Wellington City Orchestra spinning musical tales of adventure, love and vengeance

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra at St.Andrew’s

NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV – Antar” Symphony (1875)
ALEXANDER SCRIABIN – Piano Concerto in F-sharp Minor Op.20 (1896-97)
ANTONIN DVOŘÁK – The Golden Spinning-Wheel Op.109 (1896)

William Berry (piano)
Andrew Atkins (conductor)
Wellington City Orchestra

St.Andrews-on-The -Terrace, Wellington
Saturday, 19th September, 2026

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

None of these three works are likely to be the ones that the average concertgoer would straightaway think of if asked to name pieces of music associated with each of these three composers – and yet they’re all entirely worthy of performance in their own right, and have things of interest to tell us about their creators. Of these, the work of Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) is probably the least widely known, with perhaps the grandiose symphonic poem for orchestra  “Poem of Ecstasy” having achieved a measure of fame (some of it in the form of notoriety at the time of its creation) with its “mystical” associations, representing “escape” from the physical world and union with a “vast cosmos”! In more recent years the composer’s keyboard works, represented most comprehensively by his nine Piano Sonatas, are increasingly being played, along with his single (and eminently approachable) Piano Concerto.

Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) is of course the composer of the much- and rightly-loved  orchestral work “Scheherazade”, though he has other “classics” next to his name such as “The Fight of the Bumble Bee”  (and who WOULDN’T take time out to enjoy a spanking performance of “Capriccio Espagnol”? – yet another piece to add to an indispensable list of “Spanish” music NOT written by Spaniards!)  Closer to the composer’s home is a work I would definitely be including, the magnificent “Russian Easter Festival Overture”, which STILL sends shivers down the back of my spine in places, even after listening to it for more than fifty years! And then we come to the music by Rimsky scheduled for today, which bears the title  “Antar” – whether a symphony or, like “Scheherazade”, a “Symphonic Suite”, it’s difficult to decide; and the composer was of little help when it came to actually designating the work, himself fluctuating between both “symphony” and “ symphonic suite” (more when we get to the performance!)

The third of these enterprising concert choices for today was a work by Antonin Dvořák, one of a number of “symphonic poems” the composer completed upon returning to Bohemia from New York, where he had served for three years as Director of the National Conservatory of Music of America. Obviously wanting to “reconnect” with his native land, he straightaway wrote four tone-poems, each one drawn from poet Karel Jaromir Erben’s grisly stories based on Czech folk-lore, with today’s featured work “The Golden Spinning Wheel” among the nastiest content-wise chosen by the composer. This was after his having earned through the better-known symphonies , concertos and chamber music the approbation of no less a critic than Eduard Hanslick, a fierce opponent of the Lisztian school of “programme music”, who had described such works as products of “the swindle of false erudition”. Consequently, Hanslick was not impressed with Dvořák’s sudden forays into tone-poems, writing of “the dangers of this latest tendency” and also that “Dvořák now indulges in ugly, unnatural; and ghastly stories which correspond so little to his amiable character and to the true musician that he is.”

With such an enterprising and interestingly-stocked programme, the concert could scarcely fail to please – and so it proved, with conductor Andrew Aitkins’s infectiously boundless enthusiasm and direct, clearly-delineated gesturings drawing from the players sonorous, detailed and characterful responses, all of which excitingly and satisfyingly “warmed up” as the afternoon’s music unfolded – a case in point was the somewhat tentative beginning of the concert with “Antar” whose tones steadily and patiently transformed themselves into a splendid orchestral panoply, finding full expression in the exuberant Dvorak work with which we began the concert’s second-half!

Rimsky’s 1875 revision of his original version of “Antar”, a work based on a Middle Eastern legend, was presented in today’s concert – conductor Andrew Atkins contributed a commendably cogent programme note summarising the work’s genesis and subsequent “development”.) The composer eventually produced FOUR published versions of “Antar”,  the ”original” 1868 version and its 1875 revision –  then a SECOND revised version in 1897, and (confusingly!) a reworking of the 1875 version! Armed with sufficient scores and recordings (plus a designation-change by the composer) the enthusiast would have an absorbing time coming to grips with the versions and their history!

“Antar” was based on a Middle-Eastern legend concerning an eponymous warrior-cum-philosopher who has renounced humanity and taken refuge in the desert, where he saves a gazelle from a giant bird – the gazelle then reveals its true identity as the beautiful Queen Kul-Nazar, and grants her saviour the “three joys” he most longs for, which, true to form, are vengeance, power and love, and which the music depicts over the remaining movements.  I noted the effectively dark, spacious timbres of the opening from bassoons and horn, the violas’ tender playing of the “Antar” theme’s first appearance, the winds reinforcing of the upper extensions of this theme, with the flute performing evocatively exotic” figuration” , the strings’ steady articulation of the lines in the music’s first agitated tutti, and their lovely Borodin-esque “lilt” in the following dance-tune, with the horns splendid delivery of the “Antar “ theme as an occasional  counterweight – and to cap off the movement, the grand tutti statement of the “Antar” motif at the movement’s end!

The second movement coalesced rather than began, with deep, murmuring beginnings and surges of tone bringing forth a march-like figure, its subject set upon warfare and revenge, as manifested by the occasional “general welter of sound” (to quote Sir Thomas Beecham, who championed the music of the “Russian Five”, of which group Rimsky-Korsakov was a member). The players kept their martial momentums going splendidly, throwing in plenty of suitably combatative exchanges between strings and winds, capped off by rousing percussive crashes and deliciously portentous touches from the heavy brass, the music ending not in triumph, however, but with a melancholy strings-and wind reiteration of the theme. It brought out all the more the “Russian festiveness” of the third movement’s swaggering opening (reminiscent of works like the composer’s own “Tsar Saltan” and Borodin’s “Prince Igor”), with gorgeously lyrical contrasting themes from the strings, and from an evocative wind-decorated solo horn! Such was the excitement that continued and built up over the last couple of pages, that we all broke into spontaneous applause at the movement’s end!

Gorgeous wind-playing from various soloists marked the finale’s opening (from where I was sitting I couldn’t see who was playing what instrument, the players’ music-stands obscuring all but the tops of bobbing heads! – though it all sounded most evocative), in places rivalling “Scheherazade” for atmosphere and allure, with the strings doing so well with their long, sinuous lines. As the story concluded with the hero’s death in his beloved Queen’s arms the finale had no hint of any sort of stirring “grandstand finish” but rather, a kind of gradual expiation, which conductor and players despatched as meaningfully as the composer’s surprisingly prosaic treatment allowed them to do – C’est la vie, c’est la mort!

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) was an almost exact contemporary of Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943) studying piano under the same teacher in Moscow, Nikolai Zverev and continuing together at the Moscow Conservatory, each graduating with honours for piano-playing. However, they soon developed along different lines as composers, with, in general terms,  Scriabin the more adventurous, Rachmaninov the more conservative. Scriabin’s music, though largely misunderstood in his day, is enjoying increased interest  and appreciation,  while Rachmaninov’s, more conservative in outlook and enjoying a popularity that has largely endured, is still considered old-fashioned and regressive in some circles.

How interesting that both composed youthful Piano Concertos which shared the same F-sharp Minor key,  Scriabin at the age of twenty-four in 1896 (his first work involving an orchestra) and Rachmaninov much earlier, at the age of eighteen in 1891-2 (the composer’s 1917 revised version does an excellent job of removing the youthful longeurs and tightening up t the piece’s overall trajectories!). Scriabin’s work was written before he had embarked upon quasi-mystical, harmonically-radical explorations of chromaticism and tonality in his later work. Though each was critical of the other’s work Rachmaninov made a point of going out of his way to  promote his colleague’s music after the latter’s untimely death, giving the repeated heresay account of Rachmaninov casting aspersions on his friend’s state of mind difficult to take entirely seriously.

More to the point is that Scriabin’s only Piano Concerto was here given a performance by 22 year-old William Berry of the utmost finesse, control and sparkling brilliance, one accompanied hand-in-glove by conductor and orchestra. The work’s dreamy opening, brought into being by the horn and strings, was answered confidently and then increasingly passionately by the soloist, interacting with the orchestra  both in full-blooded and playfully filigree  exchanges, with a poetically responsive horn obbligato in attendance! – I loved the spacious rolling exchanges between orchestra and piano – and how Rachmaninov-like were the glorious melodic string lines prompting full-blooded responses from the pianist (and vice-versa!), These were activated into fairy-like dancings from the soloist. to the strains of pipers playing, and alternated with surges of Romantic feeling whose continued insistence  eventually drew pianist, players and conductor into a grand summation of arrival – a thrilling place to have been taken, with William Berry graciously acknowledging the audience’s appreciation at the music’s end!

The work’s slow movement drew from me a response similar to that I’ve often experienced with the Chopin Second Piano Concerto’s slow movement – beautifully limpid opening phrases from the strings, repeating the heart-stopping high point of the melody, and then repeating the sequence for the clarinet, and with the piano decorating the moment with a gossamer-like finish – such exquisite beauty! And what fun it suddenly seemed for one’s spirit to jump up up and dance with the piano’s spirited cavortings, then to pause and contemplate the stillnesses as the melody drifted all about its self-created loveliness, the piano joined by the clarinet before the strings returned to further savour the moment.

A swinging ¾ rhythm from the piano began the finale, with one of its measures repeatedly dancing to the top of the keyboard and down again, an exuberant flourish which kept the movement’s momentum alive and unfettered for a flurry of milliseconds!  – interspersded among this was a heart-bursting, burgeoning piano melody whose ascent flung open the vistas and urged the instrumental lines to take the plunge and augment the journey. The piano eventually persuaded the orchestra to abandon all caution and throw open everything widely and fill the spaces with this glorious melody! Having done this and found it good, piano and orchestra reminisced together – both the “open vista” melody and the exuberantly-dancing piano flourish were revisited and treated as old friends, the composer paying homage, consciously or otherwise, to his friend Rachmaninov’s gift of piling up climax upon climax and allowing the emotion full rein right to the forthright conclusion

Our pianist had something special in store for us at the concerto’s end, returning to the platform to give us some music by another composer whose music also deserves to be heard more often – this was a piece by Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937), a work whose title I couldn’t hear from where I was sitting as announced by William Berry, though I was able to fully appreciate the music’s quietly rhapsodic opening minor chords, whose wandering, exploratory melody flowered into lusciously-coloured tones, the music exploring both depths and heights on its path towards a monumental climax of sound and feeling – it all unwound slowly and pensively, letting the tensions release their grip and fall away, eventually returning to the piece’s opening, with the journey redeemed at the end by the solace of a major key…..a special conclusion to a memorable overall performance!

