RADIANCE, from the NZSO with Simon O’Neill (tenor) and Pietari Inkinen (conductor)  – two glimpses of Richard Wagner’s youth-to-maturity journey as an innovative opera composer.

Posted on by Peter Mechen

RADIANCE, from the NZSO in Wellington
Simon O’Neill (tenor) with Pietari Inkinen (conductor) and the NZSO
Photo: Phoebe Cassidy, NZSO

RICHARD WAGNER (1813-1883)

TANNHÄUSER – Act I – Overture
Act II –  Scene IV “Weh! Weh, mir Unglücksel’gem!”
ACT III – Overture
Scene III “Ich hörte Harfenschlag…..”
“Zurück von mir! Die Stätte wo ich raste ist verflucht!”……
“Hör an, Wolfram. hör an!”

PARSIFAL – Act I – Prelude
Act ii – Prelude
“Amfortas! Die Wunde! – Die Wunde!”
“Ja, diese Stimme! So rief sie Ihm!”
”Mit diesen Zeichen bann’ ich deinen Zauber!”
“Du weisst. Wo du mich wiederfinden kannst!”
Act III  – Prelude and Good Friday Music
“Nur eine Waffe taugt”….
O! – Welchen Wunders höchtes Glück!”……

Simon O’Neill (tenor)
Pietari Inkinen (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Friday 14th August 2026

Two significant players in recent worldwide Wagner presentations returned to Wellington last week with the NZSO – tenor Simon O’Neill and conductor Pietari Inkinen. Together they presented  an innovative programme with the generic title “Radiance” featuring excerpts from two iconic works, Tannhäuser and Parsifal, at opposite ends of Richard Wagner’s creative career as the nineteenth century’s most influential music dramatist. In each case we were given a part-portrayal of the work’s titular hero via significant utterances which reflected Wagner’s own incessant search for redemption and fulfilment in his music as an artist and human being.

Each of the artists involved in this concert has recently earned international recognition in his particular discipline   Tenor Simon O’Neill has enjoyed success in practically every major opera house world-wide, particularly in the great Wagner heldentenor roles, while Pietari Inkinen has earned international critical acclaim for his conducting of Wagner, leading productions of Der Ring des Nibelungen for Bayreuth and for Opera Australia, as well as performances of Die Walküre and Das Rheingold elsewhere.

Putting these two artists with an NZSO that has gone from strength to strength following Inkinen’s nine-year tenure with the orchestra made for an inspired piece of “showcase programming” which brought out the abilities of the participants and their respective advancements and ripenings. The confidence and surety of interchange between conductor and orchestra at the concert’s beginning with Wagner’s Overture to Tannhäuser grew with the music, from a plain and pure opening of the Pilgrims’ Theme  on the horns, through more warmly-nuanced chromatic string passages and wind ensembles’ gathering of the tones towards the brass’s gloriously rich and rounded full delivery.  As the winds’ reprise of the same softly receded, the glittering Venusberg music began, dancing, cajoling and insinuating its way into the soundscape, with Pietari Inkinen’s control of the music’s tones and trajectories building to bacchanale-like irruptions of energy and colour, eventually tamed by the return of the Pilgrims’ Chorus’s insistently resounding strains – splendid stuff!

Pietari Inkinen conducting the NZSO  in “Radiance”
Photo: Phoebe Cassidy, NZSO

Tannhäuser’s story, set in medieval Germany, appealed strongly to nineteenth-century tastes in its dichotomy between delight in pleasures of the senses and a higher, spiritual quest for redemption. We had heard in the Overture this conflict unashamedly expressed, with the Pilgrims’ song of praise interrupted by the strains of music from the court of Venus, to which the troubadour Tannhäuser had been drawn in his travels – but then, having grown tired of Venus’s charms, the knight had returned to his former home to seek redemption and solace in the form of the chaste Elisabeth. However, in a proposed singing contest the troubadour scandalised the company in a spontaneous outburst of praise for his recently-enjoyed “goddess of love”.  Defended by the ever-loyal Elisabeth he was then filled with shame at his intemperate outburst, vowing to take the pilgrimage to Rome to seek forgiveness from the Holy See – Simon O’Neill appeared at this point in the orchestral discourse with his impassioned “Weh! Weh, mir Unglücksel’gem!” (Woe, woe is me, unhappy mortal!), his voice thrillingly riding over the orchestra, striding from the stage with the words “Nach Rom!” (To Rome!) at the end of the excerpt.

The orchestra then told the next part of the story, sounding the music of Tannhäuser’s friend Wolfram (including the well-known “O du mein holder Abendstern” (known popularly as  “O, Star of Eve”), and of Elisabeth, both waiting for Tannhäuser’s return with the Pilgrims from Rome – but to Elisabeth’s sorrow, Tannhäuser is not with them. She leaves and Wolfram’s harp is then heard along with the “Abendstern” melody, bringing Simon O’Neill back onto the platform with the words “Ich hörte Harfenschlag” (I  hear the strains of a harp). In distressed tones, Tannhäuser tells Wolfram not to come close to him as he is accursed – “Zurück von mir! Die Staat, wo ich raste, ist verflucht!” Then follows the Troubadour’s woeful tale of going to Rome with the Pilgrims, but declining to share any of their comforts along the way, hoping it would alleviate the penance due for his sins! “Ich Tat’s – denn in Zerknirschung wollt ich büssen, um meines Engels Tränen zu versüssen”  (I did it because, filled with remorse, I wished to sweeten my angel’s tears!). However, all was to no avail, as the Pope pronounced eternal damnation on Tannhäuser as long as the staff in the pontiff’s hand  “no longer bedecks itself in fresh green” (“nie mehr sie schmuckt mit frischen Grün”). In response to the Pope’s rebuffal, Tannhäuser has reaffirmed his desire to return to the Venusberg and to the charms of Venus, to the horror of Wolfram who tries to stop him. Suddenly, Elizabeth’s name is heard, and the Venusberg and its goddess vanishes!  (In the opera a chorus of Pilgrims bring the news that the Pope’s staff has sprouted with green foliage, so that Tannhäuser’s soul has been saved.)

I’ve written this somewhat “pocketbook version” description of the action to try and convey something of the vividness of the performance of the singer, conductor and orchestra – overwhelming in its power of engagement (everybody playing and singing with extraordinary commitment, every emotion resonating, from hushed whispers through golden-toned exclamations of joy and hope  to forceful urgencies and desperate cries of despair and pain!) It was, in effect, Wagner at his most effusive in his career’s early stages, grappling with his hero’s issues as if they were his own regarding earthly delight and spiritual illumination – a lifelong quest in his art. Simon O’Neill’s absorption and delivery of his character’s utterances flowed with the orchestra’s every nuance under Pietari Inkinen’s many-faceted direction, so that we were ourselves taken up in it all, and left at the end thrilled by the journey’s intoxications.

After the interval we encountered a same-but-different Wagner with his final major work “Parsifal”, one certainly better-known in general terms to many Wellingtonians who, like myself, had seen the first complete performance of the opera in the country’s 2006 International Arts Festival here in the capital – with a major feature of tonight’s performance being Simon O’Neill’s singing of excerpts from the title role he had given complete in that 2006 production! Here were excerpts from Acts Two and Three, the first being Parsifal’s encounters with the embittered ex-Grail Knight-cum-enchanter Klingsor, and his enslaved sorceress Kundry; and then in the Third and final act Parsifal’s return to the Grail-Knights’ wounded leader Amfortas with the Holy Spear that Klingsor had stolen many years before, and which heals Amfortas’s wound.

We first heard what I’ve always regarded as some of Wagner’s greatest music in the Prelude to Act One of the opera – a performance from Inkinen and the players here that seemed to embody Wagner’s own words sung by the Grail-Knight Gurnemanz to Parsifal in Act One – “Du siest, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit” (You see, my Son, here, Time becomes space”) – and still after so many hearings of this music I found myself “taken over” by a sense of being in a unique and precious space, and an inexplicable kind of longing……it was an enchantment that rang through the precincts of the MFC, seeming to dissolve time for the music’s duration – a treasurable experience, via heartfelt music-making! The only slight quibble I had was at the very end of the Prelude, where a kind of “concert-ending” was tacked onto the music – I thought it was a pity that Inkinen didn’t employ the open-ended stage version ending, which I thought invited a sense of continuity with what was to come…..

Rather than being “broken”, the spell was then refocused to Act Two and Klingsor’s realm, the orchestral playing suffused with sulphurous menace and evil intent – here we dispensed with both Parsifal’s heroic deeds in dispersing the fortress’s hapless guardians, and his encounter with the alluring Flower-maidens, and the charms of the seductive Kundry, up to the moment of her first and only kiss with the hero! – At this point we were plunged into the very heart of Parsifal’s quest as he cried out with anguish the name of Amfortas, the wounded King of the Grail-Knights who had succumbed to Kundry’s charms and was wounded with his own spear by the treacherous Klingsor.  O’Neill’s opening words as Parsifal here were “Amfortas! Die Wunde!” (The Wound!), at the climax of the music for Kundry’s kiss, the intensities as heart-rending as I remembered from his stage performance, as was his impassioned self-reproach, all mirrored by Inkinen’s and the orchestra’s meticulous support. After naming her and her “kiss” as the bringer of Amfortas’s torment he rejected Kundry’s further advances with “Ha! Dieser Kuss! – Verderberin! – Weiche von mir! Ewig, ewig von mir!” (Ah, this kiss! – Corrupter! – Get away from me! – Forever, forever away from me!). The orchestra thundered Klingsor’s theme as the enchanter entered with the spear to kill Parsifal, but with the words  “Mit diesem Zeichen bann’ ich deinen Zauber” (With this sign I rout your enchantment!) the latter disarmed Klingsor and, brandishing the spear, brought the walls tumbling down in disarray. As Parsifal left, he turned to the distraught Kundry telling her  “Du weisst, wo du mich wiederfinden kannst!” (You know where you can find me!).Devastating stuff!

What happened next was like an inverse of this remarkable work’s opening with those incredibly intense, heart-rending tones and textures of the opening Prelude  – Wagner brings those intensities to a kind of fruition in sequences popularly known as the “Good Friday Music” as the music returned to the place where the opera began, a Montsalvat-like castle in northern Spain. Here, the Grail Knights have fallen upon hard times, with their leader, Amfortas still ailing from the effects of his wound, and the community of knights lacking leadership and purpose. With the return of Parsifal, the old Knight Gurnemanz expresses joy and hope, and he reminds Parsifal that nature responds to the Saviour’s sacrifice on Good Friday for all humankind, with “Holm und Blume auf den Auen”  (….the Grasses and Flowers in the Meadow)  blooming as “all Creation gives thanks” (“Das dankt dann alle Kreatur” ) with the winds (oboe and clarinet), and then the full orchestra allowing the themes to richly and fully bloom and sing – wonderful moments, in places not unlike Delius in some of the falling chromatic harmonies. This preludes the sombre entrance of the Grail Knights with Amfortas, their ailing King, by this time refusing to perform his office and uncover the Holy Grail. Unnoticed until this moment. Parsifal steps forward holding the Spear, and, singing the words “Nur eine Waffe taugt – die Wunde schliesst das Speer nur, der sie schlug.” (But one weapon serves: only the Spear that smote you can heal your wound) touches Amfortas’s wound with the point of the Spear.  It’s left to Parsifal to proclaim the miracle – “O! Welchen Wunders Hochstes Gluck!”   (O supreme joy of this miracle!), and the music drifts to its sublime conclusion.

While Wagnerians would prefer to experience complete performances of each of these works, it’s nevertheless difficult to imagine concert excerpts such as these better done than here –  and simultaneously fascinating and rewarding to witness Simon O’Neill”s portrayals of each of the title characters, distilling in the chosen sequences  their essences with surety (interesting how the juxtapositioning of the two works in a single evening brought out their similarities in terms of the composer’s overall preoccupation with his heroes’ quest for redemption and enlightenment!) The voice was superbly employed, equal to all Wagner’s demands, and alive to the singularities of expression in each case – that I responded rather more freely to O”Neill’s Parsifal surely reflected my hearing him sing the complete role – but the evening also whetted my appetite for a Tannhäuser under similar circumstances.

