of the evening’s best singers: Kristen Darragh, Barbara Graham, Daniel O’Connor and Michael Guy.

Each expressed the individuality of the lovers, waking from their dream-world of love-making, with careful fairy-like precision.

Naturally, some of the best performances came from seasoned singers like Darragh who will be remembered as Xenia in Boris Godunov: her Lucretia (Britten) was as harrowing as it was fully realised. Michael Guy also sang from an opera in English – Toni’s ‘Here I stand’ from Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, combining a Shakespearean style with a sort of histrionic Sprechstimme that was one of the most complete performances of the evening.

The second half began with A Rose by any other Name which put together three arias from Shakespeare-inspired operas.

Two of them were from famous versions of Romeo and Juliet (though the Bellini draws not primarily on Shakespeare but on the 16th century Italian sources that Shakespeare took the story from). Gounod’s ‘Je veux vivre’ was sung with great vivacity by a perhaps Natalie Dessay-in-the-making, Tania Priebs. Barbara Graham sang ‘O quante volte’ from I Capuleti e i Montecchi, displaying a promising bel canto talent: agile and soulful with beautiful sustained lines.

There followed a rarity; the overture of Nicolai’s Merry Wives of Windsor and Falsaff’s drinking song are well-known, but nothing else seems to escape Germany where the opera is still common enough. Alexandra Ioan gave us ‘Nun eilt herbei’, the equivalent of Mistress Ford plotting revenge, in a stylish blend of French opéra-comique and Donizetti.

Under the ‘etiquette’ From Russia with Love, most of the men on hand gave us the unusual experience of hearing arias from all three male protagonists in Eugene Onegin. Daniel O’Connor was a somewhat too unsympathetic Onegin as he declines Tatyana’s overtures, though his singing was indeed very fine; William Parry sang the unfortunate Lensky’s aria before the fateful duel, his voice accurate but not yet well grounded. Prince Gremin’s aria was sung by the splendid Hadleigh Adams, with warmth and vocal assurance.

The last group was entitled Ah! Perfidy, though Louise’s famous aria does not seem to fit into such a characterisation. It was sung prettily enough by Polly Ott. The last item was Eboli’s famous aria from Don Carlo: ‘O don fatale’ from Rachelle Pike, whose voice is big and given to too much fortissimo, though it was clear she had good dynamic control when she chose.

The entire assemblage went through entertaining stage business to perform the Papageno/Papagena duet from The Magic Flute to bring the evening to a most appropriate close.

 

 

 

 

J.S.BACH – Christmas Oratorio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

J.S.BACH – Christmas Oratorio
(Cantatas 1, 2 & 3)
Nicola Edgecombe (soprano)
Andrea Cochrane (alto)
John Beaglehole (tenor) / Peter Russell (bass)
Douglas Mews (continuo)
The Chiesa Ensemble
The Bach Choir of Wellington
Directed by Stephen Rowley
St.Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday, 14th December 2008

Surely the first couple of pages of J.S.Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio” rate as one of the great musical openings – timpani calling everything to attention, flutes and oboes trilling joyously, and trumpets resounding with fanfares, heralding the festive approach of the processional, with its message of “praise, joy and gladness”. St.Andrew’s-on-the- Terrace reverberated with such glad sounds on Sunday afternoon, instrumentalists and choir launching into the work’s opening with great gusto under the energetic direction of Stephen Rowley, a name new to me, but obviously a conductor capable of getting an energetic and committed response from his musicians.

In general both the Bach Choir’s singing and the Chiesa Ensemble’s playing gave enormous pleasure throughout each of the three cantatas. The opening movement featured some splendid “trumpets and drums” moments from the players, and singing from the choir which had attack, precision, energy and great variety throughout. Stephen Rowley got from his forces both the music’s ritualistic grandeur and its excitement, pacing the three parts of the work admirably through the contrasts afforded by movement and stillness, ceremony and reflection.