After the interval came the Dvořák tone-poem “The Golden Spinning-Wheel” – what a great piece of music it all was, if not perhaps as tone-paintingly graphic in places as  fellow-countryman Smetana’s depictions of events in the latter’s orchestral  work “Ma Vlast” (eg. the pictorial descriptions of Smetana’s “Vltava” and of the brutal events of “Sarka”). Still, Dvořák’s delineations of his story gave enormous pleasure to this listener in what was obviously a characteristically grisly tale of betrayal, murder and revenge – and the extent to which the music could be enjoyed “as music” and away from the story’s specifics was, I thought, remarkable!

The story told of a peasant girl Dornička, whom a king encounters on his travels, falls in love with her, and proposes to make her his Queen – the girl is then murdered by her stepmother who installs her own look-alike daughter as the king’s projected bride, but a magician retrieves the murdered girl’s body in exchange for a golden spinning-wheel whose magic then betrays the stepmother’s crime and restores Dornička to life, so that, in the words of Oscar Wilde’s Miss Prism, “the good end happily and the bad unhappily”. Andrew Atkins and the orchestra grasped the mettle firmly and plunged into the music’s glorious opening, strings and percussion establishing the trajectories, with horns and winds sounding the approach of the king, before the strings enable the royal party to sweep onto the scene, and the king to catch sight of and fall in love with the beautiful peasant girl at her spinning wheel, beautifully portrayed by detailings such as the interaction of solo violin and cor anglais, with colourful and atmospheric touches from the harp and percussion. The rest of the story unfolded with readily-evoked energies and panoplies of detail and colour, in many places satisfying as “absolute music” besides serving the narrative – but we particularly enjoyed those characteristic Dvořákian touches, such as the glorious string theme in thirds which heralded the king’s return from the wars to greet his supposed bride, and whose spinning-wheel then unexpectedly “spins out” the grisly tale’s details, resulting in the King’s rightful bride’s reinstatement, and the punishment of her would-be-murderers.

Though much was new to me, and probably to most people in the audience, this afternoon’s music successfully captivated and held our attention with its exotic fascination, colourful orchestration, and here, sturdily and enthusiastically committed performances  – all credit to Andrew Atkins’ enterprise and his players’ dedication and sheer elan in bringing it all so enjoyably to life for our pleasure!

NZ Trio with sonorous help from friends, continues to enchant

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZTrio+ at Old St.Paul’s Cathedral

GARETH FARR – Ahi (for violin, ‘cello and piano) –
Amalia Hall (violin)  / Matthias Balzat (‘cello) / Somi Kim (piano)

CAROLINE SHAW – Thousandth Orange (for violin, viola, ‘cello and piano)
with Alexander McFarlane (viola)

FRANZ SCHUBERT – Piano Quintet in A Major Op.114 D.667 “Trout”
(for violin, viola, ‘cello, double-bass and piano)
with Damien Eckersley (double-bass)

Old St.Paul’s Cathedral, Mulgrave St., Pipitea, Wellington
Thursday, 17th September, 2026

Though obviously pure coincidence, each of two consecutive Thursday concerts which I recently attended at Old St.Paul’s Cathedral in Mulgrave St, was beset by bad weather – the real pity was that the first of them –  Quang Hong Luu’s stupendous Liszt recital a week ago, –  was seriously compromised. with a mere handful of souls braving the torrential rain that would have kept most lunchtime concertgoers away. This more recent chamber music concert featuring the NZTrio and friends drew a much bigger audience for various reasons – it was part of a well-publicised tour, it contained better-known repertoire (including the ever-popular “Trout” Quintet of Schubert’s), and the weather conditions, though not ideal, were nowhere near as dire as for last week’s meteorologically-compromised event.

Having recently attended and enjoyed a trio-only concert given by this ensemble, I found myself here again engrossed by the same players’ remarkable identification with the many and varied “characters” of the music – not a note seemed to be unattended either on its own merits or in tandem with others in a harmony or a rhythmic phrase. I remember in particular loving their Schumann-playing on that occasion, and how well it captured the music’s unique amalgam of resolve and introspection peculiar to its composer. Something of that singularity was brought out here in Gareth Farr’s remarkable Trio “Ahi”, in which the composer’s opening theme was sounded in differing guises throughout the work, from the child-like playfulness of the piano-only opening to its final tug-at-the-heartstrings appearance in the last movement. I was pleased violinist Amalia Hall made reference to the late and much-lamented pianist Katherine Austin, whose association with this work’s performance included a memorable recording, with the heartfelt tones of the music’s principal theme a fitting tribute.

The word “Ahi” literally means “fire” in Te Reo, but is used in several cultural contexts like “the spark of life”, and “belonging to the land”, and “the warmth of hospitality” as well the “heat” that comes with energy, passion, conflict and rebirth.  Farr’s piece explored a number of these over the work’s different movements using a kind of motto theme in places throughout  – after the lyrical simplicity of the opening, we were plunged into a Shostakovich-like confrontation with relentless piano-initiated “slash-and-hammer barrages morphing into string-moanings and lamentings against swirling pianistic vortices! A third movement restored calm temporarily, with ‘cello and violin both intoning interactive recitative-like thoughts and impulses, before the reveries were shattered by wailing, beseeching tremolandi, the piano determinedly persisting with ostinati-like figure as the strings gently reiterated their lamentations. Finally, girding their respective loins violin and ‘cello plunged into a reprise of the work’s signature theme, which sang out defiantly, reawakening what might have represented the idea Te Ahi Kāroa  (the Spark of Life) and to which the piano joyously accorded the rapidly-rotating gamelan-derived carillon-like melody to near-abandoned and almost cathartic effect!

Next, the concert’s mystery object was the enigmatic title for one of the pieces, Thousandth Orange, which straightaway invoked the “all sensibilities opened” kind of response that anything with such a juicily (sorry!) Zen-like title might have had upon the average listener! Just as playfully enigmatic was the programme-note by the composer herself, American Caroline Shaw, at once revealing everything one perhaps needed to know about the piece without letting on about anything we might have wanted to know! – perhaps the NZTrio ‘cellist Mathias Balzat came closest to the mark by telling us that the group was “going to play the piece for us one thousand times”, adding  that “the experience should be as beautiful even after the thousandth playing!”

Violist Alexander Macfarlane (the NZSO’s current Associate Principal Viola) had joined the group for this piece, so that we had pianist Somi Kim and no less than three string players ready to convey to us the music’s many-sided, ostensibly inscrutable qualities. Pianist Somi Kim began the work, a series of four chords on the piano in a constantly-repeated pattern, and interpolated with entirely differently-constituted String Trio harmonies and rhythmic designs – almost Ivesian-like in effect! The strings then surreptitiously “took over” the four-chord pattern, leaving the piano to “extemporise”, and the strings to “play with” the chords and gradually “deconstruct” them, though the four-note “motif” remained discernable while being put under all kinds of strictures! The four-note pattern was arguably “the orange” on its way to its thousandth permutation! I liked the composer’s droll but significant comment regarding the process  – one which accorded “more appreciation of something that most would consider unremarkable”….. to the point where its perception was accompanied by a kind of mystique attitude, a heightened appreciation of ordinary things……the final statement of the “motif” on pizzicato strings at once both  “throwaway” and “significant”…..profound!

Obviously the more-than-usual atmosphere of camaraderie in the cathedral had encouraged people to leave their seats at the interval and engage in fellowship of all kinds, as the concert organisers were forced to make repeated calls to people to resume their places for the second half! This was duly done, and the performers plus yet ANOTHER additional musician, double bassist Damien Eckersley, (also an NZSO Associate Principal!) took up their places on the platform to perform Franz Schubert’s beloved “Trout” Quintet.

This was a splendid performance – I can honestly say I’ve not heard a better one, either “live” or on record! Obviously the “in situ” experience would have brought out whatever qualities there were in the music-making  more vividly than on a sound (or even on a video) recording – and these qualities, such as the technical brilliance, both individual and ensembled, allied to the ever-apparent sense of rapport between the players, and what seemed like an instinctive feeling for the music’s special “character” in these respects, made, I’m certain, this occasion one to readily “gather up” in the memory. For me, nothing seemed to stand in between or distort or dilute the impact made by the music – so, rather than meticulously  (and tiresomely) try and dot and cross all the “I”s and the “t”s of the performance I’d like to highlight a few moments that can serve to speak for the concert as a whole.

I liked the “perfect half-circle” of the string players, with the double-bass especially accorded a front-row place equal to the rest of the strings, instead of being relegated to a more backward position  – and this gave particular delight in the scherzo at some of the phrase ends when the’ cello and double bass had some unison repeated-note exclamations, and made certain each time that they were in accord (especially the final one to which they both amusingly gave some extra “oomph!”). Much earlier, in the first movement, the ensemble were able to achieve an amazingly fluid, nuanced sound which communicated so much expressiveness even when springing forward at a great pace! – as a result the first movement was an extra joy  – as well as making the development section all the more different and exciting.

The Andante second movement opened up vistas of such beauty (beguilingly-voiced lower strings!) making such a gorgeous contrast with the second “layabout” theme that came along later, like a “hands -in-the-pockets” whistling tune! Similar characterful contrasts were delivered in the theme-and-variations “Troutr” movement, during which we were all galvanised by the “helter-skelter” section, carried along by the music’s irresistible energies, then soothed by the ‘cello’s graceful phrasings. And I liked the way that violin and piano began the last variation when reverting to the composer’s “lieder” mode, each player variously giving us a taste of the hapless fish and the cruel fisherman – Amalia Hall and Somi Kim here, to my ears, made their instruments “talk” to one another so deliciously.