As for Pietari Inkinen and the NZSO players, I dips me lid! I had last heard Inkinen conduct Wagner’s music as long ago as 2012 when he conducted a splendidly-performed Die Walküre here in Wellington, also with Simon O’Neill in the cast as Siegmund on that occasion. Here, together, the two distilled the essences of the evening’s characters magnificently, encompassing all their different aspects and further whetting our appetites for more –  presently, still in our dreams, but with our up-and-coming singers demonstrating their abilities in other repertoires, and an orchestra as capable as any in the world, might we not set our sights on Aotearoa’s first complete Ring Cycle, and stimulate some much-needed Trans-Tasman Wagnerian flow in  this direction?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Zealand String Quartet bring to us music with “the beauty of loneliness, pain, strength and freedom”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand String Quartet – Storytellers

Music by Henry Purcell, Anthony Ritchie, Fanny Mendelssohn, Salina Fisher and Benjamin Britten

Prefab Hall, Jessie St., Mt.Cook, Wellington

Wednesday 12th August

Review by Leila Lois, for “Middle C”

We are seated in the glowing wooden wood panelled warehouse structure of Prefab Hall, ensconced down a laneway in Wellington’s Mt.Cook, a full audience for the New Zealand’s String Quartet’s second chapter of their Storytellers tour. The night promises to showcase both classical masterworks and contemporary commissions, each piece to guide and delight through sonic narrative.

The night is introduced by an address from Martin Smith on cello, who reminds us of the fateful words of the classical poster-boy of the series, Benjamin Britten: . He wrote, “It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness, of pain: of strength and freedom.” A perfect epigraph to an evening of music with such a breadth of emotional registers and composition styles.

First up is Chacony in G minor Z.730 by Henry Purcell, (c. 1680) (arranged by Britten in 1947). The piece, as the quartet accentuates, encapsulates the seventeenth century Baroque style of Purcell, with the expressive reimagining of Purcell. The Chacony is a glittering celebration of admiration of one composer for another, alive with playfulness and colour. The repetition and transformation and vibrant way the quartet plays really delights the ears and embraces us with warmth. It is, as Smith tells us, the 50 year anniversary of Britten’s death, and as such a marvellous moment to hear the piece. Various amusing asides are given relating to Britten and his unyielding genius, himself professing that he was “an arrogant and impatient listener” to other masters’ work. These are welcome and uplifting, and remind us of the strength of obsession and devotion in classical music.

The second piece for the evening is New Zealand composer, Anthony Ritchie’s String Quartet No.3, ‘In Time’ Op. 221 (2023). The programme notes describe the work as “a meditation on the passing of time” and exploring “the temporal nature of our existence”. It certainly feels like a journey through the two movements, Perpetual Motion and Last Dance, which have a giddying tarrantism to them, and demonstrate the toil of the quartet’s artistry, as the bow of Peter Clark’s violin loses quite a few strings by the end. It’s mesmerising and rather frenetic, in contrast to the rest of the programme, a necessary tonal shift perhaps.

Next, a too rarely celebrated work by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, forever in her time behind her renowned composer brother’s shadow.

The String Quartet in E flat major, H.277 (1834) is a perfect antidote to the tempo of the previous piece, with a lyrical slow build and an ephemeral scherzo, building into a vivacious finale. It is so refreshing to see these historical female composers at last getting their dues in contemporary bills.

Interval, and then a rare treat from young Kiwi composer, Salina Fisher, who wrote the piece Heal during the internationally fateful year of 2020, when the world was reeling from the shock of COVID-19 lockdowns. It is a hugely tender piece, really resonating in the body through the yearning of the cello and overlapping notes. A gorgeous experience to hear this live in Fisher’s hometown, Wellington.

The final piece for the evening was  Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No. 2, in C major, Op. 36 (1945) which was written as part of the 250th anniversary commemorations of Henry Purcell’s death. The piece truly  reflects Britten’s deep admiration for the composer he adored, and the quartet perform this to a breathtaking degree.

The work was composed after Britten returned from Germany, where he accompanied Yehudi Menuhin in concerts for survivors of Nazi concentration camps, and it bears the mark of deep emotional intensity. The quartet held audiences in rapture with this final piece.

A wonderful meditation on peace and healing (Britten having been famously a pacifist and conscientious objector). This lyrical programme, with some excellent storytelling by the quartet members themselves is surely a highlight of the New Zealand chamber music calendar for this year, an extraordinary tour of timely works, played with nothing but devotion.

 

Beethoven in Kelburn resounding in St. Michael’s beautiful church

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Koru Trio
Rachel Thomson (piano), Anne Loeser (violin) Sally Isaac (‘cello)

BEETHOVEN – Romance No. 2  in F Major Op.50 (arrangement for violin and piano (published; Simrock)
BEETHOVEN – Piano Trio No. 6 in B-flat Major Op. 97 “Archduke”

St.Michael’s Church, St.Michael’s Crescent, Kelburn, Wellington
Saturday 8th August, 2026

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

A chance to revisit the ineffable beauties of the ambience and atmosphere of St. Michael’s Church in Kelburn, a place I’d actually discovered for myself earlier this year as a venue for music-making,  came with the announcement of a concert to be presented by the Koru Trio.

I was somewhat taken aback when I “looked up” the Middle C website to ascertain just when it was I’d last heard this ensemble play, and found the occasion was no less than six years ago at a St.Andrew’s Lunchtime Concert! – https://middle-c.org/2020/07/koru-trio-giving-the-st-andrewss-audience-its-kohas-worth-and-more/ – what was more, it reviewed performances whose excellences should have been set in stone in my memory, so effusive were the terms with which I’d expressed my pleasure at the playing’s qualities!

As the performers in practically all the concerts I attend obviously bring so much more in terms of skill, involvement and understanding of the music that I do as a mere listener, it’s only fair that I confess on occasions such as these to my failings of proper and lasting “connection” with the music I hear, and especially so when the -performances deserve to be better remembered!

Having gotten that sin of omission “off my chest” as it were, I felt I could revisit with a clear conscience my feelings regarding the efforts of tonight’s performers  It wasn’t a long and involved concert, the fewer-than-usual items arguably allowing our responses ample space for appreciating the content more deeply and thoughtfully, a kind of “quality set against quantity” dynamic which I thought worked to the experience’s advantage.

Tonight’s composer was Ludwig van Beethoven, presented in a more than usually mellow mood with his serenely melodic Op.50 Romance in F Major, here in an arrangement for violin and piano  (published by Simrock) as opposed to the composer’s original version for soloist and orchestra. Both instruments sounded to my ears beautifully voiced in relation to one another – Anne Loeser’s violin sounded rich in her lower registers and silvery at the top, while her partnership with pianist Rachel Thomson was straightaway marked with a sense of “give and take”, the piano’s liquid tones readily finding the points of exchange with the violin in bringing out the veracity of the music’s “Romance” title.  And the performance didn’t hesitate to venture briefly into the music’s darker side as well, though the nuances from both players seemed in agreement in their gradual return to the opening’s serenity, allowing  the ‘whimsy’ that was enjoyed by both in the  concluding  exchanges to surrender to the music’s dying fall with acceptance and grace aplenty.

One of Beethoven’s most famed compositions, the “Archduke” Piano Trio, completed by the composer in 1811 has the somewhat sad distinction of being the last keyboard work Beethoven played in public, due to his ever-increasing deafness which by then was seriously undermining his ability as a performer. Contemporaries such as Louis Spohr and Ignaz Mosecheles have left accounts of their illustrious contemporary’s pitiable state as a pianist by this stage, throwing into greater relief the increasing transcendence of his creative efforts as time went on.

The work got its name from its dedication to one of Beethoven’s most constant supporters and patrons among the aristocracy, the Archduke Rudolf of Austria, who was an amateur pianist and a sometimes pupil of the composer – among the other most famous compositions Beethoven dedicated to Rudolf are the “Emperor” Piano Concerto, the “Hammerklavier” Piano Sonata and the ”Missa Solemnis – it could be said that we have a lot to thank His Imperial and Royal Highness for!

With ‘cellist Sally Isaac having joined the ensemble on the platform, we were ready, the piano obviously chafing at the bit to begin, the strings in waiting, and the audience expectant – what more could be required of a performance to excite with its prospects? Rachel Thomson’s confident and assertive opening invitation drew both her colleagues and her audience into the composer’s world of self-assured statement and ready reply – there was straightaway a kind of eagerness to explore in the exchanges an atmosphere of going places as opposed to any thoughts of self-satisfaction and contentment with a status quo – if it sounded to me just a trifle rushed at first, it conveyed a youthful vigour, which the opening’s repeat was then content to pull back and allow a touch of almost Olympian grandeur, the intent duly expressed and the means and expectations confident.

The development unravelled the opening theme, the players here savouring the individual phrases from the whole, the strings having bowed their different impulses with the piano’s encouragement, then turned to pizzicato phrases, firstly in dialogue and then intertwining their lines and dancing with the piano’s equally playful responses. The return of the reconstituted theme gave the cello a chance to sing before the piano led the ensemble daintily through a dancing world, the strings following canonically behind up to the cello’s thematic variation that always sounds to me so much like the opening of one of the Rasumovsky Quartets (No.7) – even if NOT in that work’s key of F major! Here it all sounded so joyous, with a magnificently-voiced return of the great opening theme, before the players grandly and decorously delivered the final chords.

The scherzo delighted with its “question-and-answer” opening, the players’ enjoyment of the exchanges palpable, as Sally Isaac’s ‘cello teased a concerted response from Anne Loeser’s violin, whose instrument then repaid the gesture in kind, and with Rachel Thomson’a piano delivering a “wait-for-me” catch-up repetition of the melody, bolstered  by string pizzicato and augmented by an extension of the opening phrase which the players drew out and varied in turns with ease and fluency. After this bright-eyed and bushy-tailed opening, how mysterious and “inner world-like” seemed the Trio’s first utterances, the instruments “musing” among themselves in chromatic, canonic-like meanderings whose sequences then occasionally thrust their tones upwards from the miasmal mists with “Eureka-like” exclamations from all of the players together worthy of Archimedes of antique legend!!
These diverting irruptions completed, we were returned to the Scherzo’s sprightly dance as before. A brief revisitation of the chromatic musing sequences at the end produced no further “Eurekas” but a vigorously conclusive instrumental  “Amen!”.

The heart of the work – and this performance – was the slow movement, whose every note seemed like a meditative commentary regarding human existence and its potentialities, which state of things Beethoven saw and felt despite his infirmities, and was able to realise in his music, increasingly so as time passed. Begun by the piano a hymn-like melody arched gracefully  forwards and upwards as the strings joined in, echoing both “sections” of the melody introduced by the piano. Then followed the most exquisite set of variations in various guises and combinations, the composer’s invention seeming to take wing, whether meditative or playful, solemn or skitterish, every sequence calling to mind a mood or character whose source springs from the same life-force, and casting a spell over the music-making.

It was one which a sudden, abrupt interruption swept away in what seemed like the twinkle of a cosmic eye, an impulse that straightaway set all existence dancing with nary a backward glance, an effervescent gushing of energies in which we found ourselves caught up and relishing! The jauntily-paced rhythms developed real schwung in places with fanfare-like flourishes tossed between the instruments, before a reprise of the dancing tune restored some order, exuding as much charm and  gaiety as before – when just as whimsically, a mischievous will-o’-the-wisp spirit set our sensibilities on a madcap, near-vertiginous dance which left us tingling with feelings of joy and good humour. What a delightful experience! – an intoxicating combination of music, venue and presentation, special and treasurable!