In a venue which emphasised immediacy and visceral impact of sound, the music and its performance made a stirring impression. Particularly memorable was the choir’s singing of the more reflective chorales, from “Wie soll ich dich empfangen” in the first cantata, to “Ich will dich mit Fließ bewahren” in the third. But there was warmth and splendour in abundance as well, for instance in the work’s final chorus “Herrscher des Himmels” (Ruler of Heaven), where conductor and voices managed a nice differentiation between gentle and full-throated vocal lines at a tempi that allowed maximum articulation. Only in the angelic chorus in the second cantata “Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe” (Glory to God) did I feel the need for a bit more word- projection – the lines, though nicely dovetailed, didn’t quite scintillate with enough vocal excitement, so that we weren’t quite caught up in the bubbling wonderment of it all as we ought to have been.

As for the Chiesa Ensemble’s playing, the instrumental sounds pinned back our ears right from the opening chords, drumstrokes and wind-and-brass fanfares, all of which were delivered with infectious energy and superb focus. Equally telling was the quality of the obbligato work throughout, strings and winds supporting the vocal soloists unerringly, supporting and colouring the ambience of each episode with beautifully-phrased playing. With the Sinfonia that began the second cantata the music seemed to take a while to cohere between instrumental groups, but in general the players realised all of the score’s rhythmic and textural complexities with great élan, strongly supported by eloquent continuo-playing from Eleanor Carter (‘cello) and Douglas Mews (organ).

Each of the four soloists had challenges aplenty to tackle, with old Bach writing for his solo voices as if they were instruments with effortless range and limitless resources of breath! Tenor John Beaglehole threw himself into his recitatives as though his life depended upon the outcome, and his clear sense of line, of putting across the narrative’s meaning fully engaged his listeners, even though his delivery showed occasionally strained notes. Despite getting a bit out of synch with his accompaniment at one point in the second cantata’s “Frohe Hirten, eilt” (Happy shepherds, hurry), he made a good fist of the difficult runs in this aria, and worked mellifluously with Nancy Luther-Jara’s solo flute throughout. Alto Andrea Cochrane used her rich tones to beautiful effect in the slower music, never more so than in the second cantata’s “Schlafe, mein Liebster” (Slumber Beloved), where her long-held opening notes coloured the music’s textures magically. She also brought off the last, and somewhat treacherous run of “Wo wir unser Herz erfreuen”, in the aria’s middle section with determination and confidence, though she occasionally lost some of her poise and projection in numbers such as “Schließe, mein Herz” in the third cantata, where more warmth in the tone was needed.

Soprano Nicola Edgecombe and bass Peter Russell had a fine time with their duetting in the first and third cantatas, the first a lovely dialogue “Er ist auf Erden kommen arm” with the soprano’s chorale light but true against the bass’s focused and properly weighted recitative “Wer will die Liebe recht erhöhn”. The second, “Herr, dein Mitleid” featured nicely “sprung” rhythms and finely-sustained lines from both singers, with great teamwork at “Deine Holde Gunst und Liebe”, delivered against a backdrop of beautifully- voiced oboe accompaniment. Peter Russell, in his several solo arias, demonstrated his usual intelligently musical responses to words and music, retaining his balance and momentum even when the highest notes seemed just beyond his reach. The three cantatas were played without a break, making for a rich hour-and-a-half’s concert whose proportions seemed well-nigh perfect for a pre- Christmas Sunday afternoon – for the goodly crowd which attended, it proved a delightful and rewarding musical experience. (PM)

Opera Society’s year-end gala concert

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Opera arias and Liebesliederwalzer, Op 52 by Brahms

The New Zealand Opera Society, Wellington Branch.

Year End Gala Recital with Madeleine Pierard (soprano), established and rising singers accompanied by Bruce Greenfield and Julie Coulson.