What a purposeful journey the ensemble made of the finale – so much energy and schwung in places, with double bassist Damien Eckersley grasping the mettle and giving his instrument plenty of “rumble” with his rapidly-repeated notes. But it was a concerted effort, and a more-than-fitting finish (one thought at this point!) to the concert – except that the ensemble reappeared mid-ovation at the end, and Damien Ecklersley himself had the task of introducing an encore, concerning which he spoke in particular reference to the joy of being a single double bassist playing with wonderful colleagues in chamber music, a change from his usual role as being part of the “bottom end” of a symphony orchestra!

This was a piece written by British composer Judith Weir for the UK’s Schubert Ensemble to commemorate the group’s farewell performance season in 2017, a work fittingly composed for a “Trout Quintet” performance group. Weir wrote the work with Schubert’s famous song Abschied from the song-cycle Schwanengesang in mind, describing the music as containing “goodbye waves in turn from viola, violin, ‘cello, bass and piano” – a perfect way for this evening’s ensemble to finish a truly memorable concert.

 

 

 

Quang Hong Luu (piano) – brilliantly personifying composer and music and their times

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Quang Hong Luu, with Phan Hồng Châu,  at Old St.Paul’s, Wellington

FRANZ  LISZT –  Anneés de pelerinage – Troisieme (Third Year of Pilgrimage) S.163

Angelus – “Prayer to the Guardian Angels”
Aux Cyprès de la Villa d’Este No.1 & 2
Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este
Sunt Lachrymae Rerum E mode Hongroise
Marche Funebre
Sursum Corda

Quang Hong Luu (piano)

Cathedral of St. Paul (“Old St. Paul’s”), Mulgrave St., Thorndon, Wellington
Thursday, 10th September, 2026

Vietnamese-born pianist Quang Hong Luu made a welcome “return to life” on behalf of Wellington’s concert-goers in an Old St.Paul’s “lunchtime concert” presentation, after an earlier indisposition prevented him from giving a promised recital for Wellington Chamber Music’s Sunday concert series on August 16th. Quang had originally intended to present music by Chopin, Beethoven and Liszt, including in the recital the last-named composer’s rarely-performed set of pieces from his later years, written while in residence in Tivoli, Rome, at the Villa d’Este, famous for its spectacular gardens and fountains. These seven pieces were published as the third book of an extensive collection of works which the composer collectively called “Annees de Pelerinage” (Years of Pilgrimage).

Three of these pieces draw their direct inspiration from the Villa d’Este, two of them meditations evoking feelings concerning the magnificent cypress trees in the villa’s gardens, and one inspired by the inspirational fountains, the latter work resonating in various other composers’ music in the years to come. Liszt’s sojourns at these Tivoli gardens provided solace to a composer feeling himself increasingly at odds with existence in general, and beset by occasional depression and sadness, much of which is expressed in the darker moments of some of these pieces.

The “lunchtime concert” format of this occasion perfectly suited the detachment of these pieces by Liszt from the original recital intended by the pianist, the music’s markedly spiritual, and in places esoteric character finding a fitting ambience in the Old St.Paul’s outstandingly beautiful “old-world” environment. The piano, too, in this case a hundred-plus year-old instrument, seemed to unashamedly proclaim its venerable experience in a way that felt and sounded entirely appropriate to the music and to Quang’s playing. Only the dismal weather outside refused to take note of the significance of the occasion, the rain probably accounting for a smaller-than-usual lunchtime audience.

Opening the collection was Angelus (Prayer to the Guardian Angels), its opening tintinnabulations suggesting the traditional bells – as befitted this piece’s dedication (to Liszt’s grand-daughter Daniela) the music at first seemed innocently child-like in tone and aspect, though gradually taking on deeper, grander tones before again returning to the child-like simplicities of the opening. The ballade-like melody pressed forward with engaging youthful vigour, “playing” inquisitively with the three-note staccato figure and its modulations, and with the melody itself, before gathering itself for a grand presentation of the theme, the pianist raising his hands high as if symbolising the blessings of the return to the repeated figuration passage with which the work began, and  blissfully intoning an “uplifted” meditative repetition of those same notes whose gentle earthward descent returned us to a fleeting reminiscence of the ballade-like melody’s opening strains.

By comparison, the first of the two  Aux Cyprès de la Villa d’Este  made a big, black-browed, imposing, even  fearful impression – the repeated tolling bells in the bass amplify and brutalise the opening tintinnabulations of the first piece, the music moving forward deliberately and majestically, then reinforcing the music’s forward movement, plunging us headlong into a kind of maelstrom of agitated sound whose tones lift us up and plunge us downwards in the manner of some oceanic wave, leaving us at the mercy of the ambiences surrounding the places to which the music has delivered us – as if we are in awed dialogue with the cypress trees, a kind of confrontation with nature, with creation in a larger sense and with our place in it, one of awed humility at their symbolic permanence and essential “character” (these trees being symbols of death in classical  tradition…..)

Again, the music at the outset of the second Cyprès de la Villa d’Este was gaunt, black-browed and imposing, though not as unremittingly fearful or threatening in aspect as in the previous piece – a repeated downward-leaping fifth rose partially upwards in a gesture of part defiance, part despair, followed by several tersely muttered chords. The exchange wass repeated, and a new theme, determined and rising appeared, followed by a fanfare-like passage that rose and fell with some certainty – the downward-leaping fifth and its partly-upward “balance” reappeared, followed by, firstly, a forward-looking chromatically-harmonised passage, and a luminous-sounding chorale-like major-key section, suddenly sounding like the Liszt of a previous time, as if a melodic resurgence of a idea from  the composer’s 1850 Consolations or from his 1852 Harmonies Poetiques et religieuses had come to mind. It seemed almost as if the composer had penetrated the outwardly forbidding aspect of the cypresses to express deeper, more ambivalent existential truths suggested by their customary associations – working towards a more transcendent expression that shed light upon darkness in unforeseen ways. Certainly, there was as much peaceful resignation in the repetitions of the luminous- sounding chorale as there was an occasional  indication of a troubled spirit elsewhere.

Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este, the most famous of the set, came next, introduced by an upwardly-thrusting impulse of light and energy and substance whose joyous outpourings symbolisd what its composer described via his quote from the Gospel of John (4:14) as “a well of water springing up into eternal life”, and which was to prove inspirational for a whole new generation of Impressionist composers such as Debussy and Ravel. I wanted Quang Hong Luu to savour for a few more resonant milliseconds the truly transcendental moments of Liszt’s quoting of Wagner from the opera “Das Rheingold” – here, the alluring Rhinemaidens’ twice-voiced lament was, for me, dispatched a shade too quickly – fortunately, the rest, under Quang’s fingers was sheer magic through his playing’s crystalline brilliance, and, towards the end, his complete and exhilarating physical realisation of the flow of water’s all-engulfing cumulative effect, leaving at the end a deep, richly-intoned summation in the piano tones of  something sacramental and life-changing!

The next piece, Sunt lacrymae rerum – en mode hongrois,  returned to the darkness of the first “Cypress” piece. The title “Sunt lacrymae rerum” means “There are tears for things”, and is a quote from Virgil’s “Aeneid” made in reference to the fall of Troy, though Liszt would have been referring here to the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848-49, a theme he had already explored in his piano piece Funerailles, and the symphonic poem “Hungaria”.  The air of mourning was apparent, expressed on both a personal and a national level, Liszt employing all kinds of sonorities to express different levels of sorrow, the piano writing unique in terms of its vision and inventiveness.

No let-up was possible with the following Marche funebre (the earliest piece in the collection, written in 1867), written to mark the death by execution of the unfortunate Maximilian I, the Emperor of Mexico, and containing the inscription on the score “To have wished for great things is an accomplishment in itself “. Perhaps the introduction to this work contained the set’s darkest music – Wagner called this music “an old man’s delirium” – the central section was bleak and ruminative, while the final section was extraordinary, a huge crescendo, atonal harmonies amid tremolandi passages, before a final section which paid homage to the unfortunate monarch in the most fulsome pianistic “clarion call” terms!

Finally came the pianist’s ultimate act of faith, the chorale-like Sursum Corda (Lift up your hearts!) an irresistible and heartfelt statement of faith which the pianist here threw himself into with amazing gusto, at times lifting his whole body from the piano seat in aid of putting every fibre of his being behind the delivery of this music’s message, a performance which fulfilled to a unique, overwhelming degree a “blood-sweat-and-tears” kind of fervour on the part of the composer, so that here, it was as if performer and composer had become one.

We made up for lack of audience numbers at the end with what we hoped were sounds and gesturings of enthusiastic appreciation of the pianist’s superhuman efforts! Quang assured me he would be in Wellington next year for another concert, as yet undisclosed as to content. At such an interpretative level as we had been privileged to experience on this occasion I felt inclined to happily and eagerly undertake with him whatever musical journey he might propose! What a treat to have such an experience to look forward to!

 

Orchestra Wellington’s “Colossal” triumphantly ticks all the descriptive and presentation boxes

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Marc Taddei with Orchestra Wellington and Wellington District Brass Ensemblepresents “Colossal”
JOSHUA PEARSON – Digital Fenua: Fakatili Te Kiloga Fau (world premiere)
HECTOR BERLIOZ – Requiem: Grand Messe des Morts
Kyle Stegall (tenor)
Orpheus Choir, Wellington (Brent Stewart, director)
Te Kōkī Orchestra / Wellington Brass Band / Trust Porirua City Brass
Hutt City Brass / Levin and Districts Brass
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, September 12th, 2026

Review for Middle C by Peter Mechen

With the confidence, surety and irrepressible flair that has characterised his work with Orchestra Wellington over the past few years, conductor Marc Taddei brilliantly succeeded in both masterminding  and spearheading an event which  bounteously fulfilled the ineffably effable title “Colossal” for the concert itself. In every way it was an appropriate description of an event that in my experience has perhaps been recently matched for grandeur here in Wellington only by the performance of Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” in 2010 when Vladimir Ashkenazy conducted the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, together with a team of vocal soloists, the Orpheus Choir and various other choral groups in a similarly unforgettable occasion.

Of course pride of place in respect to the concert’s title was inevitably accorded French composer Hector Berlioz’s intrinsically prodigious “Grand Messe des Morts”, or “Requiem”, and borne out by the extent of musical forces employed by the composer. Such large-scale events were not uncommon in France of the composer’s time and before, being an expression of La Gloire, that source of pride, honour and distinction associated with one’s nation. From the era of Louis XIV (“the Sun King”) French composers would seek to emphasise and reflect in their music the earthly and divinely-appointed virtues of the monarch, bringing to the public spectacular musical depictions by such as Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Jean-Philippe Rameau – and not forgetting, in more revolutionary times, the famous La Marseillaise of Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.