 

 

 

 

Classics and commemoratives from the splendid Aroha Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents the Aroha String Quartet

The Aroha Quartet: Eli Vincent (viola), Konstanze Artmann (violin), Haihong Liu (leader), Robert Ibell (‘cello)  – photo, Wellington Chamber Music

HAYDN – String Quartet Op. 64 No,6
BARBER – String Quartet Op.11
ROSS CAREY – Toccatina (Elegy – 2010)
BEETHOVEN – String Quartet No. 10 “Harp” Op.74

St.Andrew’s on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday 2nd August

This was a beautiful and revelatory concert from the Aroha String Quartet,as near to a “something for everybody” presentation as one might reasonably wish for!

First of all, there was a String Quartet by Josef Haydn, as delightfully self-explanatory and satisfying as any work from the string quartet repertoire could be to as wide a range of tastes as might be imagined. Following this we heard a work by American composer Samuel Barber, his single most well-known piece of music, popularly known as Barber’s Adagio for Strings, but here brought to us in its original context as part of a three-movement string quartet.

After the interval the focus was shifted to some “closer to home” music, not as indigenous in origin as might have been possible, but whose human interest connection resonated sufficiently for us to register its proximity and relevance to our part of the world.   This was music by Lower-Hutt-born Ross Carey, written in 2010 to commemorate the death of Ruby Hunter (1955-2010), the indigenous Australian singer-songwriter, Carey having been inspired by what he considered as “the profound personal struggles and triumphs of the dedicatee”, one of Australia’s “Stolen Generation” who was taken from her birth family and placed in foster care from the age of eight. She became the first indigenous Australian woman to record and release a solo rock album. Carey in his  work Toccatina – Elegy wanted to reflect something of that eventful journey.

A different and no less eventful kind of life-journey was that of the composer of the concert’s concluding work, Ludwig van Beethoven, whose String Quartet No.10 in E-flat Major, Op.74.has long become identified with its nickname, “The Harp” (given not by the composer, incidentally, but by a publisher!), and earning the sobriquet through its opening movement’s passages of plucked arpeggiated notes .Beethoven dedicated this work to the Archduke Rudolf, one of his most loyal supporters in Vienna. Written against the background of battles in and all around Vienna between the Austrian and French armies, the quartet was able to be premiered towards the end of 1809 after the French had left!

So to the music and its performance – and, to begin, we heard the last of Haydn’s six Quartets Op, 64, in E-flat , a group dedicated to Johann Tost, a virtuoso violinist of the composer’s acquaintance. What a glorious E-flat opening of the work we enjoyed! – with the refulgent warmth of the tones spreading through the ambient spaces of St.Andrew’s, a combination of elegance and playfulness with the sonorous opening set against those filigree impulses of playfulness. The development was treated as a kind of “fantasia” on the opening, before the second violinist presided over a kind of “triologue” between the other three players, a delightful sequence of conversational exchanges, each with a personable kind of opinionated quality, and seeming to come to concerted agreement before returning to the opening – the revisitations added enrichments and feelings of increased satisfaction to the exchanges in their sense of a shared, and obviously relished experience. The slow movement had its own surprise in store – after a serenely lullabic, beautifully “arching-over” melodic opening, the  music\.s central section abruptly changes, depicting what the programme note calls a ”tantrum” from the first violinist (terrific playing from Haihong Liu, here!) – one wonders how “personal” an utterance this episode depicted, as the composer’s marriage was reputedly not a happy one! On the other hand, its volatility could be nothing more than an instance of “gypsy-like” character Haydn had frequent recourse to in his music.

I adored the Menuet’s performance – here, lively and somewhat pesante in character, with the aristocracy depicted as “kicking up its heels” in places, stepping outside the traditionally “courtly” nature of such interactions. The Trio is a gentler “landler” which employs occasional glissandi figurations – a mannerism deemed too “vulgar” by nineteenth-century editors, “smoothing out” the scoops in the lines, but here restored, giving the music an engaging folkish character! And what a joy was the finale! – real “Keystone Cops” stuff which a later composer given also to such headlong dashings, Dmitri Shostakovich, would have relished all the more had he been a violinist!  The whirling, almost vertiginous figurations enacted a stop/start manner whose theatricality added to the pleasures of the entertainment, complete with teasing tempo variants towards the end, and capped off with a furious presto finish that had us on the edges of our seats for the final flourish.

Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings has long been the American equivalent of Elgar’s “Nimrod”, taken from the latter’s “Enigma Variations”, music whose strands in both cases readily conjure up a sense of shared emotion involving either commemoration or loss on the part of a whole nation and in many cases across boundaries. Both pieces are parts of larger works, in Barber’s case a string quartet Op.11 from 1936, one whose second movement Adagio the composer quickly made into an arrangement for string orchestra, one which has virtually gone around the world, leaving the remainder of the hapless parent work languishing in the wings of largely unheralded appreciation!

Now was our chance to hear the actual “source” from which the work was drawn. It was the first time I had heard the string quartet version of the work, and, in fact, my first experience of the complete quartet! Barber was content with completing three movements, the familiar Adagio here flanked by an opening  “molto allegro e appassionato” movement, and a concluding “molto allegro (come prima)” sequence, He began work on the piece in 1935 while living in Austria with his partner, Gian Carlo Menotti, intending to have the work finished for performance by the Curtis Quartet – however, the finale gave Barber a good deal of trouble, and after the first, delayed, performance of the work, Berber rewrote the movement several times, eventually settling for a kind of reprise of the beginning movement, music of spiky textures featuring colourful contrasts of mood, much shorter than the two movements preceeding it.

The first movement  opened intensely and passionately – music that seemed in a hurry to take us somewhere. A dramatic pause introduced a more lyrical second theme, refreshingly open and song-like, until the tempo was impulsively switched back to the opening urgencies, though retreating again for a gorgeous violin solo, prompting the ensemble to take up the lyrical lines, the cello enjoying a moment of rapturous expression as well – the players then remembered their allegiances to the opening urgencies once again, but couldn’t resist the nostalgic beauties of the more lyrical sequences, which they returned to most affectingly – the music seemed to want to have its cake and eat it too, reminding the players of the music’s need for further fervent gesturings before enigmatically concluding the movement with a few abruptly dismissive shrugs.

The Adagio which followed needed no detailed description, except that its long lines of expression engulfed our  sensibilities in a timeless world, seemingly endless “stretches of sound” which created their own breathing-patterns and impulses, out of normal time, and reminiscent of something like an ancient chant drawing inexhaustible energies from some kind of life-force, and prompting those listening to attune their own biorhythms accordingly – the viola in the ensemble held what seemed like a central note, while the surrounding instruments both stratospherically and metamorphically harmonised to mesmerising effect.  in the midst of the silences that followed, the heartfelt epilogue brought violin and viola together to sound the opening theme’s concluding voice – a superb, deeply affecting performance!

Was a finale necessary after such an utterance? I think so – some kind of “closure” was actually welcomed after the rawness of the Adagio’s conclusion, and the sense of continuation from the first movement brought us back to a world from which we had escaped, and perhaps needed to be re-reminded of, however enriched by the revelations of the Adagio’s other-worldliness. The famous stand-alone Adagio wasn’t at all diminished by its quartet companions, but its impact was sharpened and  made more  multi-dimensional in its original context.

The interval’s breathing-space prepared us for something different, a work whose composer was present in the audience! This was New Zealand-born Ross Carey’s work Toccatina (Elegy), though its subject was more Trans-Tasman than home-grown, and was written while Carey was in Australia. The composer talked with us briefly about the work’s subject-matter before we got down to grips with the actual music – here in three sections, the first an energetically restless “perpetuum mobile” with the lower strings providing rock-steady “hocket” accompaniment to the violins’ soaring and swooping overhead lines, the first violin at first taking the lead with some heart-stopping stratospheric lines, but increasingly joined by the second violin, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in counterpoint!  In the second section the ‘cello took the lead with a poignant-sounding repeatedly descending figure (lovely voicings from the ‘cello!), supported by a tapestried networking of triplet-like lines from the other instruments, handing over to the violin in places, with the figurations from both instruments seeming to dance to their own music in places….before we knew what was happening the first movement’s ostinato-like movement had crept back, this time with more resolve in the music’s sights, the rhythms giving way gradually to what became increasingly self-affirming statements of quiet fruition at the end – in its way, profound and moving.

And so we reached the concert’s last item – I remember the distinctive first-movement concluding “motif” of Beethoven’s “Harp” string quartet being used as the theme of a televised programme series about famous works of art, long before I started getting to know the quartets properly. Having been television-less now for nigh-on forty years, the aural spaces that were created in my life by such a blessed liberation left room for music of all kinds, and inevitably brought those remarkable works swimming into my ken – so that the reappearance of the aforementioned motif, with its genesis long since identified, continued to give special pleasure!

So it was, naturally, that the Aroha’s voyage through this quartet’s opening, truly venturesome movement enabled me to enjoy that sense of returning from afar all over again, though of course the intermittent journeyings between the aural milestones were as rewarding in their own way, and especially in this intensely committed performance – the opening poco adagio took us into a world of wonderment with those occasional sforzandi chordings reminding us not to tarry overmuch amid incidental beauties, but to keep our intents and purposes on the journey! With the allegro came those delicately-placed pizzicati notes which earned the quartet the sobriquet of “Harp”, along with amazing will-o-the-wisp figurations whose vertiginous quality (here, brilliantly executed) whirled through our sensibilities up to the moment of my “great works of art” revisitation passage, forever fresh and nostalgic at one and the same time! The work’s middle section varied between amazingly “busy’ variants of  the movement’s first allegro subject, and rapid-fire pizzicato exchanges, taking us on a whirlwind kind of ride to the recapitulation, in which all the movement’s elements returned in “same-but-different” guises, and an extended kind of “coda” which managed to integrate those same elements in a spirited confrontation-like summation AND re-echo my “motif” of  cherished memory!

The programme note mentioned the second movement’s ”tender love aria” description, which the performance straightaway brought out, possibly a reflection of an “amour” of the composer’s, though one which perhaps didn’t work as planned due to the near-despair of the minor key mood that suddenly clouded the music, and the almost palpable “hesitancy” which takes over the exchanges! The violin determinedly took the initiative, supported by the cello, before the mood darkened once again (and with the violin dropping into a register that resembled a viola or even a ’cello while its violin partner took the higher ground! Again the instruments mused between hope and despair, though one sensed as much a feeling of resignation in the softly-whispered concluding chords.

What a startling difference wrought by the vigorously-propelled Scherzo, here! Bitingly-precise ensembled attack depicted a fierce kind of exultation, the playing part exhilarating, part fearsome in its physicality, quite overwhelming in its impact, its four-note repetitive phrase modelled on the opening of the Fifth Symphony, premiered just a few months before. The “Trio” sections didn’t let up, but whirled like dervishes around and about chant-like figures, ostensibly used by the composer as counterpoint exercises for his pupils. The scherzo’s “third-time round” was then delivered in increasingly whispered tones, coming to an unresolved halt, and allowing the first strains of the finale to sound from the exhausted silences – an engagingly repeated three-note Allegretto theme!

The first of the variations on this theme, a dancing, canonic celebration of gaiety providing further welcome relief from the scherzo’s punishingly relentless drive. was led by the ‘cello, as was the following graceful triplet variation. Then came a contrasting running variant of the theme, followed variously by a slower, wistful sequence, a sprightlier violin-led dance, and a chugging ’cello triplet accompaniment a cross-rhythmed song – this grew in intensity and pace until it changed to an allegro stretto with all the instruments excitingly in unison, and racing towards the work’s end, finishing, somewhat disconcertingly, on two soft chords!

