26 February 2013

Review: Nostalgia presented by ARCO string orchestra

Kerr St Artspace (Museum of the Vernacular)

ARCO string orchestra
Alex Taylor - Conductor

Carolyn Drake

ARCO is now a well established feature of the Devonport musical scene, with many memorable performances over the last three years taking place at the Kerr St Artspace on the slopes of Mt Victoria. The brainchild of Silver Scrolls winner and local Alex Taylor, these concerts and other Intrepid Music Projects always promise audiences innovative interpretations of old and new music.

The ensemble began confidently with Edvard Grieg’s Holberg Suite. The first violins balanced playfulness with grace in the Praeludium, supported by robust rhythmic drive in the accompaniment. The Sarabande was lovingly shaped but was inflicted by moments of indigestible intonation. The Gavotte was too delicate, lacking the crispness demanded by the score; the task was made difficult by the soggy acoustic. This burden turned into great assistance in the Air where the first violins and lower strings traded beautifully dark and yearning phrases, softly cradled by the inner voices’ solemn pulses. The Rigaudon provided an energetic finish to the suite, with displays of outstanding virtuosity by Concertmaster Olivia Francis and Principal Viola Emma Fetherston.

Ronald Tremain's Five Epigrams for Twelve Solo Strings had the orchestra briefly explore different compositional methods. The concise programme notes were helpful for the listener to observe these Webern-esque process miniatures. The overall sound effect achieved by the orchestra in each movement was convincing, even if strict adherence to detail was hard to appreciate. The players managed the angular musical deconstructions with clarity and aplomb, undoubtedly helped in this instance with the direction of Taylor centre-stage.

The Dances of Brittany by Larry Pruden provided a lyrical contrast to the Tremain. The tolling undercurrent established by the violins energised the resonant viola section in their opening folk-like melody. Emma Fetherston crafted evocative viola solos in the second movement and reinvigorated the ensemble into the sparkling and fleetingly impressionistic final movement. This was certainly the highlight of the evening – excellent music performed with great joy.

After the interval came Tchaikovsky’s demanding Souvenir de Florence. The frolicsome first movement limped at a cumbersome pace, causing its usually flamboyant gestures and lilting phrases to become uncomfortably transparent and sometimes rather mechanical. The movement ended aggressively, saved from an abyss of cacophony with seconds to spare.

The central movements – Adagio cantabile e con moto and Allegretto moderato – were captivating in their simple beauty. The ensemble played the slow movement with a charming naïveté, however a more relaxed sound would have allowed subtler expressivo passages. The addition of double basses to the traditional sextet caused a few balance and intonation problems, however the additional power was particularly welcome in the third movement.

The Allegro vivace requires the players to create a tone of silky lightness but with the strength of steel. The violas and lower strings provided the secure rhythmic platform allowing glorious themes to flourish in the violins and upper celli. Animated by the liveliness of the music, the bright young musicians brought the concert to a rapturous conclusion.

25 February 2013

Review: After Lilburn - the music of New Zealand's gay composers.

Auckland University Music Theatre, Auckland

Performers: Mark Menzies, violin/viola; Claire Scholes, voice; Luca Manghi, flutes; Flavio Villani, piano; Justine Cormack, violin; Ashley Brown, cello; Sarah Watkins, piano; Finn Schofield, clarinet; Alex Taylor, spoken voice.


Carolyn Drake


It is good to hear a non-choral piece of David Hamilton's. After years of putting the composer in a box, one can finally take him out. Yet is it such fresh air? Slides 3 (1982) and 8 (1987) for solo flute, were the eldest pieces of the evening. The music presented two pronounced ideas: a spectral 'jet whistle' against ornamental melodic phrases, never to become homogenous although seemingly moving in that direction. The second of the two 'slides' had interesting but vague analogous relationships to the previous, yet it was a strange partner, the piece attempting to summarise a host of six other pieces we hadn't heard. Flutist Luca Manghi made an admirable performance of the pieces, and succeeded in focussing the ears of the audience, a necessary manoeuvre at the outset of any concert.



Claire Cowan's piano trio: wood : strings : hammers : flesh (2008) presented much entertainment for the evening. Aesthetically consistent and resourceful, Cowan's writing was fascinating, however compromised between stylistic regions (as alluded to in the programme notes). Pianist Sarah Watkins danced around her piano, slapping the various faces of the instrument and plucking its inner guts whilst the two string players pulsed in pizzicato beats of five. However engaging at the surface, I felt the piece floated above a less satisfying underlying structure and so failed to take me in any further.

constellations (2012), a composition for solo piano by young composer Alex Taylor contained a rather wonderful sound world of pitch geometry. Flavio Villani's fingers remained for the most part in the clear register of the piano, before finally summoning a spread of beating harmonics derived from the low keys. The result was a slow, directional piece, with complex patterns but towards the middle became stagnant, and ended far too late.