Berlioz’s music was to serve a ceremonial, rather than a liturgical function, a reflection of the changed, post-Revolution place of the Church in French society (as was the use of the composer’s own setting of the words instead of the traditional “Dies Irae” Catholic liturgical setting, in use since the fourteenth century). The Requiem was in fact a commission from the French Government in 1837 for a work of remembrance honouring soldiers who fell in the July 1830 revolution – but due to the disapproval of various anti-revolutionary interests, the dedication was then changed to honour a hero (General Damrémont, the French Army’s commander-in-chief, killed during the country’s recent war efforts aimed at colonising parts of North Africa).

Though Berlioz’s music in general displays occasional touches of La Gloire his Requiem here paid singular attention to a number of varied influences, both musical and social, reflecting his individual feelings towards a “new Romanticism” in art and culture.  The work’s large and diverse forces produced a remarkable range of musical and aural responses, in particular a sensitivity and restraint in certain places, which of course made the almost seismic upheavals of parts of the Dies Irae all the more overwhelming in their effect. The composer described his initial enthusiasm for the text of the work in characteristically excitable tones – “I fell upon it with a kind of fury – my brain felt as though it would explode with the pressure of ideas!” – given these declarations of such creative ferment (here reproduced in the concert’s excellent programme notes), it continued to surprise with how much of the work was so introspective, delicate and ethereal. Here was a composer-sensibility capable of generating intensities at practically every place along such a spectrum, a kind of compendium of emotional response whose spontaneously-wrought effect compelled constant attention.

Along with this “Grande Messe des Morts”  and its historical and cultural associations, the concert brought to us the very great pleasure of an additional work, moreover, one from this part of the globe which nicely balanced things with the Berlioz work – this was the world premiere of a work by young Aotearoa New Zealand-born Samoan composer, Joshua Pearson, one whose title Digital Fenua: Fakatili Te Kiloga Fou concerned the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, and translated from the Tuvaluan language as “Navigating the changing Environment”. The issues facing Tuvalu have been exacerbated by climate change over recent years – they concern rising sea levels, coastal erosion, drinking water shortages and extreme weather patterns. Joshua Pearson’s astonishing and instantly impactful orchestrations plunged all of us into a series of swirling turbulences, with insistent chimes heralding the onset of currents and counter-currents of watery impulses, coloured by megaphonic vocalisations from different parts of the orchestra as strings sounded eerie harmonics and a solo violin floated a stratospheric solo line. Players alternated between conventional instrumental sounds and creative rustlings and crinklings from crumpling cellophane clusters (how onomatopoeic these description words themselves sound!) .

What could be taken on surface value for a magical fairytale sound-world of course had darker, bleaker and more ruinous implications, with Pearson’s evocative instrumentations graphically illustrating both the destabilising action and effects of increasingly confrontational weather-patterns and resulting conditions threatening present living environments with eventually uninhabitable conditions. Hand-in-hand with the ”thriil” of these near-virtuosic orchestrations came, of course, the realisation for us that these spectacular evocations were portents of doom in a sobering, “for whom the bell tolls” kind of way – all the more credit to the composer, therefore, in sounding so graphic a warning to humanity at large. The conclusion of the piece underlined its grim message with the players gradually enveloped in darkness as the sounds faded to silence. As befitted the piece, its presentation and performance, the reception at the end was overwhelming, with the composer making a warmly-acclaimed appearance!

There was no interval, but a kind of changeover process during which the Orpheus choir and brass band personnel filed respectively into their places, while Marc Taddei gave a brief outline of the freshly-published 2027 Orchestra Wellington concert prospectus – an exciting and stimulating season based upon “Dance” and affording all of us many a delightful listening prospect. That done, and a goodly proportion of the composer’s requirements regarding voices and instrumentalists having been brought into the performing arena, the stage was set for the “Requiem” to be set in its “leviathanic” motion.

The work’s mournfully-phrased opening gave notice of its proverbial “depths”, with lower and higher voices in tandem properly emphasising their “polar opposite” tones, the singing,  with variously deep and pure tones combining with strings and winds to make an immense “carpet of sound”,  as the cries of “Requiem” vied with the winds’ piercing, downwardly-cascading  phrases  After the tersely-delivered “Kyrie Eleisons” came the “Dies Irae”, introduced by black-toned double-basses, with Berlioz again using his sopranos, this time in tandem with winds, as a dramatic contrast, before bringing in the other voice-lines. Each group of verses was given its own level of purposeful intensity by agitated string passages, the “Quantus tremor” passages urgent and vigorous, leading up to the first of the work’s truly monumental passages, with brass choir antiphonally following and exchanging phrases with brass choir, two upper groups interacting with two lower groups and leading to the thunderous entrance of the percussion – a scalp-prickling moment, to which the men’s voices then added their stentorian cries of “Tuba mirum” as part of an enormous crescendo of sound, one which resorted to hushed tones for “Mors stupebit” but which then flared up excitingly once more at “Liber scriptus proferetur”. And how pathetic, energy-drained and fearfully wonderful was “Quid sum miser”, with its bleakly forlorn cor-anglais and bassoon accompaniments!

The tumultuous “Rex Tremendae Majestatis” outbursts, followed by the increasingly urgent ‘Recordare, Jesu Pie”, leading into “Confutatis maledictis” made for episodes of great and desperate excitement, the “prayer” becoming a compelling “theatre of supplication” before returning to “Rex Tremendae” amid piteous cries of  “Salva Me”.  The following “Quaerens Me” brought us some of the evening’s loveliest singing, the voices in unaccompanied . lyrical mode, pleading for forgiveness as was accorded Mary Magdalene and the Good Thief at Christ’s crucifixion, and a necessary respite when considering what was to follow.

This was the mighty “Lacrimosa”, the “day of tears”, Berlioz unsparingly giving the verses a harsh, jagged syncopated accompaniment from strings, winds and brass in rugged 9/8 time – two quieter passages gave some respite, but soon returned to the merciless onslaught with additional brass and percussion joining the fray as the choir wass spared nothing!   The prayer rose towards its punishing finality, with every singer and player in the hall, it seemed, hanging onto those final utterances for all they were worth – a transfiguring moment, leaving at the end an exhausted, but still reverberating  silence!

Into this “void left by a maelstrom” came the Offertorium, a deeply-moving  work whose obsessively-repeated and anxiously unresolved vocal lines representing a kind of great anxiety, with the voices seemingly left abandoned in a wilderness, intoning a figure that oscillated between two notes without settlement or deliverance – meanwhile all around these voices the instrumental lines “wandered” as if enchanted or bewildered, the strings and winds aware of and responding to the text’s invocations of the “promise” made by God to “Abraham and his seed” – the beautiful moment at the words “promisisti et semini ejus” was here like balm for our senses, the music moving into the major key and generating a flowering of hope for deliverance into light and warmth – wonderfully and superbly-delivered!   The following “Hostias”, with its hauntingly celestial key-changes  generated by angelic winds (always reminding me of – and, of course, pre-dating – “Lohengrin”!) gave even further hope for salvation (but what creepily sepulchral brass-playing was sounded here at the end, affording scary glimpses into the abyss!).

Then came the equally spell-binding sequence with solo tenor Kyle Stegall, the single voice resplendently furthering Berlioz’s transfiguring fusion of the ordinary and the fabulous, backed up by celestial echoes and resonances from the choir (apart from a brief moment of strain for the sopranos in their “Gloria” utterances) – their “Hosannas” here joyously danced and exalted in response, as did the adjoining brasses at the end!

It was left for the “Agnus Dei” to usher in the drama’s final moments, with magical wind and brass chordings underpinned by strings giving the choir’s heartfelt utterances a kind of enduring luminosity, as did in contrasting ways the succeeding, entirely characteristic exchanges between the lighter strings and winds and the darker, more sinister brasses. More grounding was the return to the work’s opening, with the cries of “Requiem” punctuated once more by those well-remembered descending wind chords, but reaching a finality with the voices’ utterances resolving into “Quia pius es, in aeternum, Domine” (Because thou art forever merciful, Lord) and a series of heart-easing “Amens” with blissfully rising-and-falling string roulades underpinned by gently-throbbing timpani and string pizzicati which together concluded the work.

Such an accolade-exhausting achievement left one grasping vainly for further acclamations! To all the performers, enablers and organisers one needs must bestow very great gratitude at being presented with such a work brought off with all the elan, brilliance depth and variety that it needed to succeed. It takes its honorable place in the growing pantheon of memorable presentations by Orchestra Wellington and the Orpheus Choir, here enriched by the stellar contributions of so many local musicians who obviously relished their integral part in the proceedings. Both Marc Taddei’s and Orpheus Choir director Brent Stewart’s stewardship of this historic event will be remembered and appreciated for a long time to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dolfin-Lin Duo – positively tingling with spontaneous re-discovery!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
Dolfin-Lin Duo – Balazs Dolfin (‘cello) / Tony Chen Lin (piano)

ZOLTÁN KODÁLY  –  Magyar Rondo (Hungarian Rondo) (1917)
ANTON WEBERN  –  Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano (1914)
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH  –  Sonata for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord in D Major  BWV 1028
GAO PING  –  Sonata No. 2 for ‘Cello and Piano “Departure” (2001)
BÉLA BARTÓK – Rhapsody No. 1 for ‘Cello and Piano (1928-9)
NATHANAEL DEJONG – Abandoned Voices (2021)
JOHANNES BRAHMS – Sonata No.1 for ‘Cello and Piano in E Minor Op.38

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday,, 30th August 2026

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

This partnership of ‘cello and piano made a profound impression with the Duo’s strongly-projected, in places “larger-than-life” realisations of the works chosen, with those I’d heard before (the Bartok and Brahms pieces) giving a remarkably singular impression to my ears of hearing the music for the first time! I’d heard Tony Chen Lin’s playing on several occasions previously as well as on recordings, and found myself often remarking upon his boldly-characterised view of both detailings and overall trajectorial and colouristic character, playing which unhesitatingly “addresses” more than merely “coaxes out” the music’s manifold moods. On this occasion, of course, his partner was Hungarian cellist Balazs Dolfin ( their Duo was formed in Italy in 2021) whose similarly arresting and whole-hearted approach to his instrument and its sound-world in general seemed to me to fit like a glove with the pianist’s aforementioned qualities  – so that the music-making throughout the concert positively tingled with spontaneously-generated re-discovery!