What a finish, and what a performance, as evidenced by warm appreciation from all parts of the auditorium!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Manon – an operatic journey of turmoil and struggle for survival

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Opera presents:
JULES MASSENET’s  MANON – Opera in Five Acts
libretto by Henri Meilhac

Cast:  Manon Lescaut (soprano) – Amina Edris
Le Chevalier des Grieux (tenor) – Pene Pati
Lescaut, Manon’s cousin (baritone) – Phillip Rhodes
Le Comte des Grieux, the Chevalier’s father (bass) – Wade Kernot
Guillot de Morfontaine ( tenor) – Patrick Power
Monsieur de Brétigny ( baritone) – Kieran Rayner
Poussette, an actress (soprano) – Sarah Mileham
Javotte, an actress (mezzo-soprano) – Jasmine Jessen
Rosette, an actress (mezzo-soprano) – Charlotte Secker
L’Hotelier (bass) – Brent Allcock
Guardsmen – Matt Landreth/Joshua Jamieson

Wellington Opera Chorus – director, Michael Vinten
Orchestra Wellington – conductor, Romain Dumas

Director – Sara Brodie
Set Design – Michael Zaragoza
Costume Design – Rebecca Bethan-Jones
Lighting Design – Paul O’Brien

St.James’ Theatre, Wellington
Saturday, Ist August, 2026
(until 9th August 2026)

Reviewed by Peter Mechen for “Middle C” and “Opera” (UK)

Manon is probably composer Jules Massenet’s most famous work, a five-act opera comique which premiered in Paris in 1884, and which has been a staple of the opera repertory ever since. My first encounter with this work’s name (and that of its composer!) was through a most diverting book I read during my musically formative musical years, a collection of anecdotes and quotations attributed to the legendary conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, well known as a wit and raconteur. Beecham adored French music and was famously quoted in the book as declaring – “I would give the whole of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos for Massenet’s Manon and would think that I had profited by the exchange.”

Though I’ve now fallen under the opera’s spell (my feelings affirmed by this heart-rending production), it took a long while for my explorations to reach the character of Manon (and I’ve still not heard Puccini’s near-eponymously-named Manon Lescaut, nor have I read the original Abbé Prévost novel). I wasn’t at first attracted to the character of Manon herself, an attitude coloured by the less-than-flattering judgements of various (invariably male) commentators – of course the story of Manon is told all along from a male perspective (that of her ill-fated lover, the Chevalier des Grieux), which in my youthful eyes skewed the story against her favour – she’s portrayed as beautiful and charming, but also addicted to wealth and pleasure, and aware of the effects of her beauty and sexuality as tools in manipulating others for her own ends.

Getting to know and think about Massenet’s and his librettist Henri Meilhac’s work more closely, one develops increased sympathy for her character and her actions – her instincts as a “survivalist” necessarily inform what she does throughout, but ultimately take her beyond the point of return on the road to Le Havre in the drama’s heartrending final scene. I found myself less inclined or even able to sit in judgement on her character as merely “shallow”, and by the end of this performance found myself in a kind of wholeheartedly “born-again” agreement with the production’s director Sara Brodie, who expressed in a programme note the character’s determination to “survive” in a man’s world, and realise her “truths” beyond those of the conventional “male gaze”. That final scene opened within me a watershed of sympathy for both her and the luckless des Grieux having to endure their own shared-but-divided fates on that desolate road – Manon meeting her death and des Grieux left to endless darkness and despair. I thought of poet Dylan Thomas’s words regarding the toll exacted by the life-force in one of his poems – “that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer”.

Naturally I was looking forward to the Wellington Opera production, relishing among other things the thought of witnessing in situ two much-acclaimed voices bringing these aforementioned characters to life – soprano Amina Edris as Manon Lescaut and Pene Pati as Chevalier des Grieux – luxury casting indeed! All seemed well at the beginning, with conductor Romain Dumas getting from the Orchestra Wellington band some superbly energetic introductory flourishes, garnished by heartfelt wind-and-string tones, setting in motion and colouring the ambiences of the story. Through what seemed a distinctive setting of old-world portals of public places, in this case a hotel next to a railway station, came a group of people, vociferously demanding the attentions of the hotelier and impatiently awaiting signs of a response!

Here we met certain of the story’s significant characters – firstly the aged roue Guillot de Morfontaine  (Patrick Power) with an entourage consisting of three young actresses, Pousette (Sarah Mileham), Javotte (Jasmine Jessen) and Rosette (Charlotte Secker), plus a friend, Monsieur de Bretigny  (Kieran Rayner), all seconding the urgent demands of Guillot for service, to which the long-suffering hotelier  (Brent Alcock) eventually and good-naturedly responds. All splendidly acquitted themselves, with Patrick Power’s Guillot pompous and self-important in his utterances, and Kieran Rayner’s elegantly self-contained but purposeful de Bretigny a kind of “foil”, as well as the three actresses’ voices both mellifluously blending, and coquettishly keeping their escorts’ attentions. This, of course, like the original “Carmen” of Bizet’s, is an “opera comique”, featuring passages of spoken dialogue in between recitatives and set-piece arias and ensembles – though not a “French speaker” I was amply assisted by the surtitles in being able to relish the theatrical cut and thrust of the characters’ soliloquies and sung/spoken exchanges throughout.

Lescaut (Phillip Rhodes), Manon’s cousin (here, sturdily officious and fatherly of manner) appeared with two of his associates (Matt Landreth and Joshua Jamieson), ostensibly to meet Manon and escort her to the convent as previously arranged, but also to enjoy a shared game of dice with his companions. The train arrived (complete with atmospheric puffs of smoke and steam – an update from Massenet’s original coach!), and after several passengers had disembarked with a fine degree of confused to-do, the stage was set for Manon’s arrival.

I must admit to feeling somewhat confused by my initial view of Amina Edris as Manon in this production  – though her singing and acting as a suitably overawed “provincial miss” new to the city, was convincingly “young-girlish”, with shyness and exuberance set in delightful interplay, (with her opening aria Je suis encore tout étourdie (“I can’t conceal all my confusion!”) winsome and  delightful!), I found it difficult to reconcile myself to the “gawky-schoolgirl” look of her unflattering attire, which for me compromised whatever feminine charm and allure she possessed, thus reducing (or recasting) the verisimilitudes of the composer’s intended “smitten” responses of the various men to her appearance – we heard, firstly, her cousin Lescaut describing her as  Une belle fille (“A lovely creature”),  and Charmante (“Quite enchanting!”), aa we did the old roue Guillot, who professed to be totally smitten by her appearance, asking her for Obtenir de vous un seul mot d’amour  (“A single word of love from your lips!”) – he was quickly brought back into line by his three attendant actresses, who chided him for his foolishness!

Lescaut reappeared, warned Manon regarding unwanted male attention with the cautionary  Soyez gentille! (“Be on your guard!”) and told her to wait for him to return from his card-games – but again, then, with Pene Pati’s appearance as des Grieux, and his fulsome response to his first sighting of Manon, I couldn’t help feeling that his words of utter besottedness  – O ciel!  Est-ce un rêve? (“O, heavens! – Am I dreaming?”) – didn’t accord with the “picture” I was presented  from upon the stage….(as previously stated, I confess to being, at the time, nonplussed by all of this! – the fault must surely have been entirely of my own sensibility, perhaps bringing to bear a convoluted memory of my own jejune “falling in love” experiences – and as such, which I am unreservedly “owning up” to!!). Maybe, as a friend said afterwards to me, for the people together on stage their proximities would obviously overcome any untoward “concealment of beauty” and those utterances I’ve quoted had no sign of any ‘forced pretence” or artificiality by either singer concerning the acting or vocalising – the emotions were as heartfeltly expressed as one could wish for!

Nor, thankfully, were there any reservations in this regard from the beginning of Act Two onwards! In fact, it seemed as if I had woken from a dream and was regaling the appearance of the “true” Manon, as the “enchanteresse” composer and librettist had intended all along! From here, and right up until  the opera’s piteous final scene Edris’s Manon for me simply blossomed in terms of her appearance, with designer Rebecca Bethan Jones’s series of stunning costumes for the heroine readily and effervescently complemented the latter’s disarmingly self-assured beauty, further buoyed along by her determination to succeed in the world of the men seeking to “possess” her – whether in Act Two with des Grieux, reading his letter On L’apelle Manon (“Her name is Manon”), or, later in the same Act, her touching, if somewhat ambivalently coloured, Adieu, notre petite table (“Farewell, our little table”) salute to the couple’s apartment, with de Brétigny in the famous Act Three Gavotte  Obéissons quand leur voix appelle  (“Let us obey when their voices are calling”) on the promenade of Cours-la-Reine at festival-time, or, with des Grieux in the solemn precincts of St. Sulpice Church where she persuades him to forgive her faithlessness and give up his desire to “escape” into the world of prayer and service to others, and return to their past love, in her touching N’est-ce plus ma main? (“Is this not my hand?”). Edris’s Manon “grew” her character in voice and deportment along this journey, as singularly as did other doomed operatic heroines such as Carmen, or Katerina in Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” at their respective journeys’ ends –  Manon’s final moments with des Grieux were at once wretched and yet noble, coming to “own” her self-truths as well as expressing her love for him before expiring, her character portrayal a transfixing and compelling “moment” of radiant intensity, just as would a brilliant shooting-star flash briefly across the heavens towards oblivion.

Pene Pati, as Manon’s paramour, des Grieux, also grew his character from a degree of theatrical awkwardness at the couple’s meeting to a full-blooded, if somewhat over-wrought passion for his “enchanteresse”, one which the events of the story pushed to extremes of delight and despair, as the couple’s fortunes waxed and waned. The tenor’s complete absorption in the role was palpable at all times, both in vocal and on-stage terms – his singing of En ferment les yeux (“When I close my eyes”) to Manon  when together in the lovers’ apartment in Act Two, had that quality of “living value”, of converting the tones into genuine feeling – a mark of greatness! – then, at a different stage of the story, and with a rawer, more vulnerable quality, his aria in the St Sulpice Church – Je suis seule (“I am alone”) – in which he strove to free himself from thoughts of Manon  and devote himself to a life of service to others. As well, there was a treasurable fluency of physical interaction between Pati and his stage-partner (who happens to be his real-life partner as well, of course!) In an interview Pati amusingly – and touchingly – made reference to his and Armina Edris’s real-life relationship, commenting that it had its pros and cons on stage, though an advantage was that they “didn’t have to rehearse the romantic scenes!”  Nevertheless, the partnership seemed to draw from a kind of mutually-generated spontaneity, a naturalness of expression for both Pati and Edris, evident in what came across from both as a no-holds-barred musical and dramatic assumption, with the occasionally strained higher note indicative of the voices’ utter commitment to their roles. We were thus made to feel the singularity of the pair’s achievement in no uncertain terms throughout.

By no means, however, was our delectation confined to the efforts of the story’s leading characters – while not, perhaps an “ensemble” opera in the sense of Mozart’s “Figaro” which I had heard splendidly presented earlier this year in Wellington, Manon nevertheless requires a number of engaging and capable soloists to bring to life various other significant characters in the drama – and here, an entirely home-grown cast gave its audience a good deal of pleasure with its array of individual talents. As mentioned, beginning the stage action was one of New Zealand opera’s most distinguished and experience singers, tenor Patrick Power, as Guillot de Morfontaine, a roue (a French term for “a debauched, lecherous or immoral man”, usually of advanced years), one accustomed to announcing his presence (and his “entitlements”) from a position of wealth, here a robustly-voiced and double-sided figure of both comic fun and more insidious, vengeful intent, one whose rebuffal by Manon on various occasions in the story eventually brought about her downfall at Guillot’s instigation.

Bringing elegance, beauty and good humour to Guillot’s entourage were three of his consorts, elegantly-attired young actresses, probably in his pay for various kinds of amusements, Poussette (soprano Sarah Mileham), Javotte (mezzo-soprano Jasmine Jesson) and Rosette (mezzo-soprano Charlotte Secker) – the three voices alternated between individual observations and concerted comments relating to whatever was happening in the story, the effect at first delightful and amusing when the three chide Guillot for attempting to solicit the young Manon’s favours at his first meeting with her!  Manon envies them their beauty and elegance at first – but comes to share in their world of luxury and pleasure during subsequent scenes in the festival promenade on the Cours-la-Reine, and at the Hotel Transylvania’s gambling tables, until Guillot’s revenge on Manon and des Grieux puts a brutal and unforgiving end to their aspirations.