National Library Auditorium, Wednesday 10 December 2009

The New Zealand Opera Society is one of New Zealand’s longest-lived musical institutions, founded at the same time as the first home-grown opera company, the New Zealand Opera Company, in 1954. Its purpose was to be friends of the company. The company died in 1971, but the society knew that it still had a job to do, supporting opera wherever to emerged in New Zealand. It has survived one other major national company, based in Auckland, which lasted a mere three years.

Since the 1970s the society whose main strength was, and still is, in Wellington, it publishes the monthly magazine, New Zealand Opera News and its Wellington Branch presents regular recitals and opera events of many kinds. In recent years it has also run screenings of opera on film and DVD but has struggled to attract audiences to live recitals.

Wednesday the 10th of December was a singular exception when there were few empty seats at the National Library auditorium.

The reason obviously, was Madeleine Pierard whose rise to celebrity has even overcome the general level of media neglect of classical music. Hardly out of her studies at the Royal College of Music in London, she has already been cast in significant roles at Covent Garden and other important opera houses. Back in New Zealand this past week, she has sung in the meretricious Paul McCartney concoction, Ecce Cor Meum as well as in a magnificent, full-house Messiah with The Tudor Consort in the Town Hall.

For the opera society she was in the spotlight with two brackets of arias.

The first comprised excerpts from opera seria: from works by Handel, Mozart and Rossini. The second bracket comprised ‘Mon coeur ne peut changer’ from Gounod’s Mireille and Marietta’s Lied from Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt.

Madeleine’s absolute command of style and technique held the audience spell-bound in the aria from Handel’s Alcina, ‘Tornami a vagheggiar’ Without denigrating the supporting singers, here was a star, not just in the making, but made, though there are areas in which she will develop, for example in cultivating greater warmth and lyrical qualities. In the strange artificiality of Handelian belcanto, she brought an electrifying dramatic sense, utter security, agility and brilliance. In music closer to recognizable human emotions, in the aria ‘Deh se piacer mi vuoi’ from Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito: there was fury and ambition. It was interesting to hear her mezzo soprano range still strong and natural. Finally, in Rossini’s famous Semiramide aria, ‘Bel raggio lusighier’, she demonstrated a virtuosity that I would risk saying might be unmatched by any other New Zealand singer.

Madeleine moved onto Kiri Te Kanawa territory with Marietta’s Song from Die Tote Stadt: very different indeed: the velvet and lyricism replaced by a crystalline, almost spectral quality which captured the opera’s decadent, Freudian obsessiveness.

Finally, a welcome exposure of Gounod’s other opera – Mireille, some rank it ahead of Roméo et Juliette as his second finest work. This aria, ‘Mon coeur ne peut changer’ has been recorded by Malvina Major on her CD Casta Diva. Madeleine sang it with the right combination of wistfulness and sparkle.

The concert was by no means simply a showcase for Ms Pierard however.

Georgia Jamieson Emms opened the evening with Norina’s ‘Quel guardo il cavaliere’ from Don Pasquale, with a degree of uncertainty in both style and panache, but her later arias – The Queen of the Night’s Act I aria and Zerbinetta’s stratospheric aria from Ariadne auf Naxos, displayed considerable flair both vocally and histrionically.

The other solo performances were from Daniel O’Connor, a young baritone who has acquired a natural ease of delivery and attractive stage presence. The notes of ‘O du mein holde Abendstern’ (Tannhäuser) may not be hard to find, but it can be a dull and stiff affair; with O’Connor it was anything but that, and there was an intelligent grasp of the Wagner idiom. Then he sang Onegin’s Act II aria, in fine Russian, with a proper degree of empathy and gentleness. Perhaps he is on the same path as T T Rhodes.

Barbara Graham is a young singer who, like O’Connor, has been on the New Zealand Opera‘s emerging artist programme. She had both the personal assurance and the musical talent to carry off, if not at especially breakneck speed, the brilliant ‘Glitter and be gay’ from Candide.