First up was Zoltan Kodaly’s Magyar Rondo, written in 1917, and drawn from incidental music the composer had written for a play by Zsigmond Móricz called Pacsirtaszó (Lark’s Song), a folk-style drama but  with “social realism” themes – this version for ‘cello and piano brought out the piece’s soulful folk-character at the outset, before breaking into a dance variation, angular and quixotic! A deeper, more baritonal tone came with the next, slower variation, the piano contrasting the cello’s sombre voice with full, assertive treatment accorded the melody’s refrain, though the music returned to more intimate realms for a wistful, harmonics-like cello passage, almost ghostly in effect! A far more helter-skelter mood overtook the next variation’s minor-key mood-change, the music abandoning itself to a burst of high-spirited display before the cello took us suddenly along a pizzicato-strewn pathway, the piano playing bagpipelike figurations as the dance swirled and swayed up and down – but how wistful and redolent were the dream-like moments of remembrance, compared with the wildness of the duo’s concluding high-spiurited flourishes!

Nothing further from the opening could have been devised than what we next experienced, Anton Webern’s ‘Cello Sonata, a work written in 1914, and intended as a present for his father, who loved the ‘cello! For whatever reason the composer broke off working on the piece and decided he would give his father the “Three Little Pieces for ‘Cello and Piano” Op.11 instead, abandoning the Sonata, which wasn’t rediscovered until 1965, twenty years after t3he composer’s death. Though roughly contemporaneous with the Kodaly piece we heard  at the concert’s beginning, the Sonata seemed to inhabit an entirely different creative sphere,  Though not twelve-tone music. Webern’s Sonata features fractured phrases and angularly-pointed rhythms whose contrasts are often explosive and even disturbing, with “sehr bewegt” (very animated) suddenly giving way to (“zart bewegt”) gently animated, before reverting without warning to the original marking for the piece’s final gesturings.

Not inappropriately, the players then took up, after a moments’s pause, the programme’s next item Johann Sebastian Bach’s  Sonata for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord in D Minor, with the first-movement Adagio in our minds seeming almost to “sort out” the still-resonating strains of the Webern piece, almost as if giving credence to Webern’s teacher Schoenberg’s dictum that “there are no dissonances in music, just more remote consonances…”. I thought the playing so very exquisitely dovetailed, bringing out as much the character as well as the beauty of the lines’ interactions during the following Allegro. The soulfulness of the minor-key Siciliano rhythm throughout the Andante brought out the expressiveness, the depth of feeling, the grief inherent in this music that awaited release in a finale that danced like thistledown in the wind, joyously freed from earthly constraint as the composer evoked the prospect of life’s fulfilment in expectation of heavenly reward.

Sixth-generation Chinese composer Gao Ping’s music is well-known to New Zealand audiences due to his significant working associations with various educational institutions in this country, such as Christchurch’s University of Canterbury and Te Koki New Zealand School of Music in Wellington. He’s developed long-term relationships with local musicians such as Michael Houstoun  and  the New Zealand String Quartet – the fifteen year-old association with Houstoun has resulted in a recent recording “Outside the Window” of Gao Ping;s music, released on the Rattle label. By way of acknowledging a New Zealand influence upon his own music he is currently planning an opera set in this country, one whose setting (Central Otago) will draw from storytelling traditions present in classic stories from both Chinese and Western cultures. This has been, he has said

Gao Ping’s Cello Sonata No. 2 was written on 2001 – its title, “Departure” was taken from the subject of a Chinese poet of the “Song Dynasty” one writing in times parallel to western medieval times (10TH-13TH century), the Song Dynbasty poet Su Dongpo. The poet relates the work’s title to the cyclical meaning of the Chinese  word shi meaning “departure” which incorporates both an end and a beginning, an idea elaborated upon by Geo Ping’s music which ends the piece with the notes of its beginning. Its sounds also give voice to the composer’s inclination to blend Western and Chinese music, reminding the listener in places of the inclinations of Janacek, Kodaly and Bartok in their similar “seedings” of various pieces with folk-inspired impulses and gestures.

There are five sections to the work  which play continuously, and whose flow emphasise that same “end is my beginning” concept. The cello underlines traditional colours and timbres of traditional Chisese instruments such as the Guqin and Erhu, as well as having recourse to vocal inflections of traditional speech-styles, stemming from an era of personal expression and introspective inclinations. The ‘cello emphasised these associations at the beginning, now and then “bending’ the notes, and employing freely ranging dynamic levels, with eerie, other-worldly harmonics that invited the piano’s first entry. A sustained note slowly developed more elaborate configurations which grew to  allowing ever-increasing freedom of expression – the instrumental sounds could be described as reaching for speech inflections, suggesting the full human range of tones, timbres, colours and dynamics.  Whole episodes then gave themselves over to contrasting depictions of emotion and purpose, often alarmingly confrontational, then reverting to introspective moods, the tones becoming increasingly disembodied as a sense of overriding timelessness crept into the sound-worlds and gradually silenced the remaining impulses and counter-impulses in spell-binding fashion!

An interval of discussion made the time pass quickly before we were off again with the dauntless duo, this time a folk-flavoured work by Bartok, the Rhapsody No.1, originally composed for violin and piano but arranged by the composer for ‘cello and piano – here, ‘cellist and pianist gave a remarkable display, giving full measure to both the physical and lyrical aspects of the Rhapsody, tearing into the well-known contrasted pairing of the traditional Lassú (slow) and Friss  (fast) sections of the Hungarian verbunkos (recruiting) dance with tremendous physicality, precision and plaintive lyricism, the soft-playing as arresting as the excitement generated by the more brilliant sections.

An entirely new name to me was New Zealand composer Nathanael Dejong (b.1988) whose work reflects his training as both a pianist and violinist as well as composition, but directly focuses on his interest as a parent in childhood development relating to teaching and learning in an age he considers overshadowed  by electronic media devices –  the “Abandoned Voices” title reflected this dominance of digital media at the expense of human interaction. Consequently the work we heard presented sombre exchanges between the instruments, deep, serious and heartfelt utterances punctuated by long silences and wide dynamic ranges, both piano and cello employing delicate, winsome sets of gestures representing a plethora of sounds to make sense of, both of their own volition and in responsive contexts to one another – the cello playing unworldly harmonics and the pianist reaching into the body of the piano to dampen notes and chordings. It all makes for a variety of impulse and intent awaiting definition and associated meaning, the “small voices, waiting to be heard” presence embodied in newly-emergent human form.

Though there was nothing “small voiced” about Johannes Brahms, the young composer’s rabid perfectionist nature resulted in his destroying many youthful compositions before allowing his innermost creative thoughts to remain, an inclination which for some years dogged his compositional efforts – indeed, some scholars suggest that probably only one-third of Brahms’s entire compositional input has survived. The earliest “official” works were for solo piano and song collections, the young composer’s meetings with the violinist Joseph Joachim and Robert and Clara Schumann gained him invaluable advice, example and confidence, though he maintained his rigorous self-critical attitudes to his work throughout his compositional career. His two ‘cello sonatas interestingly “reverse” their composer’s expected compositional trajectories, with the earlier First (played today) very much connected to the past, the deep-throated melody that opens the work frequently “changing places” with the piano, so that the harmonic structure of the work is richly varied in texture and tone. The “fusing” of the two leads strengthened the discourse between the two voices, both performers here scarcely holding back in terms of full-blooded expressiveness – I simply loved it!

For whatever reason, Brahms removed an Adagio movement originally composed, leaving the “Allegretto quasi Menuetto”  to fend for itself as a foil to the outer movements, a charming theme, sharing the opening section with a sinuous second theme, also in a minor key – the trio was even more suggestive in intent, with both instruments tying the melodic strands closely together, before returning to the opening dance. The finale  plunged into a whirling dervish-like opening, (commentators cite Bachian influences here relating to “the Art of the Fugue” at the beginning, which took on a more playful aspect in places, and with Brahms broadening the trajectories into momentary illusions of adventurous impulse (shades of the D Minor Piano Concerto’s great “questing” theme at one point!) and disarmingly charming dance-like manoeuverings, all swept away by the return of the opening “whirling” figures, concluding with a furious, cataclysmic stretto leaving us all deliciously dishevelled by the music’s wonderfully conclusive sound and fury!

 

SPACE JUMP – An exhilarating listening leap from NZTrio into firmament-like territories

Posted on by Peter Mechen

FAZIL SAY – Space Jump for Piano Trio (2013)
REENA ESMAIL – Piano Trio (2019)
KEITH MOSS – Field Notes in Autumn (2026 – NZ Trio commisssion)
ROBERT SCHUMANN – Piano Trio No 2 in F Major

NZTrio  (He taonga wairere)
Amalia Hall (violin), Matthias Balzat (cello), Somi Kim (piano)
Wellington Central Library – Te Matapihi te Ao Nui
Sunday 23rd August, 2026

Composers over the course of time have often demonstrated a fondness, and, indeed, a facility, for writing descriptive music representing people, animals, objects or events. As early as the Renaissance, there was a penchant for imitating the sounds and movements of wildlife, with voices mimicking birds and animals, as well as human activity involving both warfare and daily life in large cities. Throughout the Baroque and Classical periods composers such as Vivaldi, Biber, Haydn and Couperin enthusiastically wrote music to tell stories or imitate different sound-worlds in nature and in human society. The Romantic period which followed saw the rise of “programme music” and sparked both debate and conflict between the conservative and progressive elements, each advancing the respective merits of “absolute” and “descriptive” music right into the twentieth century, where modernist techniques further advanced and diversified the music that described all kinds of life-forms and mechanised objects, blurring the absolute/descriptive classifications of music.

With this potted history in mind, it was interesting to encounter in this concert a number of  works by contemporary composers that had been inspired by both modernist and traditional trends and conceived from different physical, national and cultural standpoints, and representing a kind of global interest in and acceptance of regional perspectives of the individual pieces and their respective preoccupations. And binding the whole exploratory process of performing and experiencing these different works was one central to the essences of the instrumental medium – Robert Schumann’s iconic Second Piano Trio of 1847, one representing a kind of apex of joyous expression and fulfilment, and to which each of the preceding works in the concert had aspired in their own ways.