A further character makes a significant appearance in the Third Act and in various subsequent scenes – this was des Grieux’s father Le Comte des Grieux, who Manon obliquely questions regarding his son’s state of mind after their separation and who answers her with respectful forbearance. The Comte’s later exchanges with his son were given all the parental and societal authority one expected by Wade Kermot’s solemnly sonorous portrayal, doubly-vexed by his son’s reckless affair with Manon, and his subsequent “volte-face” desire to enter the Church. Each of the scenes directly involving father-and-son has a splendidly archetypal sense of timeless confrontation reproduced in all art-forms across the ages – and here, the ecclesiastical solemnity of the renowned Parisian church of Saint-Sulpice was the paradigmatic opposite of the gambling rooms of the Hotel Transylvania, where, in both instances the son was censured by the father – ruefully and philosophically in the privacy of the church, and then trenchantly and censoriously in the tumultuous latter scene in which Guillot wrought his revenge on both Manon and des Grieux, accusing them both of cheating and having them arrested by the police.

Throughout the course of this passionately exuberant and ominously fateful play of events and circumstances the Wellington Opera Chorus brought to the story’s unfolding a vigorously concentrated, chameleon-like series of tableaux, both dynamic, and in places wonderfully frozen in dream-like mise-en-scene “onlooker” stasis amid the vibrant energies, as if choosing to amalgamate momentarily in a “snapshot” with our own audience’s view. Whether on the vibrant promenade of Paris’s Cours-La-Reine or within the inner sanctum of St Sulpice’s church, the voices resoundingly conveyed the singular ambiences of each location, as did the ensemble’s purposefully focused choreographed movements. And while Guillot’s dancers in the Act Three “Ballet from the Opera” made (to the latter’s intense chagrin!) little or no impression upon the by then distracted Manon, their graceful performance suitably charmed the rest of us!

The opera’s final scene depicted the hero and heroine in the grip of Guillot’s revenge – des Grieux has been released from prison at the instigation of his father, but Manon has been sentenced to deportation as befalls “women of her kind”. Des Grieux plans to rescue Manon  and bribes a prison guard to free her, but it is too late, as, sick and exhausted, she dies in des Grieux’s arms on the road. Here, it transcended a popular view of opera  “a show in which the heroine dies at the end…”…. a powerful “across-the-board” commitment embodied by the conviction of the performance scene seemed for me to tap into a feeling of personal loss, of genuine grief, and even of a certain heroism regarding what people did and aspired towards on stage during the telling of Manon’s story. The moment’s power and capacity to convey genuine emotion spoke volumes, reflecting the quality of production in every sense, bringing to fruition something positive about every aspect of what took place both on and around about that stage over the evening.

It was a process which began with the very first orchestral note sounded from the pit, the music springing into warm, pulsating life from Orchestra Wellington, in the hands of conductor Romain Dumas, featuring both ensemble brilliance and energy along with the warmth and character of the numerous instrumental solos depicting or supporting the characters in the story. Set designer Michael Zaragoza’s distinctive stage sets from the beginning evoked both hints of the glories of the ancien regime, symbolic “archways” (the portals) through which characters such as Manon boldly, even recklessly, strode, but also an expression of what was termed “jouissance”, with its titular character in particular searching for a singular manifestation of delight beyond everyday pleasure. And lighting designer Paul O’Brien’s evocatively-lit scenarios reproduced the essences of the characters’ different surroundings and circumstances, none more enduring in the memory than the bleakness of the road to Le Havre, on which the luckless couple met their respective fates.

At the opera’s end there occurred a momentous standing ovation, a fitting tribute to the efforts of everybody concerned, and not simply to the “star duo” achievement of the two leads – this was a solidly-rounded acclamation of a performance which satisfied on so many levels , not the least of which how it “grew into” the drama as the evening went on. It was one definitely for the ages, then, and affirmed as such with ever-renewing confidence, energy and understanding throughout by this production – a presentation for Wellington Opera to be justly proud of.

Ozan Biner-McGrath at St.Andrew’s – a piano recital of music to delight in and savour

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MUZIO CLEMENTI (1752-1832) – Piano Sonata in B Minor Op.40 No.2
SERGEI RACHMANINOV (1873-1943) Prelude in B Minor  Op.32 No.10
Etude-Tableau in F-sharp Minor  Op.39 No.3
CESAR FRANCK  (1822-1890) Prelude, Choral et Fugue FWV 21

Ozan Biner-McGrath (piano)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Wednesday 29th July 2026

The St. Andrew’s Lunchtime Concert series in Wellington has consistently delighted us this year with a number of extraordinarily exciting concerts, both performance- and repertory-wise – and this week the series came up with yet another absolute winner! This was a piano recital presented for us by a young pianist from Dunedin, Ozan Biner-McGrath, who’s currently a year-13 student at the city’s Logan Park High School while undertaking piano studies, both with his father, Tom McGrath, and  Professor Terence Dennis at the University of Otago, with whom he’s taking a piano performance paper.

He’s already achieved a number of milestones as a young musician – in 2025 he received First Prize at the Dunedin Concerto Competition,as well as being selected as an NZSO Emerging Artist the same year, having been a semifinalist the previous year in the National Piano Competition and a finalist in the Lewis Eady National Junior Piano Competition in 2023. Earlier this year he participated in and was a semi-finalist in the Lev Vlassenko  Piano Competition in Brisbane. Other biographical details I’ve gleaned are his veneration for two particularly outstanding piano virtuosi, Martha Argerich, and Grigory Solokov, and a love for chamber music as well as solo playing. He also takes part as a percussionist in performances by the Dunedin Youth Orchestra.

What particularly attracted me to Ozan’s recital here was the repertoire he chose, in particular a Piano Sonata by the unjustly-neglected composer Muzio Clementi, who wrote over one hundred such sonatas, and was a virtuoso whose reputation as a performer vied for a short time with that of Mozart. A famous piano-playing confrontation between the two in the presence of the Emperor Joseph II was considered a “draw” though each side’s supporters claimed their favourite’s triumph!

Mozart was, of course, almost congenitally ungenerous to any would-be competitors and their achievements – Beethoven, on the other hand, was quoted as being a great admirer of Clementi’s music!  – in fact when listening to a work like the latter’s B Minor Sonata Op. 40 No. 2 (which Ozan  Biner-McGrath played today), I couldn’t help but join so many of the dots with Beethoven’s  rather more  well-known  “Pathetique” Sonata, with its similar slow introduction to the work. The great Vladimir Horowitz was a noted exponent of Clementi, and more recently, the American pianist Lamar Crowson made two LPs containing a number of the sonatas – however these works remain rarities in piano recitals, so I was grateful for Ozan’s advocacy (and his absolutely splendid playing!).

Right from the beginning, the solemn Molto adagio e sostenuto opening of the B Minor Sonata was beautifully “voiced” , filled with inflexion and communicative impulse – every phrase was given by the pianist a “living value”, it seemed, with Beethoven’s similarly “striving” quality and gift for eloquence a seemingly obvious act of homage to the older composer, the music’s  poise and suggestive spaciousness similarly followed by a fiery allegro. In places I found myself thinking even of the great Sviatoslav Richter’s ability to harness waves of energy and build them unerringly into cataclysmic gesturings at the music’s conclusion – wow!

The second movement Largo, Mesto e patetico brought a questioning opening ambience, as if the player was musing on certain ideas or conundrums, returning them at the end into the whimsicality from which they emerged – all very remarkably transparent a creative process! The Allegro gave rise to dark, urgent passages alternating with more fanciful sequences, the pianist adroitly giving the structure an appealing air of spontaneous unpredictability – and there was a marvellously-wrought “developmental” section that made use of an initial descending figure then given ascending chromatic treatment – simply mesmerising! The return of the opening revisits the “riddle” of the work’s introduction before a presto Coda whirled us away on a barrage of triplets – what a splendidly-wrought roller-coaster ride!

Biner-McGrath’s next offering was the magnificent B Minor Prelude Op.32 No.10 by Sergei Rachmaninov, inspired by Arnold Bocklin’s painting “The Return” (Rachmaninov’s close friend, fellow-pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch left an affecting account of his “discovery” via the composer himself, of this particular Prelude’s “meaning”). This was a remarkable performance by Biner-McGrath, one whose focus and sense of  timing seemed to embody a vivid representation of the artist’s subject in the painting – the return home of a soldier,  plagued by doubts as to what he might encounter and by the unpredictability of how he might react to whatever circumstance he finds. Biner-McGrath built the tensions unerringly throughout the “dark night of the soul” experienced by the prodigal regarding his struggle, and gave appropriate tragic voice to the “major-to-minor” phrase which brought the work to a close.

After this came the spectacularly virtuosic Ètude-Tableau Op.39 No. 3 in F-sharp minor –  a veritable torrent of pianistic pursuance on Biner-McGrath’s part, which, however, didn’t for me seem to have quite enough light-and-shade or specific characterisation (it was the one item I couldn’t quite “connect” with, as much as I appreciated the technical achievement of the player realising the notes!).  Coming after the B Minor Prelude especially, it was more sound and fury than anything else, and gave something of an impression in places of a work still in progress as an interpretation, (maybe the preceding Prelude’s “completeness” in performance needed some time for me to escape the spell and jump into the Etude’s very different world) – still, for whatever reason I remained on the “outside” of the music, and have continued since then to wonder exactly why….

No such problems accompanied the concert’s final item, Cesar Franck’s Prelude Chorale et Fugue, a work written in 1884, long  after the composer had left his piano virtuoso years behind him, but still reflecting his formidable keyboard skills. He completed the Prelude and Fugue before adding the Chorale, paying homage in the first instance to Bach, and, perhaps as a kind of afterthought, wanting to express something of his own religious mysticism in the manner of another of the composer’s heroes, Franz Liszxt, who had befriended the young Franck and encouraged his career at various times, both as a pianist and as an organist.

The work’s opening in Biner-McGrath’s hands was filled with Romantic feeling, a sense of constant yearning for life’s meaning, the flowing, exploratory opening expressing the tensions associated such feelings, both in the restlessness of the harmonic explorations and the freely-recited declamatory passages, repeating  the opening agitated figures and their answering recitations – the pianist freely immersed himself in the music’s explorations, maintaining a “questing” aspect through variants of the agitated passagework which took us further into what seemed a kind of “charged” state of being, leading to agitated passages which fell away as quickly as they had risen.

Biner-McGrath then took us in to the world of the Chorale, calmly and purposefully evolving a “structured” kind of sound one would associate with some sort of ritual, a more “inward” kind of experience – this was further illuminated by a melody played by the left hand repeatedly passing over the right, as if some inward spirit was guiding the hands towards expressing something unearthly, the pianist adroitly bringing out the varying intensities of each of this theme’s appearances as the music progressed, becoming almost orchestral in effect in places, as if unseen voices were joining in the resonances of this noble melody.

Gradually the voices died away, and the pianist took up a very Lisztian repeated three-note descending theme which could have come from that composer’s Third Annees de Pelerinage (published as a set of pieces in 1883, a year before Franck wrote this present work) – sombre in mood at first, it gradually developed in presence and power up and down the keyboard, until the same three-note theme was announced as the beginning of the fugue! – its outwardly contained, slightly capricious aspect was beautifully controlled at first by Biner-McGrath, exploring the motif’s manifold possibilities both declamatory and poetic, until briefly subsiding and re-emerging as a more agitated figure resembling the left-over-right hand-crossing of the Chorale, all so enthrallingly exciting and cataclysmic!

With the turmoil dramatically broken off, a repeated-note figure then seemed to almost “summons” the celestial-sounding return of the chorale theme, one whose growing radiance then majestically shares the sound stage with the fugal theme in a ritual-like rapprochement of sorts, a transformation into what one indubitably feels like a kind of ecstatic resolution of previous troubles and conflicts into eventual triumph!