Throughout, the singers had the benefit of the most sensitive and finely judged accompaniments from Bruce Greenfield. His page turner throughout the recital had been Julie Coulson who eventually took a seat at the treble end of the keyboard to share the duet accompaniment for Brahms’s Liebesliederwalzer. None of the young featured singers took part in that performance: instead four of Wellington’s leading resident singers joined forces: Lesley Graham, Linden Loader, Richard Greager, Roger Wilson.

Individually, they brought life and affection to these somewhat pale imitations of what Johann Strauss II was wowing the world with at the same time (to be fair, Brahms did call them ‘innocent little waltzes’ to make clear that he did not aim to ape Strauss, whom he greatly admired); but as a vocal ensemble, their voices were not particularly engaging. It does not reflect on individual vocal qualities, but could as easily happen if you put together four of the world’s greatest singers: the art of selecting voices and managing them so that they blend is a delicate matter, and the smaller the number of singers the more difficult the job.


Nota Bene – A Snow-Free Christmas

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Nota Bene – A Snow-Free Christmas
Nota Bene Choir
Guest Conductor: Peter Walls
Carolyn Mills (harp)
Frances Moore(soprano)
Peter Barber (viola)
Fiona McCabe (piano)

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St.,Wellington

Saturday 6 December 2008

A couple of nights after being mightily impressed by the singing of the Tudor Consort at a recent “Messiah” I must confess to being even more taken with the performances by Christine Argyle’s wonderful choir “Nota Bene” at the group’s recent concert “A Snow- Free Christmas”, conducted by Peter Walls, and given at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Wellington on Saturday night (December 6th).

The Hill Street Cathedral has the double virtue of intimate audience/performer proximity within a relatively voluminous space, and we audience members certainly reaped the benefits of both of these characteristics throughout the concert. This sense of involvement in an occasion was underlined at the beginning and end of the opening work, Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols”, which featured the entrance and exit of the all-female choir singing the traditional Christmas Motet “Hodie” – such a scalp-tingling effect at the start, those distant voices drawing nearer and nearer, bringing with them all the excitement and expectation of something festive, rich and satisfying.

Britten’s work was just one of the evening’s “Christmas” offerings, but it was among the most significant – and its performance, I thought, did the music full justice. The women’s voices of Nota Bene may have lacked the sheer animal vitality of some of the boys’ choirs whose performances I’ve heard of this piece on recordings, but the beauty and purity of their singing for conductor Peter Walls made for some breath-catching moments in places. Aided by some of the most atmospheric and diaphanously-woven harp- playing in this piece which I’ve ever heard, from Carolyn Mills, the choir encompassed every aspect of Britten’s wonderfully variegated settings, moving easily and tellingly from the vigour of “Wolcum Yole!” to the rapt beauty of “There is No Rose”, and beautifully integrating the use of solo voices with the contrasting amplitude of the larger group in numbers such as “Balulalow”. In the previous setting for solo voice and harp, “The Yonge Child” I was struck during this performance by how Britten manages to conjure up sounds that are at one and the same time so new and yet so old, speaking to our time, yet perfectly in accord with the medieval texts favoured by the composer.

Perhaps the choir’s singing of “As Dew in Aprille” might have had a touch more “swing” in its melodic trajectory at the climax to achieve absolute rapture, but amends were made with the tumbling energies of “This Little Babe”, and later a fine sense of almost pagan abandonment in those cries of “Deo gracias” that concluded “Adam Lay I-Bounden” most satisfactorily. Carolyn Mills’s incomparably sensitive realisation of the solo harp interlude was followed by a setting which could be described as the work’s dark heart, “In Freezing Winter Night”, with the choir’s anguished insistence on a repeated high-lying phrase heightened as the music moved up half-a-tone at the climax towards even colder and more forsaken realms, the emotional “squeeze” expertly managed by all.