The NZTrio boldly began these intriguing presentations with a remarkably tactile work “Space Jump” written by the Turkish composer/pianist Fazil Say, the result of the composer’s fascination with the daredevil exploits of Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian extreme sports pioneer famed for a record-breaking 2012 skydive from the edge of space after being lifted by a helium balloon to a height of almost 40 km, before free-falling for most of his descent, and breaking the sound barrier in the process! Fazil Say was among the 8 million viewers who watched the Jump on You Tube, his music depicting every aspect of the jump including the safe landing on earth. (Baumgartner, incidentally, was killed last year in a paragliding accident in Italy – he was 56 years old.)

The music was nothing if not vertiginous in places, though the life-threatening nature of the exercise was, for much of the music’s length masked by the situation’s “suspended unrealities” as the adventurer seemed almost to “float” for a lot of the downward journey in relative solitude and loneliness. However, in places towards the end the hazardous nature of the undertaking became more and more apparent in the music, leaving behind the initial violin ostinati (which had been borne along by the ‘cello’s counterpointing figures and the ambient piano chordings) and plunging into a sudden jazzy piano irruption of energies  –  the driving trajectories of the stuntman’s “fall”!  Violin and piano ”hewed” at syncopations attempting to turn the trajectories different ways, the instrumental swirlings and impassioned tones conveying the out-and-out physicalities of the free-faller holding his course steady. Then, a sudden cessation of trenchant movement was ”filled in” by more settled and lyrical figures, with occasional scintillating “swirls” augmented by piano glistenings, and a couple of strange, discordant harmonies which sounded and then drifted into silence. Whew! – exhausting stuff!

Then came a work by Indian-American composer Reena Esmail, her 2019 Piano Trio, sounds which thankfully kept its trajectories a good deal closer to terra firma, though covering vast distances of a different kind. Here, the composer’s music took us to a world of vibrant fusion between Eastern and Western composition, in which European tonal and harmonic systems could interact with her own heritage’s rather more ancient North Indian (Hindustani) traditions. Esmail had studied as a student at the Juilliard and Yale Schools of Music, but then won a scholarship through a Fulbright/Nehru grant to enable her to undertake explorations of Hindustani (north Indian) classical music.

As a student pianist she had become enamoured of the piano trio tradition begun by Josef Haydn and further advanced by figures such as Mendelssohn, Shostakovich and Ravel, the latter having a particular influence upon her penchant for colour and texture in her own music. Thus her own 2019 Piano Trio reflects such early Western music influences as well as drawing from the storehouse of musical tradition found in the complex patterns and pitches organised around the ancient patterns and constructions known as raga, or raags found in traditional Hindustani music.

Straightaway, in the Trio’s opening movement, a shimmering, repeated-note pattern appeared, led by the piano and echoed by the violin and ‘cello, echoing the spirit of Ravel in the evocative piano figurations,  the strings later quoting an ancient Monsoon season raag Megh, violin and ‘cello harmonising the melodic lines, then decorating the piano’s reiteration of the melody,  and building the melody’s intensities in canonic fashion. The second movement opened with the strings repeating single-note and slow-trilled gestures against a beautiful choral-like piano melody, violin and ‘cello exchanging dialogue-like phrases, evocatively “bending” the occasional note in sitar-like fashion, as the piano gently and softly voiced a shimmering accompaniment, incorporating a raag Des (the latter word meaning “country” or “land”). For the listener this sounded like a retold or shared reminiscence or description of a particular place, one whose reiterations brought forth a surge of intensity, a deeply-felt sequence of expressive emotion.

The third, Scherzo-movement was all nervous intensity, the strings’s rapidly-exchanged tremolandi passages dancing to an ostinato  piano accompaniment, then building in excitement, with spectacular piano glissandi shooting across the soundscapes like meteorities, before the trio returns to the opening dance, repeating those electrifying piano glissandi to scintillating effect before the energies died down, brought to a droll conclusion by a single piano note!

Beseeching piano chords and lament-like cries from the strings began the finale, the music seeming to be ensnared in its own trance-like evocations, tremolando strings and rhapsodic arpeggiations from the piano leading to a heartfelt, song-like section with a filigree piano accompaniment – beautiful and almost tragic-sounding! The music became almost Rachmaninov-like, with passionate piano chordings and full-voiced string unisons reaching a point where some great thought, emotion or realisation was uncovered or confronted and squared up to – the mood was savoured and elevated to a point of great release and resolution, so that all that were left were haunting piano chords and ever-diminishing string harmonics, fading away to silence. At the end, the departing tones remained an indelible, lingering memory…….

In the wake of such high-impact presentations, South African-born, Wellington-based Keith Moss’s Field Notes in Autumn provided some welcome relief! – we were charmed to find the composer was actually present, and spoke briefly about his work, a piece which was derived from an earlier work for flugelhorn and piano, one presumably written almost exactly a year previously, if the title was to be taken literally!

A fresh, open piano sound began the work, establishing a “New World” kind of ambience, with the ensuing violin solo (repeated by the ‘cello) richly-wrought and nostalgic. The music’s ongoing, almost supercharged nostalgic quality put me in mind of those English pastoral works by Vaughan Williams and Butterworth in feeling, with, as the composer put it, “explorations of place, people and memory”. I sat listening and thinking how gratifying such music would be for performers, giving back such beauties to their efforts, and enjoying, as here, the appreciative audience response both during and at the end of the piece.

In concluding this delightfully singular foray into piano-trio possibilities this gifted ensemble gave us what surely counted as a cornerstone of the repertoire – Robert Schumann’s Second Piano Trio in F Major, for once a work by this composer whose opening would have kept the listener guessing as to its provenance for a few more bars longer than usual, as so much of his output almost immediately does! Here, in contrast to his G Minor Trio whose opening straightway proclaimed its “time of gloomy moods”, was, in the NZTrio’s hands music of joyous and energetic vigour right from the outset, inspired as Schumann was by his love for Clara, and the feelings her devotion to him awakened. It was actually the tenth anniversary of the couple’s secret engagement, which accounts for the music’s frequent allusions to Clara – the first two movements of the work here quoted the song “in the depths of my heart I keep a radiant image of you” from Schumann’s own song-cycle Liederkreis, and the third movement contains a quote from another song-cycle Frauenliebe und Leben, a work influenced by  Schumann’s courtship of Clara at the time.

A sinuous melody shared between the strings began the second movement, which coursed between this and various impulse-driven episodes – soulful recitative-like exchanges given all the room needed for the players to fill out the phrase-turns, and wistful minor-key asides which surprise with impulsive, spontaneous-sounding irruptions that just as suddenly fall back to treasurable moments of exquisite dovetailing of detail – memorable music-making! The third movement was a piquant waltz, violin and piano in canon with the melody, with the cello a dark-browed accompanist, the three players elaborating their lines in the graceful Trio, then returning to the dance, and nudging the harmonies into and out of the major key during the coda.

Nowhere is Schumann more beguiling in this work than in the finale – energetic, whimsical and good-humoured, the music and its performance readily teased and delighted us, building towards the end to what seemed like a near-euphoric state of elation, enabling us all to share in the effervescent-sounding exclamations of pleasure in the playing.  Small wonder that Clara Schumann’s verdict on the work – “(it) delights and warms the depths of my soul from beginning to end” resonated in our responses at the concert’s conclusion!

 

Orchestra Wellington’s “Creation” concert boldly crosses cultures and genres

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents “Creation”

DARIUS MILHAUD – La Création du Monde
BÉLA BARTÓK – Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion
CARL NIELSEN – Symphony No. 4 “Inextinguishable”

Ballet Collective Aotearoa
John Psathas Group – Akvilė Šileikaitė, Michael Houstoun (pianos)
Fabian Ziegler, Katarzyna Myćka (percussion)
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei – conductor

Michael Fowler Centre. Wellington

Saturday 22nd August, 2026

Orchestra Wellington’s latest presentation spanned fascinating varieties of time, place and human expression in bringing together different manifestations of creative impulse ranging from the trans-Atlantic cosmic (Milhaud) through flavoursome folkish interaction (Bartók) to an individualised and spectacularly conclusive life-perspective (Nielsen).

This occasion wasn’t the first on which the orchestra and Marc Taddei had invited dancers into the concert-hall (I remember a remarkably atmospheric dance presentation of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin in 2023)  but as one of the current items (Darius Milhaud’s La Création du Monde) just happened to be an original ballet score, the challenge of a dance presentation was taken up and readily accepted by the Ballet Collective Aotearoa on a surprisingly-accommodating stage in front of the orchestral platform. Further out-of-the-ordinary performance configurations followed with the appearance of two grand pianos and numerous percussion instruments on the platform, making ready for Bela Bartók’s fascinatingly collaborative Concerto for two Pianos and Percussion. Here the version with the composer’s own orchestrations was played (the original was for four players only), the music exploring a complex network of creative instrumental combinations bringing together classical, folk and futuristic elements.

In conclusion, the concert presented us with a singular view of the creative process via an orchestral symphony whose title eponymously described its very character – this was  Carl Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony, given the name “Inextinguishable” by its composer, a direct affirmation of, in the composer’s words  “life and movement” readily suggesting the “will to life” as being “indomitable and inextinguishable”.

Such is the increased “global” focus of present-day humanity, it’s hardly surprising that there’s increasing interest shown by creative groups worldwide in exploring the commonalities of intrinsic human activities, views regarding existence in general and including stories from different places relating to origins of the world and the life it has supported and developed. French-born composer Darius Milhaud’s 1923 ballet “La Creation du Monde” conspicuously represented a kind of amalgam of pioneering discovery on his part involving both his exposure to New World jazz music when visiting New York in 1922, and his fascination with a collection of West Central African Creation mythologies – these  had been compiled by the Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars, in vogue with a fascination in 1920s French artistic circles regarding “primitivism” perfectly expressed by African art and legend. In response to a commission from the impresario Rolf de Maré for his Ballets Suédois  (Swedish Ballet Company) in Paris, Cendrars devised the ballet’s scenario with cubist sets and costumes designed by Fernand Léger. The ballet unfolded across five movements whose connections charted a “creation” course from “Chaos” through awakenings of Nature, and the creation of Man and Woman – a scenario not unlike the biblical story of Genesis.