Of course, it was the kind of music and performance that sent us all babbling out into the streets afterwards – extraordinary! Ozan Biner-McGrath will certainly be a musician to watch for in the near future, and a name to conjure with!

 

 

 

NSZO’S Let There Be Light illuminates Saariaho, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Shan Liu (piano) with Jaime Martín and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra – photo, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

KALJA SAARIAHO (1952-2023) – Lumiere et Pesanteur
SERGE PROKOFIEV (1891-1953 – Piano Concerto No. 3 In C Major Op.26
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893 – Symphony No. 4 in F Minor Op.36

Shan Liu (piano)
Jaime Martín (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington (Te Whanganui-a-Tara)
Friday, 24th July 2026

Review by Peter Mechen (Middle C / Seen and Heard International)

This concert by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra was given the title “Let There Be Light”, a quotation from Genesis 1:3 in the Bible, depicting the creation of light upon the earth and its division from darkness – a theme which took different manifestations in the three works given in this evening’s concert by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and its guest conductor Jaime Martín, along with a major contribution in one of the items from the remarkable sixteen year-old New Zealand pianist Shan Liu, here making his mainstage debut with the orchestra.

Beginning the concert was a piece by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. Lumière et Pesanteur  (Light and Gravity) – the composer’s own notes regarding this work referred to it as a ”gift” from her to fellow Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen to honour his advocacy as an interpreter of an earlier work by Saariaho, the oratorio La Passion de Simone, which was inspired by the works of 20th Century philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943). The music of Lumière et Pesanteur  was reworked by the composer from part of that same oratorio, the “Eighth Station”, described by one commentator as the piece’s “most orchestral and least-defined“ section.

Saariaho’s work here  began with the merest murmur of a percussion twinkle from celeste and strings, an evocation of space into which joined a lone trumpeter, sounding a fantastical line with the utmost freedom – this gave way to various wind instruments whose floating tones spontaneously interacted, forming delightfully speculative colouristic and textural ambiences, with brasses playing ever so softly! Over the top of these iridescences piped a piccolo, a foil for the occasional subterranean growlings welling up from beneath, but countered by the continued effusions of wind tone supported by the harp and the softest and most mysterious of brass sonorities.

One could have supposed some kind of narrative at work – my feeling, being new to this music,  was a fairytale-like scenario, one in what seemed in a constant state of sublime and seamless coalescence.  It felt for me as if existence itself here was portrayed in the act of emitting hugely all-embracing sighs of pleasure from the various instrumental groups, occasionally led or spearheaded by specific lines.

Throughout, these tones seemed poly-harmonic, giving us hardly any consciousness of specific keys or modes – instead, opening our imaginations to scenarios of sonorities, textures and timbres engaged in some kind of cosmic interaction, and at which we were spectators mesmerised by the phenomenon’s inception, its growing to various stages of fruition and its equally enigmatic departure! – one in which the sounds didn’t cease as such but seemed to play on at the end beyond what we could actually hear……

After this came the Prokofiev Concerto, a different kind of journey, with its volatility and “take-it-as-it-comes” attitudes towards darkness and light, bestowing insights upon both players and listeners via an experience akin to something of a roller-coaster ride! Such a process seemed all the more Herculean a scenario here through the work in question being undertaken in our presence by such a youthful soloist! Of course Shan Liu had by this time demonstrated his exceptional qualities as a pianist on both the home and international pianistic arenas, even though he was here tackling repertoire that one would think was the preserve of the super-virtuosi (I had, for instance, seen none other than Martha Argerich play this concerto – so I was hedging my bets as to how this young man would in my mind fare against that memory!)…..

Anyway, what a concerto! The opening Andante featured  firstly a clarinet, and a second soon joining in, with the strings then sounding that characteristic sweet-and-sour quality of Prokofiev’s in the opening melody – then in came the strings again with the Allegro – such terrific energy and momentum announcing the pianist’s first entry – could Shan Liu do it? My goodness, could he what! – straightaway, such sparkling, clear and brilliantly fluent fingerwork – and then he really opened up the pianistic throttle for the toccata-like exchanges with swirling winds and slashing strings and tremendous orchestral support in general!  And so it went on – the military-like dotted march rhythms shared between the piano and mischievous instrumental detailing brought out humour aplenty – the march rhythms turned to scampering ones, with each upward-thrusting  gesture eliciting cataclysmic cries from the orchestra, the last of which featured  a return of the opening theme as a full-throated kind of “hymn-tune” – Shan Liu took up the cantabile mood, interacting with the waves of orchestral sound and producing a kind of ethereal, almost mystical sea-change in the music, until the return of the urgent allegro rhythms which recommenced the argument.  And so it went on, through various succeeding episodes too numerous to describe, except to say that the last sortie set the seal on the movement, with the pianist’s running two handed unisons gathering up the orchestral forces in the tremendous and excitingly irresistible propulsions that took the music to a triumphal final chord – at which point the Michael Fowler audience simply exploded with delight and pent-up exhilaration, deservedly giving the musicians their due!

The slow movement was all wistfulness and charm at the outset, the soloist completely at one with conductor and orchestra in the music’s bitter-sweet lyricism, until a sudden outburst brought a wild dance, which the cellos and basses helped along, giving plenty of “hoof to the swing” – as they also did with the succeeding triplet rhythms. By contrast a sequence of pure magic then meandered into and over the sound-vistas, everybody in a kind of drifting dream -a moment of fantastic, other-worldly music-making!  And how spontaneously the rhythmic impulses seemed to come to life again, with dancing impulses sprouting from all about the orchestra – those amazingly jaunty passages then fused their energies with the return of the wistful melody that began the movement – what seemed like opposites enjoying a perfect partnership!

The winds had done a superb job of introducing most of this work’s themes thus far – and the finale was no exception, with the bassoon setting a wry, insouciant opening tone for the movement’s beginning, the piano joining in the fun with big-boned dance measures and playful competition with the orchestra via several glissandi-like skirling phrases added to the “quick-march” exchanges.  There was so much to enjoy, with the winds (again) initiating a plaintive, bitter-sweet melody,  the piano nonchalantly replying with a “walking” theme, taken up by the winds, and a full-blooded return to the bitter-sweet theme on the strings – this was both voiced and embellished until the theme here got the gloriously “full Rachmaninov” treatment from soloist and orchestra (though I’m certain that neither composer would thank me for THAT heartfelt observation!). Those ubiquitous winds then bumptiously reintroduced the opening theme – by now sounding positively turbo-charged! – and with soloist, conductor and players working up to full stretch in alternating the music’s heightened momentums, the concerto by the end had simply overwhelmed us with its power and brilliance!

We couldn’t let Shan Liu go for a while after this! – not until conductor Jaime Martín visibly INSISTED the young pianist play an encore! – most appropriately we were given Schumann’s Traumerei from Kinderszenen, an appropriate antidote to the concerto performance’s intoxication in its simplicity and naturalness of utterance – even though it inhibited not a whit of animated discussion throughout the interval regarding what we’d heard!

Surprisingly, and as it turned out, delightfully, conductor Jaime Martín made a gracious and entertaining “guest’s speech” for us at the second half’s beginning, firstly praising Shan Liu’s remarkable performance, and then properly introducing himself, by way of amusingly recounting his first interactions upon his arrival with various New Zealanders who, upon learning that he was Spanish, acceded, to his utter amazement, fulsome congratulations upon him in relation to the recent Football World Cup Spanish victory!  –  “..almost as if” he said “I myself had played in the final!”. He then talked about his own impressions of the Tchaikovsky Symphony he and the orchestra were about to play,  actually getting the players to sound a few of the work’s themes and motifs by way of highlighting them for us – all this was done in a perfectly straightforward and unpatronising way – a further amusing moment was when the conductor mentioned the word “fate” in his description of the symphony’s main recurring motif, and paused for dramatic effect – in the silence one of the cellists dropped their bow on the floor!

All such byplays done with, Martín began the symphony, getting truly spine-tingling brass-playing and dramatic whiplash-chordings from the full orchestra in the work’s introduction. The strings expressively and plaintively took up their own “first subject”, handing over to the winds and helping to further build up the tensions which became a kind of “pitched battle’ between the “fate” theme and the orchestra’s lamentations! It was a properly dramatic and sonorous journey throughout, the eloquent orchestral detailing in every section by turns confronting (the “fate” music and its insistent accompanying theme) and consoling (the folksy second subject theme and its major-key variant) right to the tumultuous conclusion of the first movement.)

Martín had asked his strings beforehand to play the accompaniments alone to the long oboe solo that distinguishes the second movement, encouraging his audience to “register” the simplicity and loneliness of these pizzicato passages, adding to the beauty of oboist Robert Orr’s actual performance – listening to this movement I was freshly taken aback by the qppeql of Tchaikovsky’s orchestrations, especially the many interactions between strings and winds so gorgeously and heartfeltly realised in this performance. Likewise in the famous pizzicato-led third movement the impact of the instrumental contrasts between strings, winds and brass were positively flavoursome (Johanna Gruskin’s piccolo in particular picturing a superbly loquacious “beastie”!).

Martín then introduced the finale almost as attacca (not marked in the score), conveying the music’s tremendous urgency, the playing marked by fierce exchanges and great brilliance – similarly, the conductor brought the contrasting “Birch tree” melody in almost in tempo. maintaining the music’s delicacy but enhancing the excitement! Later in the movement this melody led with increasing intensity to the final, tumultuous statement of the “fate” motif, momentarily halting the music’s headlong flow, but leading to a quiet reiteration of the festive-like music which represented the composer’s words “If you cannot discover the reasons for happiness in yourself, look to others…” The orchestral frenzy unleashed for us at the conclusion of this movement tonight embodied that fatalism with the utmost euphoria and excitement. Since then, my memory has been wandering back to my first encounter with this work via the legendary Hungarian conductor Antal Dorati, whom I saw give what seemed like a cataclysmic-sounding performance with the then NZBC Symphony Orchestra here in Wellington in 1973 – his shade would, I think, have relished tonight’s equally memorable presentation.

 

 

 

Music of celebration and of mourning, from the Aroha String Quartet International Music Academy

Posted on by Peter Mechen

AROHA STRING QUARTET – International Music Academy Tutors Concert

ASTOR PIAZZOLLA (1921-1992) – Tango Ballet (1956) – arrangement for string quartet by Jose Bragato
RICHARD STRAUSS (1864-1949) – Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings (1945)
– arrangement for 7 solo strings by Rudolf Leopold (1996)

Members of the Aroha String Quartet International Music Academy Tutors –
Haihong Liu, Donald Armstrong (violins) / Eli Vincent, Konstanze Artmann (violas)
Robert Ibell, David Chickering (‘cellos) / Oleksandr Gunchenko (double-bass)

St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington – Lunchtime Concert
Wednesday, 15th July, 2026

The Aroha String Quartet’s International Music Academy meets every year in Wellington for six days of intensive music-making, involving workshops, coaching and rehearsals, an event organised and run by the Quartet members themselves and the Academy Administrator Cathie McCallum. This year close to forty non-professional string players from around New Zealand and Australia were brought together for workshops, coaching and rehearsals, which result in various concerts involving the players and the guest tutors, and featuring works for both chamber and orchestral forces.

One of these concerts, featuring firstly the Aroha Quartet players themselves, and then in partnership with several of the Academy’s tutor-musicians brought a large lunchtime-concert audience to St.Andrews’ for what promised to be a special event – we were given repertoire out of the usual “run” of things for a string quartet – a “Tango Ballet” by the Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla (written originally for his own ensemble, the  “Octeto Buenos Aires” in 1955 – a string quartet version of this work was made by Jose Bragato, the composer’s regular “collaborator”), and then followed by a work from Richard Strauss written in 1945, originally for seven players but then recast as the “Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings” version we normally hear (this performance was of a 1996 reconstruction of the “original” by Rudolf Leopold).