Solace came with lovely duetting in the “Spring Carol” and a joyous feeling of homecoming in the excitable “Adam Lay I-Bounden”, before the performers took their leave as they had come. After the interval, we were treated to some attractive, intriguingly inter-connected Christmas music manifestations – firstly, listening to Michael Praetorius’s seventeenth-century arrangement of “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen”, and then a twentieth-century “take” of the same carol, arranged by Jan Sandström (the “Motorcycle Concerto” man, as Peter Walls gleefully pointed out to us, reminding us of the NZSO’s recent performance of this work with trombonist Christian Lindberg). Untutored, one would be hard put to associate the latter music and composer with the sounds we heard here – the melody and words were exquisitely “floated” by a quartet of voices antiphonally placed in the choir loft over the top of rich choral humming vocalisations from below – an amazingly timeless effect, brought off most beautifully.

Another set of inter-related musical strands were woven by the performers with a performance of the 14th-Century carol “Resonet in laudibus” (some evocative bare fourths and fifths raising antiquarian goosebumps), then relating the melody to the 17th- Century Lutheran Chorale “Joseph Lieber, Joseph mein”, both carols associated with the medieval practice of “rocking” a cradle during services. As Brahms used this same melody in the instrumental parts of his “Geistliches Wiegenlied”, soprano Frances Moore, violist Peter Barber and pianist Fiona McCabe then performed this song with sensitive teamwork and winning and nostalgic atmosphere.

Francis Poulenc’s attractive “Quatre motets de Noel” challenged the choir in all departments, and enabled them to shine – the opening “O Magnum Mysterium” demonstrated the voices’ flexibility over a wide dynamic range, and a capacity to deliver exquisite detailing; while the dialogues between shepherds and their questioners engendered a compelling story-sense in musical terms. Only the cruelly high soprano writing in “Videntes stellam” seemed to bring out the merest hint of strain, though the poise of the singing was unimpaired, with the evocative shifting harmonies of the concluding “Hodie” making for a rich and satisfying conclusion to the work’s performance.

Next were three traditional carols from France, Italy and Latvia – first, the enchanting French “Il est nè le divin enfant” captured our sensibilities with its lovely, droll rhythmic carriage, rather like dancing bagpipes or musettes in partnership with voices. Then came a different connection with another recent Wellington concert – the Italian carol “Quando nascette Ninno” shared the same tune as Handel’s “He shall feed his flock” from “Messiah”, this lovely performance gently scintillated by a jig-like tambourine accompaniment. Most distinctive of the three, however, was the Latvian carol “Dedziet skalu, putiet guni”, whose bell- sonorities and mesmeric rhythms built throughout agglomerations of groups of voices towards an enticing episode of filigree decoration from the sopranos that resonated within a bell-like finish – very nicely brought off! To conclude the concert we were treated to a New Zealand bracket of carols, featuring the work of Carol Shortis, Andrew Baldwin and Douglas Mews Senior. Carol Shortis, a Philip Neill Memorial prize-winner, is currently studying composition at the New Zealand School of Music, and Andrew Baldwin is composer- in-residence at Wellington’s Cathedral of St Paul. Both Shortis’ “I saw a Fair Maiden” and Baldwin’s “O Magnum Mysterium” demonstrated their composers’ skill and experience in writing for voices; while the older, and in some ways more adventurous and confident-sounding work of Douglas Mews Senior, “Snow-free Carols”, gave us three nicely differentiated Christmas settings from this collection, a Pohutukawa Carol with a tripping 6/8 rhythm, a meditative setting for two soloists and choir of Eileen Duggan’s poem “An Imprint of His Little Feet”, and a vigorous, coda- like call to action “Christmas Come In”.

An unscheduled, but wholly appropriate encore to the concert was a performance of the original setting of Franz Gruber’s “Stille Nacht” with guitar accompaniment, the old tune as moving and as evocative as ever, but made even more magically so as the culmination of Nota Bene’s seasonal feast of truly lovely singing. (PM)