Fascinatingly, the ballet’s scenario was here adapted for the Ballet Collective Aotearoa by choreographer Tanemahuta Grey, with the dancers depicting the Te Ao Maori creation story of the separation of Rangi-nui and Papa-tuanuku. The choreographer’s voice spoke the introductory incantations in Te Reo (a translation not provided that I could see, which was a pity!) However, the Te Ao Māori story is well-known enough by audiences to make an involving and sonorous connection with the music possible and meaningful, and was brilliantly essayed by the dancers (as well as by the musicians on their part) throughout. It was interesting that, as the group had more female than male dancers Tanemahuta Grey stressed the aspects of the story involving the births of the two female deities Hine Ahu-Ons and Hine Titama, more than the activities of Tane and his brothers at the story’s beginning – a differently-weighted focus to what one usually encounters in the story.

Though the detailings of the myth were differently emphasised to that of the well-known story (Rangi-Nui the Skyfather, and Papa- Tuanuku, the Earth-Mother are forced apart by the efforts of their son Tane Mahuta, after the attempts by various of the other children had failed), the union and separation of the parents (Olivia Platt as Papa-Tuanuku, and James Buechell as Rangi-Nui)  readily conveyed both the closeness of their union and the agony of their separation. This was achieved by Tane-Mahuta (Tabitha Dombroski), with suitably forceful connivance from additional dancers Amelia Chandulal-Mackay and Lyndon Foley.  Then, the coming into the world of the daughters of the union, Hine Ahu one (danced by Zoe White) and Hine Titama (Ruby Clarke) was conveyed with due exchanges, minglings and separation sequences. A more detailed explanation of the scenario would have enhanced our understanding of specific movements towards union and separation, but the somewhat abstracted gesturings and concerted movements managed to convey the ritualised essence of origin and representation we needed to give the movements their symbolic meaning – and the music-making was wonderful!

Creation was followed by re-creation in terms of the next item, both in the performing space’s adaptation for the presentation, and the original work’s “enlargement” by its composer Bela Bartók. This was the Concerto for two pianos, percussion and orchestra, and was a work which I’d heard not long ago in its original 1937 format, for two pianos and percussion, and which the composer and his wife Ditta Pásztory had premiered in Basel, Switzerland in 1938 with great success. This led to the composer’s publisher Hans Heinsheimer suggesting that Bartók recast the work with orchestral accompaniment after he had left Hungary for the United States in 1940 to give his music increased performance opportunities – the original solo parts for the work were largely unchanged, and the work was premiered in its new format in London late in 1942. Bartók and his wife Ditta gave the American premiere of this work in January, 1943 at Carnegie Hall, New York, the last occasion on which the composer appeared in public as a performer, as he was to die of leukemia in September 1945.

This performance featured an ensemble with the name John Psathas Group, formed by an international ensemble of artists dedicated to “bringing contemporary chamber music to life” with the promotion of John Psathas’s music a “raison d’etre” for the ensemble along with other recent works. Fittingly, New Zealand’s Michael Houstoun was invited to participate in this concert with fellow-pianist Akvilė Šileikaitė, and percussionists Katarzyna Myćka and Fabian Ziegler. As I’d never before heard the “concerto” version of this work the occasion had more-than-usual interest for me.

The work began with soft drum rolls and low piano notes, suddenly “lit up” by the first of two scintillating irruptions, each conveying an idea of something eventful awaiting its appointed time – the pianists gradually built up their figurations in presence and excitement with increased detailings from both percussionists and orchestra, becoming giant stride-like beats as the “presences” amplify and accelerate their intensities, alternating energetic piano dovetailings with percussive colourings from the soloists and fanfare-like crescendi brilliantly bursting forth from the orchestra. What sounded like a “devil of a fugue” introduced by the side-drum roll made for hair-raising irruptive sequences, both playful in their “falling back” to folkish expression and startling in their contrasts of extremes! We were kept on tenterhooks for most of the movement’s course, so volatile and differentiated were the sequences and their interactions!

Bartók’s “night music” drew us into a fantasmagorical amalgam of impulse and stillness, sounds that owed nothing to convention and everything to nature, the music gradually creating its own trajectorial instincts towards a kind of unease which now and then  “spooked” the textures either with isolated sforzandi or eerily swirling chromatic piano figures which pursued glissandi-like impulses of disquiet – everything sounded so “feral”, so unconcerned with form or shape, predisposed instead towards a self-
contained ambient presence set in timeless surety by long-held wind tones claiming  proprietal rights at the end.

A flurry of energies sent tones, scintillations and percussive patternings dancing in the last movement’s opening! – the xylophone and timpani danced alternate steps goading the pianists into following suit, and elongating the festive, almost Shostakovich-like air of joyous release.  Akvilė Šileikaitė and Michael Houstoun took up the mischievous variations of their respective trajectories, one second direct and business-like, and the next “playing” with droll and loping rhythms before dashing excitedly together  into an urgently-conceived crescendo of energies whose concerted impulses resonated through the spaces most satisfyingly! The pianist’s “cake-walk” pastiche-like sequence got everybody’s rhythmic instincts in synch most splendidly, almost as if “jam-sessioning” would keep us going indefinitely! – however, Bartok chose to make a tongue-in-cheek gesture of wry acceptance over the work’s last few bars, with a few piano notes and a muttered percussion gesture ending the work and leaving us all bemused but happy!

We spent the interval musing over conductor Marc Taddei’s words addressed briefly to us before the Bartók item  regarding recent funding decisions from Creative New Zealand reducing its annual support for Orchestra Wellington by almost 40%, and alerting us that the cuts would carry serious implications for the orchestra’s ability to stage the kind of innovative and ambitious presentations we’d enjoyed from OW of late. Such sobering realities didn’t, however, inhibit the impact of the second-half performance of Carl Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony, one that, under such circumstances, aptly bore the name “Inextinguishable”. As it meant to go on, the symphony exploded into being in the conductor’s and players’ hands, the full-blooded playing announcing in no uncertain terms that this music had something to say!

The work as a whole felt like a “stream of consciousness” with its composer intent upon demonstrating the inexhaustible process of life and its variety – so, the four “sections” in the symphony featured the same notes, themes and progressions repeatedly “turning up” in different guises in boundless displays of energy and reflection, underlining the sharply-contrasted nature of the exchange. In the wake of a cello solo supported by the flutes, the clarinets took up the great descending theme which dominates the work, followed by the strings, intermingling fragments of the opening things before a brusque repeated viola figure broke into the mood, preparing the way for the following energetic version of the same glorious clarinets’ theme, here made rumbustious and raucous. Throughout, Marc Taddei’s control of his forces steered the music unerringly through its by turns steady and frenetic manifestations, with strings, winds, brasses and timpani unhesitatingly throwiing themselves into the fray, each vying for our attention! Eventually, we were moved  towards and through a great E-major orchestral statement of exhausted but triumphant finality which proclaimed its victory before sinking downwards towards the next movement’s beginning!

As timpani and violin  mused  quietly on what had gone before the wind choirs suddenly broke out in cheerful song, via fresh, out-of-doors flavourings from both reeds and flutes, playing in what sounded like an “old-world” fashion, but with subtle hints of later harmonic language, evident in the more “exploratory” string pizzicato passages, everything here so deliciously and disarmingly delivered, right up to the clarinet’s entry with rather more sobering and tentative phrases, as if the player had realised some kind of “brink” was threatening – which it was!

As if a giant cosmic firmament was suddenly opened up before us, the Orchestra Wellington strings turned the intensities upon us with a vengeance! – though there weren’t masses of strings their focused sounds galvanised our sensibilities as they delivered the third movement’s spectacularly resonant opening utterances, reinforced by irruptions from the timpani and lower strings, motifs from the symphony’s opening. The violas and cellos joined in, just as whole-heartedly, and a fugal section piled the emotion up higher and higher towards a wonderful moment of release, though the performance didn’t let up with the intensities – despite a piquant oboe solo lifting its beseeching voice the strings brushed the moment aside and launched into a furious fusillade-like violin unison passage, skin and hair flying, and which the lower strings then took up as well – breathless excitement! (I read about a telling exchange  between conductor Sir John Barbirolli and his Halle orchestra leader Martin Milner who, when rehearsing the work requested that the conductor take this passage with the strings  “a little slower, for clarity’s sake” – to which Barbirolli replied “Oh, no! – if we take it any slower, people will hear what you’re playing!”).

Here the music exuded joy and energy, the performance “taking wing”, expressing the “inextinguishable” qualities of life itself, though the composer still had a wild-card to play – the addition to the orchestra of a second set of timpani, which had been silent up to this moment, but which now joined in with the vigorous expressions of delight and energy. Though my seat in the Michael Fowler centre gave me an excellent view of the first timpanist, I could only just catch glimpses of the tops of the flailing drumstick- heads of the second player, placed as he was partly under the upstairs audience overhang – so I missed the spectacular visual effect of the additional player’s joining with the movement’s opening festivities, and, more importantly, the later, combatative sequences between the two players’ instruments. After the two timpanists seemed to size each other up, the music momentarily calmed down, the winds making reassuring noises as the strings hovered uneasily, as if reluctant to launch into the work’s great “life” theme and face the challenge of the heavy artillery! Brass and winds then sounded warnings of what was to come as the “battle” began in earnest – though I couldn’t clearly see the second timpanist, the surges of sound that raged back and forth across the vistas were impressive in themselves, the conflict flavoured by shouts from the strings and cries from the brass! A final percussive crescendo and the drums broke off their onslaught, while orchestral forces lifted their voices in triumph with the composer’s all-pervading “life theme”, the timpani then joining in with the final peroration as partners rather than foes, the players all sonorously savouring the spoils of victory!

A classic concert experience, then – and, for me, one to savour in the memory as a revelation!