Consequently, it was very much a concert of two halves, beginning with the Piazzolla work which delighted on all fronts from the outset –  Piazzolla’s “Tango Ballet” sought to “expand” the traditional associations of the dance into various adaptations of mood and situation, using a narrative not dissimilar in technique to George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris”, namely, a series of impressions of city life (in Piazzolla’s music’s case, Buenos Aires, of course!).  The work’s introduction features the solo violin vertically effervescing with energy, the accompanying strings at first taciturn in response, but then rolling into a swinging rhythm, the impulses sufficiently and enticingly “held back” by way of suggesting greater excitements to come…..the following “The Street” gets the rhythms walking with ever-growing excitement, the upper strings dancing over the cello’s ever-jaunty strides and eventually rushing up and down in a ferment of exhilaration, which then unexpectedly quivers to a halt, as if transfixed by a sight, a feeling, a happening – what could it be?…

The score bears the title “Encounter”, suggesting a meeting, bringing bewilderment, perhaps bashfulness, or beguilement, an awkwardly romantic moment (Eli Vincent’s viola here contributes a wonderfully-played and smokily suggestive moment of discombobulation towards the end) – when suddenly the music breaks into the mood with “Cabaret” , with the rhythms bouncing all around and about, the energies having an almost animalistic “impulse without thought”, but which then drain disconcertingly to a near-silence. It’s the work’s most profound moment, and one which the composer’s favoured instrument, the bandoneon is almost certainly suggested in this movement’s introspectiveness, as befits its title of “Solitude”. The music drifts downwards, the lower strings’ despairing tones icily accompanied by violin tremolandi, the latter then taking up a heart-wrenching melody, very harmonically “free’ and played with heartfelt focus by Haihong Liu.

And so, life goes on, as the music returns to the mood of the opening, heralding the concluding “galop” with lots of fanfare-like gesturings, and bringing the work to a close with a few flavoursome “tough” harmonies leaping off the bowstrings and into the excited resonances of the conclusion.

One couldn’t have asked for a more contrasted ambience than from the work by Richard Strauss which followed – this was a piece given here by seven string players which the composer had first sketched out in response to a commission from the famous Swiss conductor Paul Sacher in 1944. The conductor had wanted a work for string orchestra, so the sketch was amplified to a work for 23 solo strings, and given the name “Metamorphosen” by the composer, inspired by the writings of Johann Wolfgand von Goethe whose ideas had expressed, over a century beforehand a metamorphosis of living things through constant transformation and renewal.

By this time the ageing German composer had become sickened by the war’s gradual destruction of so many hallowed locations throughout Germany and Austria which he had held sacred as representative of Germany’s art and culture. He was to write in his diary, after finishing “Metamorphosen” in May 1945,  “The most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve-year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany’s 2,000 years of cultural evolution met its doom” . Though the despair Strauss felt at the loss of so many cherished symbols of his country’s art and culture was palpable, his choice of a title for the piece seemed, however subconsciously (and at that time remotely), a gesture akin to planting a Goethe-like seed of renewal in the face of such destruction.

In fact Strauss’s fellow-composer Gustav Mahler had similarly expressed in his own music many years before something of the same dark despair in the concluding pages of the latter’s Sixth Symphony – and, of course, both composers were to emerge from their separate “dark nights of the soul” and go on to compose subsequent works of searing beauty, Mahler with his “Das Lied von der Erde” and his Ninth Symphony, and Strauss with his equally glorious “Four Last Songs”.

The themes Strauss crafted for “Metamorphosen” are partly his own and partly those of his idol Beethoven, directly evoking memories of the latter’s “Funeral March” from the “Eroica” Symphony. In this performance of the composer’s original septet version (reconstructed by Rudolf Leopold in 1996) the themes inevitably stand out more clearly than in the full, 23-instrument version, though the ambiences are inevitably different, and in some ways more intense for listeners, who are perhaps encouraged to “move more closely” to a smaller group, rather than settle back and revel in the lusher, fuller sound of the bigger ensemble.

I had not heard this “chamber version” before, and, not unexpectedly, found it revelatory, in as much as that “moving closer” sensation brought upon by greater intimacy with the sounds, enabled the music to “strike home” even  more tellingly (ironic though it might seem when one thinks of the sonic impact of a large group of strings!), Of course there have been many great recorded performances of the work in its “full strings” version – and I also recall a superb performance from as distant a time as 2010 from the NZSO strings with Pietari Inkinen here in Wellington, all but the ‘cellos standing, and everybody playing their hearts out!

With the Aroha Quartet players and three others whose names are indelibly associated with the NZSO, Donald Armstrong (violin), David Chickering (‘cello) and Oleksandr Gunchenko (double bass), there was no question regarding the brilliance, fluency and commitment of the playing of these musicians in this work, which was thrilling! What I came to realise, shortly after the work began, was the extent to which this music quickly overflowed its expressive parameters as I listened, transcending its composer’s original intention of commemorating the destruction of a culture at a specific time and in a specific place, and prompting – no, in fact, URGING me to bring to mind the world’s present-day happenings of destruction and desecration of whole peoples and their cultures by forces whose originators and proponents one might well accuse in turn of “bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture” and as our own era’s “greatest criminals”! Strauss himself might have been obsessed with his own personalised despairings via this work, but his brilliant stroke of introducing motifs from the music of one of the world’s most oft-acknowledged sympathisers towards and spokespersons for mankind in general, here completely and utterly transcended any boundaries of time, place and circumstance relating to the original 1945 work.

Certain concerts take it upon themselves to be enshrined in the memory, especially those whose performances are enabled by the players to speak with an eloquence that transcends the ordinary –  sometimes even to the point where the music-making reminds us, however uncomfortably, that we live in a world in which “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”…….this concert took me into the sobering, on-going  realities of those words and the resultant sufferings of people, then and now, and everywhere…..

 

Elouan Quartet and Bridget Douglas – stellar performance and partnership

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music  2026 presents:

ELOUAN QUARTET with BRIDGET DOUGLAS (flute)

AMY BEACH _Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet
SALINA FISHER – Mata-Au (2021)
ARTHUR FOOTE –  A Night Piece for Flute and String Quartet (1918)
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – String Quartet in B-flat major Op. 18 No. 6
ALBERTO GINASTERA – Impresiones de la Puna for Flute and Strings (1934)

Elouan Quartet: Jessica Oddie (leader), Anna Van Der Zee (violin), Alexander MacFarlane (viola), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, 12th July, 2026

I’d not heard the Elouan String Quartet play together before (and they were formed in 2024, so goodness knows where I had been!) However, I was familiar with three of the quartet members in different performing contexts, violinists Jessica Oddie, and Anna van der Zee, and ‘cellist Ken Ichinose, all of whom I’d thought were exceptional in what I’d heard them play. And though the name of the violist, Alexander MacFarlane, was new to me, his presence in such august company couldn’t, I reasoned, help but be self-recommending even before I heard a note of his playing! Furthermore, the concert was graced by the presence of Bridget Douglas, principal flutist with the NZSO, and a much-loved favourite of Wellington audiences. Adding to the mix was a programme whose composer-names were in most cases more familiar to me that was their actual music, so on various counts I felt the concert promised to be something of a treat.

Of course, the “something old/something new” kind of presentation invariably works well with audiences, though the “something old” can by dint of sheer force of personality make just as much of an impact upon audience sensibilities in a well-wrought performance as a newly-encountered work. Having said that I’m aware that the music of this afternoon’s first composer hasn’t exactly been entirely neglected of late in the city’s concert and recital programmes. American-born Amy Cheney Beach achieved fame both as a performer and a composer during her lifetime (1867-1944) – she was the first American woman to have a full-scale symphony (her 1896 “Gaelic” Symphony)  performed (by the Boston Symphony Orchesra) and published – and she was also the soloist at the 1900 premiere of her own Piano Concerto, with the same orchestra. Altogether she composed more than 300 works, including chamber music, choral works, songs both with orchestra and piano, and solo piano pieces.

After her death Beach’s music suffered a decline for several decades, but interest in her creative achievements has gradually renewed, as has recognition of her pioneering efforts on behalf of both American music and women composers. A comment by one of her contemporaries after the first performance of her “Gaelic” Symphony suggested the ambivalence women composers had and would continue for a while to face on the part of the “establishment”, with fellow American composer George Chadwick congratulating Beach on her efforts, by way of  welcoming her (the only woman) into membership of the New England composer-group, known as the “Boston Six”, proclaiming her as  “one of the boys”.

Wellington has recently head this same “Gaelic” Symphony given by our City Orchestra – see review at https://middle-c.org/2026/06/a-world-encircling-winter-solstice-concert-compendium-from-the-wellington-city-orchestra/ : and another memorable concert in the region took place at Waikanae in 2023, featuring the New Zealand String Quartet of that time, playing Beach’s 1907 Piano Quintet, and joined by pianist Diedre Irons giving what seemed like an “in the manner born” performance of the piano part – here’s another review at https://middle-c.org/2023/10/the-new-zealand-string-quartet-discusses-emperors-dictators-and-husbands-at-waikanae/

Another chamber piece by Amy Beach was featured in today’s concert, “Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet”  a work from 1916 and one of three presented today featuring a partnership between solo flute and string quartet. Here, the music demonstrated Amy Beach’s desire to reflect a kind of  “American” quality in her music, something very much an “issue” in Beach’s lifetime, and which led to discussion and argument which at times became acrimonious. This was the question regarding exactly what was “American” in music – was it from native American Indian sources, Afro-American cultures or from “the great majority” of American peoples who were neither American Indian nor Afro-American, but had vastly different cultural heritages brought from various other parts of the world?  The discussion had originally been sparked by none other than Antonin Dvorak, at that time resident in the United States during his directorship of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. Dvorak famously stated that proper “American” music should embrace the diversities of the country’s multicultural elements, such as with what the composer called “indigenous” folk tunes, and sought to present a kind of “demonstration” of this influence in his well-known  “New World” Symphony.

Of course, this review has nothing like the space needed to convey the various arguments and counter-arguments in full, but they brought to the fore issues of class, race and ethnicity in ways that still resonate today – see further commentaries in the following article – https://classical-scene.com/2025/05/24/a-tale-of-two-cities/  Amy Beach was theoretically on the side of the “great majority” influences, the various heritages brought to the United States by the new settlers – in her own compositions she chose to highlight her own Anglo-Celtic folk-tunes, and particularly in her “Gaelic” Symphony. It’s ironic that the principal theme of this work, derived from one of Beach’s own songs, is one with the title “An Indian Lullaby”, though the melody is entirely Beach’s own.

The strings alone began the work, the theme, wistful and melancholy, the lines having an almost silken contrapuntal aspect with their intermingling, before allowing the flute to enter with elaborations that decoratively “clothe” the original theme, the players again observing the minor-to-major key change towards the end which the theme had incorporated. The next variation has an insoucient tripping trajectory into which the strings invite the flute to join, having tested the contrapuntal waters and found them agreeable – though the ensuing waltz promised a darker, more sinister kind of experience, chromatic harmonic shifts adding to the music’s effable, ineffable mystery, and making a gorgeously seductive sound under  these players’ fingers…..the fourth variation seems like a shadowy kind of entr’acte, as mysterious in its culmination as its entrance. Then followed a gorgeously passionate outpouring of tones from the ‘cello introducing the fifth variation, taken over by the flute, long-breathed and languorous, before the theme was generously shared by the instruments in turn, a true confluence of ensembled sound-personalities!. A gloriously rhapsodic flute solo later, the ‘cello began an impish fugue, which proceeded with ingenious distractions, such as a classic watchmaker’s “winding down” to the fugue’s strains  – a quick, scampering reprise of the same by the cellist and violist brought everybody back to a rerise of the work’s opening, and whose final notes I can still imagine somewhere continuing to echo….