 

A feast of classic and contemporary Finnish music – from Pietari Inkinen and the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra  – Myths and Legends 2026

Pietari Inkinen conducts the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra  – Photo, Phoebe Cassidy, NZSO

SIBELIUS _ Pohjola’s Daughter
MAGNUS LINDBERG – Violin Concerto No.2
Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin)
SIBELIUS – Four Legends (Lemminkäinen Suite)

  1. Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari
  2. Lemminkäinen in Tuonela
  3. The Swan of Tuonela
  4. Lemminkäinen’s Return

Pietari Inkinen – conductor
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 15th August, 2026

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

I’d already become reacquainted with Pietari Inkinen’s rostrum presence in front of the NZSO the previous evening in the orchestra’s spectacularly-delivered  Wagner concert “Radiance” –  so this evening’s “Myths and Legends” concert was certainly an added pleasure. It was heightened by Inkinen choosing a programme which featured the music of perhaps his most illustrious countryman, Jean Sibelius, as, during the conductor’s earlier, seven-year tenure with the NZSO ( from2008 to 2015) he had programmed in concert and recorded all seven of the composer’s symphonies, as well as also presenting in that concert series tonight’s Lemminkäinen Suite, (though, sadly, I wasn’t the Middle C reviewer for THAT concert!). So, learning that Inkinen was proposing to repeat these Four Legends  (as they’re also often called)  was an added fillip to the occasion for me this time round!

There was more! – along with the Legends another of the composer’s tone-poems, one which hardly ever gets performed here in Wellington, was promised, the atmospheric, superbly-crafted “Pohjola’s Daughter” long a favourite work of mine due to its presence as an “extra” on the first recording I ever owned of a Sibelius Symphony, the magnificent Fifth. So as far as this composer was concerned it was a case for me of a cup that “runneth over”, making the occasion unmissable!

I could have, of course, lamented the choice of an ostensibly unrelated work to “fill out” this concert’s contents – I would of course have opted, had I been given the power to choose, for some of the incidental music the composer had written for either  “Festivo” or “The Tempest”, both of which suites contain some fabulous and rarely-performed music.  However, it seemed apposite for all sorts of reasons for Inkinen to opt on this occasion not for more Sibelius, but for a violin concerto by a well-known contemporary Finnish composer, Magnus Lindberg, and to employ the services as a soloist of another countryman, the wonderful Vesa-Matti Leppänen, long-time Finnish-born concertmaster of the NZSO, and one who had of course previously worked with Inkinen during the latter’s tenure as the orchestra’s principal conductor.

So it was decreed – and many of us thus found ourselves attending the Michael Fowler Centre on two nights running, here filled with expectations already fuelled by the previous evening’s musical riches ( see https://middle-c.org/2026/08/radiance-from-the-nzso-with-simon-oneill-tenor-and-pietari-inkinen-conductor-two-glimpses-of-richard-wagners-youth-to-maturity-journey-as-an-innovative-opera-com/)  and more than ready for further pleasures.

Inkinen was warmly welcomed to the platform to begin the concert – straightaway I liked the sense of “purpose” that seemed to emanate from the figure on the podium, highlighted by his patient, immobile stance before a note of the music was played – when it came, its darkly-focused tones created a world at once removed from time and place but at the same time “present” in the hall’s ambiences as the music filled the spaces. This was the world of a Finnish hero, Väinämöinen, he of the Finnish national epic the Kalevala, an adventurer advanced in years but still attracted to female beauty, one who on his travels encounters the beautiful “daughter of the North” a region known as “Pohjola”. We heard Väinämöinen’s steadfast and determined “adventuring” theme on the orchestral brasses, and then, suddenly came the beautiful theme associated with “Pohjola’s Daughter”, who in the story was depicted sitting on a rainbow weaving a cloth of gold. Her charms attracted Väinämöinen, who invited her to join him in his travels homeward – however she told him that he needed to perform certain magical tasks before she would agree to accompany him, so he set to work to perform his part of the bargain. We were drawn by focused, evocative instrumental lines into the interplay of Väinämöinen’s and the Maiden’s dialogues as the venerable hero steadfastly undertook his labours – however with the final task ( that of using his magic to build a boat from the distaff of the maiden’s spinning-wheel), Väinämöinen faltered and sustained an injury, causing him to renounce his quest (to the sounds of the maiden’s mocking laughter!) and sadly continue his homeward journey. The playing-out of this tale’s retelling was brilliantly graphic, the instrumental evocations palpable and moving, especially those regarding the sense of failure and ultimate resignation of the hero towards the end of this, possibly (with the exception of Tapiola)  the composer’s most accomplished single orchestral work outside the great symphonies.

We next welcomed a popular audience favourite to the platform, violinist Vesa-Matti Leppänen, normally the orchestra’s Concertmaster, to perform a work described by one critic as “a romantic violin concerto in disguise”.  Magnus Lindberg’s Second Violin Concerto came across as a thickly-woven, luscious-sounding work which has hyper-charged energy fields connecting order out of seeming cross-referencing chaos to produce various impressive focal points which I found could inspire, excite and disconcert simultaneously. The composer wrote the work for Frank Peter Zimmermann, one of the foremost German violinists of today, who gave the work’s premiere in 2015 – in a talk Lindberg gave about the work before a New York performance he aptly described the concerto as “a lot of things boiling”, and this performance by Vesa-Matti Leppänen and Pietari Inkenen bore out that notion of several simultaneously-percolating elements during the work, confusingly so throughout this performance for a reviewer new to the work!

Beginning with a three-note phrase from the soloist that recurred in various elongated form throughout the work, this  theme found its way via various instrumental echoings and developments to an exciting, full-toned orchestra sonority. Then, to the accompaniment of a dancing violin solo the orchestra traced a rich panoply of sounds, in places trading dance-trajectories with the soloist while in others giving different voices tongue, as with some delighted/irascible swirls from the piccolo along with the other winds in one frisson-dominated moment! Whether dancing or soaring, soloist and orchestra complemented one another’s preoccupations (including some interactions between soloist and the orchestral first violin!) and afterwards there were beautiful stratospheric notes from Vesa-Matti’s violin mingling with harp arpeggios, and then leading  to the orchestral vaults being grandly thrown open as if some stupendous visitation was being heralded by the music.

The solo cadenza, towards the end of the slow movement, followed some Korngold-like gestures from the orchestra. Vesa-Matti mixed arco and pizzicato notes among other explorations, including some spectacularly high harmonic-like sounds, almost a string-playing fireworks display, with occasional three-note motif-references thrown in for effect! Near the movement’s end the luscious late-romantic sound-world was again evoked, with another, briefer solo cadenza – we heard due pomp and ceremony in some concluding orchestral phrases, with the solo violin in places almost beside itself with excitement, allowing the orchestra its “grand peroration” before unexpectedly handing the work’s ending back to the soloist for a wry three-note concluding gesture! It was a work whose complexities of detailing both fascinated and overwhelmed this listener! – for me a definitely candidate for a wish-list of further listening opportunities!

After the interval, we were returned to Sibelius’s world of myth and legend by way of the composer’s “Lemminkäinen Suite”, with the eponymous hero’s adventures drawn, like Väinämöinen’s in the earlier Pohjola’s Daughter, from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. The hero, Lemminkäinen, is something of a Maui-like character, described variously in the Kalevala epic as young, good-looking, heroic and reckless, but with numerous other folk-lore versions of his exploits. Sibelius’s sequence of events in the story doesn’t follow the Kalevala’s – in the epic his return home at the end was not from Tuonela, but from a reprisal against the people from Pohjola, who had burnt his village to the ground while he was carousing with the Maidens on Saari. Consequently the suite is more absolute music than narrative, and whose separate evocations can be equally enjoyed as such.

Sibelius here has him firstly travelling to the island of Saari (Lemminkainen and the Maidens of Saari), where he seduces as many women as he can before fleeing to escape the vengeance of the men of the island. The music, built around two groups of themes presents firstly the young man’s longing for the excitement of adventure, and his journeying to the island, and his encounters with various women  – “Then, the minstrel, Lemminkainen/ roamed throughout the island hamlets/ to the joy of all the virgins/all the maids of braided tresses”  (Kalevala – Rune 15). There’s an almost Tristanesque Wagnerian quality expressed by the seduction music as it builds towards a suggestively orgasmic kind of release at the end, the brass signalling a final consummation of desire in returning to the home key as the energies of the piece subside. Inkinen and his players capture it all, at a tempo which enables the detailing of both the hero’s journeyings and his carousings to be fully savoured.

The composer changed the order of the two middle movements at various times, resulting in differences in recorded versions – my first recording (Thomas Jensen and the Danish Radio Orchestra) put “The Swan of Tuonela” first but others have since reversed the order, as did Inkinen on this occasion. Either seemed to fit the story (which we’re told doesn’t follow the Kalevala anyway!) – here we were plunged eerily and scarily into the “Land of the Dead” with music that was malevolent in character and obsessive in its repetitions. Such was the playing’s  concentration and focus we were irrevocably gripped and held by the spectral tones and harsh textures, though respite eventually came from a sudden and transformative episode of unearthly calm, strings and winds magically and uncannily countering the evil with some kind of strangely “healing” textures, representing the mother of the hero in search of her son, entering Tuonela, retrieving his dismembered body and sewing the different parts together as per the Kalevala’s story.

As if proclaiming the dominion of Tuonela’s embodiment of death, the following movement featured the suite’s easily most celebrated section, The Swan of Tuonela, here given the most sublime performance I could ever imagine hearing from all concerned, and especially from the orchestra’s cor anglais player, Michael Austin. Inkinen got his strings in the latter stages to “dig into” the phrasings in classic Barbirolli-style (the conductor of my long-time favourite recording of this work!), steadily and patiently maintaining the macabrely beautiful ambiences right through to the piece’s resounding silences at the end.

After this, some sort of deliverance was urgently needed as a “return to life”  metamorphosis, and duly provided in surgings of renewed energies with the work’s concluding movement, Lemminkainen’s Homecoming, the playing replete with feelings of both release and anticipation, as well returning to life our own beleagued sensibilities in the wake of such gruesome adventurings into and through a Finnish version of a dismal Underworld, from which emancipation was a truly joyous experience.  Indeed, such it also was in general terms for me with the reappearance here in Wellington of Pietari Inkinen, whose music making seemed for this listener to have a new surety of confidence that brought an extra dimension of the music’s “release” to his ever-vigilant “control” – he seemed well-pleased to have made his return as did his warmly-appreciative audience.

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.