Salina Fisher’s String Trio Mata-Au followed (the name of the Clutha River in Te Reo. meaning “to meet again”). I can’t do better than quote the composer’s own note in the programme, describing just what I heard….”The water dances and swirls as it connects places and people – It flows and gushes with forward momentum and anticipation…” I heard what I imagined to be a bubbling spring-like infusion of liquid energy, with strongly-projected harmonic colours, often in “seconds” intervals, and volatile in rhythmic character, the instruments taking single-line “turns” before moving inexorably into transcendent realms, the sounds lifted upwards, with the solo cello having the last word. I wish Douglas Lilburn could have heard this work, as it seemed to me to explore those rhythmic realms, both spontaneously gestural and longer-term trajectorial that he spoke about composers here “finding” as a genuine “language” of our own……

A near-contemporary of Amy Beach (and a fellow-member of the aforementioned “Boston Six”) was Arthur Foote (1853-1937) born in Salem, Massachusetts. He had a couple of “firsts” to add distinction to his career as a composer, teacher and organist – he was the first prominent American-born composer to be entirely trained in the U.S. and the first to receive an American university’s Masters degree in music. In his day he was a well-known figure in music circles – like Amy Beach he had orchestral works premiered by the Boston Symphony, in his case suites, serenades and a cello concerto, There was also chamber music, choral works and numerous piano pieces, with one critic characterising  Foote’s output as belonging to “the cult of restrained in art”, and citing his “A Night Piece for Flute and String Quartet” as representative of a creative culture running parallel to more “unrestrained” expressions of creativity.

This piece attained popularity in a later version for flute and string orchestra, but here we heard the original and more introspective chamber version. Beginning wistfully and romantically, the music is often likened to Faure’s – nothing is excessive, with passionate moments for the solo flute in constant balance with more subdued passages, in the manner of a rhapsodic fantasy-piece. All of the instruments were here allowed to speak with characteristic voices, and “realise” the composer’s beautifully-crafted evocations.

“Anchoring” this enterprising concert was a presentation by the Elouan players of the last of Beethoven’s Op.18 Quartets, No, 6 in B-flat Major, my favourite from the set. Beginning with an irresistibly “bouncy” Allegro con brio, the players packed the trajectories with momentums that picked us up by our ears and took us places, replete with phrasings which questioned as well as answered, and relied as much on contrast as flowing discourse. The development section was an absorbing, slightly “off the path” series of ear-catching modulations whose exchanges delighted us with their “made up on the spot” character, with dialogues that never faltered, and at the end, double-duetted their way to a recapitulation that chose a “same but different” homeward path, as sharp-etched here in places as it was convivial. The slow movement, part heartfelt song-like, part-processional at the beginning, took us through a series of exquisitely-voiced major/minor key sequences which kept us guessing in places as to what the music would do next!

As for the whirlwind Scherzo, we were deliciously bewitched, and bothered, if not entirely bewildered by the composer’s utter delight in syncopation (“an explosion of rhythmic eccentricity” was how one commentator described it)  and which the players  threw off without seemingly turning a hair, all to our pleasurable delight! Not only this but the Trio was despatched in similarly split-second fashion, the whole giving us surgings of near-breathless exhilaration. Came the famously “ghostly” introduction to the  finale, with its Haydnesque opening bars and its gradual agglomerations of “La Malinconia”, here darkly, ambiently and (as the composer wished) delicately coloured by the players as the music seemed to take us still further into those seemingly malignant, almost Shakespearean realms – before Beethoven suddenly whipped off the mask of dread and brought to the fore a charming 3/8 Allegretto (quasi Allegro!) dance!  We were in due course returned, suddenly, to the opening, which again inclined towards darker regions, but alternated between this and the dance, and afterwards returned to a slower, more dreamy statement of the dance theme, before Jessica Oddie’s violin led the “up-and-at’-em” charge of a few barnstorming bars towards the finish! What a journey!

We then reconnected with Bridget Douglas for the concert’s final item, Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera’s  Impresiones de la Puna for Flute and Strings (1934). Reckoned to be Latin America’s foremost composer after the death of Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos in 1959,  Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) began his composing career as a nationalist, using folk and popular elements in his music. One of his earliest compositions was “Impressions of the Puna” (the name refers to the bleak rocky wasteland high in the northern Andes, the heart of the old Inca empire). In three movements, the first, Quena, refers to the cane flute, an instrument developed by Inca civilisation and used for solo improvisation and song accompaniments – here, the performance brought out the music’s “solitary player” aspect, a melancholy song with harmonic support from the strings. Hardly less melancholy, though with livelier trajectories, was the second piece, Canción (song), not surprisingly referring to lost love, the music comparatively restrained and lyrical at first, before gathering momentum towards the end with a steady, dotted string-rhythm. The third and final Danza refreshed our sensibilities with something different – strongly pulsating pizzicato rhythms accompanying a flute-and-violin dialogue, interrupted by recitative-like utterances from flute and strings before returning to the dance, and concluding with concerted flourishes from all the instruments together. A minor work, perhaps, but great fun to play and to listen to, and allowing us the pleasure of returning to our homes afterwards with smiles and warm hearts.

Deliciously unfamiliar/eminently listenable music from little-known French composer Michel Corrette

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MICHEL CORRETTE (1707-1795) France
LES DELICES DE LA SOLITUDE – Sonatas Op. 20 Nos.1-6

Michelle Kesler –  ‘Cello I Sonatas 2, 4 & 6  / Cello II
Miranda Wilson – ‘Cello I Sonatas 1, 3 & 5  / Cello II

MSR Classics MS 1832

Recorded November 2024 in the Recital Hall at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA

“In the spirit of friendship between ‘cellists, we hope listeners will enjoy this lively conversation between instruments” writes ‘cellist Miranda Wilson in her notes accompanying a delightful recording that has come my way, of music by a composer whose name I did not know, one Michel Corrette, born in Rouen, France in 1707. In this case, it’s amusing to associate the ready camaraderie between the two musicians featured on this recording with a work whose six sonatas have the collective subtitle  Les délices de la solitude (The Delights of Solitude) – however, although it would seem that Corrette’s set of six sonatas were originally for solo ‘cello plus basso continuo, they’re here assigned to two ‘cellos, whose demonstrably equal share of the lines makes for great satisfaction, as much obviously in performing as in our listening!

Cellists Michelle Kesler and Miranda Wilson are the players on this recording, made in November 2024 at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah – at the time both were Professors of ‘Cello at their respective teaching places, Kesler at the aforementioned Brigham Young University, and Wilson in the neighbouring state of Idaho at the eponymously-named State University in Moscow, Idaho. We’re given detailed guidance as to which player is “Cello I” in each of the sonatas, Kesler conveniently taking the “lead” in Sonatas 2, 4, and 6, and Wilson in the other three. The presentation nicely completes the collaborative nature of the whole by presenting the works in numerical order.

My first listening impression (Sonata No. 1 in F Major) was of a slightly more spacious acoustic for the two instruments that I thought I was going to fully enjoy, but, as with any concert or recording one encounters, one’s ears can take a little while to, in Michael Flanders’ immortal words on his and Donald Swann’s “At the Drop of A Hat” live recording, “get the pitch of the hall” – and by the first movement’s end the sounds had found and “inhabited” their places for me with music which had by this time amiably teased, cajoled and enlivened my spirits!

Miranda Wilson entertainingly draws attention to Corrette’s music corresponding with the rise of the ‘cello as a solo instrument at the expense of the viola da gamba in popularity at this time, one taken advantage of by, firstly, the publication of these sonatas at around 1739, and the composer’s 1741 treatise Theoretical and Practical Method for Learning the ‘Cello to Perfection in a Short Time. Something of the ferment of the controversy is excitingly suggested by a pamphlet circulated in 1740 by a French lawyer and amateur viola da gamba player Hubert Le Blanc, one which bore the contentious title Defence of the Bass Viol against the Enterprises of the Violin and the Pretensions of the ‘Cello! – wot larks! Le Blanc’s somewhat intemperate rationale regarding his instrument’s superiority has since seen its consignment to the realm of the specialist, by no means obliterated, but put in its place by history!

Here, we are invited to indulge in the composer’s obvious enthusiasm for the then still new-fangled instrument (Corrette’s aforementioned treatise was the first French publication of “a theoretical and practical method” for aspiring cellists) – and the sonatas as recorded here feature a kind of “coming together” of solitudinous delights, with each ‘cellist by turns blending their instruments’ solo lines with their partners’ roles as contrapuntal voices, the modes somewhat antithetical in these pairings but, in situ, delightful.

Sonata No. 1 straightaway dances into a Fuga, marked Allegro, the counterpoints unselfconsciously switching from first to second voice in non-hierarchical exchange, its composer obviously allowing his originally-wrought basso continuo a satisfyingly comparable response to the soloist here, and also in the Affetuoso Aria that followed – and the Allegro finale makes for as “companionable” a solitude as could be imagined!

The D Minor Sonata No. 2 begins with a more driving Allegro, with lots of “fizz” to some of the exchanges, and the ensuing Affetuoso, with its contrasting Arias I and II underlining a poignant operatic-like interaction, not unexpectedly calling for some resolution – a CPE Bach-like Allegro staccato did the trick, those brusque, attention-grabbing initial notes making for a splendid “what’s all this, then!” kind of denoument!

I loved the easy, loping stride of the C Major No 3’s Allemande – a kind of relaxed “bustle” of an Allegro, and then with both this and the equally bucolic concluding Fuga da capella third movement enclosing an unexpectedly concentrated middle-movement Sarabande. More concentrated intensities came with both players’ deep-diving into the following E-flat Major Fourth Sonata’s opening Adagio, one that conveyed a more-than-usual sense of solitude on the music’s part. This dramatically tipped over and into a Corrente, an exhilarating running-sequence leaving one breathless but energised enough to take on board the music’s almost hymn-like Aria which followed – little did we realise we were being primed for a “call-to-arms” with the succeeding “Brut de chasse” here rousing and enthralling our sensibilities with sounds and sensations of an army on the march!

Further excitement came with the galvanic Presto Prelude to the Fifth Sonata in G Major, in which one imagined our two cellists enjoying an “Anything you can do” exchange, with hair and resin flying! The following Allemande, though more leisurely an Allegro took us on a reasonably aerobic stroll, a mood which was at once echoed and calmed by a graceful Sarabande – here, a winsome and exploratory partnership that brought peace to one’s soul. As well for such respite, with the sharply-etched Presto finale that followed mischievously breaking the mood, snapping playfully at dancers’ heels.

Glorious and celebratory were the Handelian flourishes which opened the final sonata of the set, the 6th in a joyous D Major. Here, strangely, it seems the MSR Classics booklet prints the incorrect names and tempi for the movements – the opening Preludio has a grand, ritualistic character which should be Allegro Moderato, not Presto. And this suits the solemn, ceremonial gait of the second movement Aria, not Allemande – Allegro as listed here. Finally, the players skip merrily into a concluding Gigue (not in the least bit like a Sarabande!). It all made for a bit pf a puzzle on a first listen, but one well worth solving, and which Michel Corrette himself might possibly have regarded with amusement rather than annoyance  – after all, among his prodigious output were no less than twenty-five “Concerti Comiques”, pieces for vocal and instrumental ensembles which were often “fun” settings of popular tunes and well-known opera themes, and written largely to be used as “entractes” during performances of comic theatre.

This was revelatory stuff for me – listening to the disc right through was like being taken on some kind of “tour” of a specific time and place in European musical history – though he lived in the same era as his fellow countrymen Rameau, Leclair, Boismortier and Mondonville, and at the same time as Handel, CPE Bach, Gluck and Pergolesi,  Corrette’s music survives comparison with these more famous figures due to its craftsmanship and its composer’s penchant for capturing elements of different styles and blending them in singular ways. The voices of his influences are in places unmistakable but he manages to make the results of their synthesis his own. The only comment I wanted to make of a questioning nature concerned repeats in the various movements, so many of which seemed to finish before I wanted them to! –  and moments such as those made me wonder what the scores of these works indicated were the options for the players who perform this music. I would be interested to find out more regarding this subject. For the rest, to the composer and performers, simply “Bravo! C’est magnifique!”