Then came the central piece of the programme. Jack Body's Meditations on Michelangelo (2008/9) was by far the most pronounced in 'gay sensibility'. Each meditation, in the form of monologues, was introduced with fragments of poetry by Michelangelo di Lodovico, then meditated by a solo piece for 'shaded' violin, shaded and coloured by the piano. The first movements were slow and dark modal monophonic lines, ornamented in various fashions of Body's Asian interests. On the fourth meditation, with the words of Michelangelo's verse to his lord: 'and he who loves you faithfully rises to God above and holds death sweet', the music became a compelling sequence of chromatic rises in major tonality. The piece continued, though for far too long, perhaps in the way that such music is easy to generate - to excess. I feel that the last movement proved, to the words 'Sleep is sweet, but better to be made of stone', the lack of subtlety in both players, and thus rather tested the patience (or fed the boredom) of audience members.


After a second entrance of applause for violinst Menzies and pianist Watkins, concert curator Samuel Holloway took the stage to announce an eight minute interval, presumably due to the concert starting at least two minutes late. And, to the disappointment of many, that there would be no wine.


Annea Lockwood's I give you back (1993), a thrilling solo piece for soprano Claire Scholes bewildered the audience in the beginning moments of the second half. At times unbearable and horrible, the poetry and the singing were constrained to a select few pitches and to repetitive phrases: 'I release you'. At a couple of points Scholes shook the rafters with extraordinary strength in her high register shrieks, as the poetry and music attempted to intimate the weird sensation of fear becoming freedom. The last word formant 'ng' of 'dying' was particularly exquisite, slowly imploding into the soprano as the sound moved to the back of her throat, and below.


Waipoua (1994), a duo for clarinet and piano by Gareth Farr, was a lower-light in the programme. Farr's pleasant use of suspended triads lent its allegiance to Pop music, but as a short piece with no direction contained nothing more than its premise - 'an exploration of the lyrical and emotional capabilities of my favorite instrument, the clarinet' - without being at all an exploration of any kind. Finn Schofield played with remarkable sensitivity, yet a few unpolished moments prevailed where the young clarinetist struggled to control the overtones over the soft ending tones.


Ben Hoadley's excessively light Winter I was (2009), a duet for flute and recited poetry, had a similar appeal to the previous piece. Short, modal/tonal, repeating, and light, there was nothing taxing about it. The musical material seemed oddly paired with poetry taken from Gregory O'Brien's Winter I Was (1992), itself a remembrance of (the gay) Cage and (the not gay) Feldman. And yet the piece, written seventeen years afterwards, with no other reason than to accompany a piece not already heard in this concert, was at the least a peculiar choice.


After these two 'interludes' was Samuel Holloway's Stapes. The title correlating to a bone of the inner ear, impressions of various sound transformations, spectra alterations, amplifications and so on, occur within the simplicity of the acoustic piano trio. The piece is evocative of a magnified and contorted tour of the inner ear. Cellist Ashley Brown and violinist Justine Cormack retained utter command in the fast passages of natural harmonics; Brown's ending solo was controlled with sensitivity, and slanted with all the implications a fade out has. One thing that strikes me about this piece is that it is often programmed without its counterparts (two other trios, both named for other parts of the inner ear), and thus floats above its context (a recurring theme this evening…).


The final piece of the evening, John Elmsly's Four Echoes for viola, contained the last articulate ties to the premise of the concert. Holloway's commentary at the top of the programme notes, suggesting that 'gay sensibilities' might be discovered in this bundle of works, specifically mentioned the relationship between composer Jack Body and Douglas Lilburn. Now in this final piece we encountered a second reference to Lilburn, a remembrance of him written in this soliloquy of four movements. Elmsly wrote for the programme 'musical shadows appeared in the work, particularly in the Lament, which is specifically in his memory'. Shadows certainly did appear: Prelude, silhouettes of Grisey's Prologue for solo viola, and throughout the work various melodic fragments much like that from Ligeti's Musica Ricercata. Not clearly Lilburn though, but the lyrical writing may have been enough of a salute to his spirit.


With many moments of great and varied music this evening one feels amazed with the sheer contribution of the queer community to New Zealand music. On reflection, I feel some voices of this community were in fact left out (apart from the titular, Lilburn himself wasn't included, along with many other strong composers such as Chris Gendall). The concert, having been advertised to both the gay community and also more generally to the public, seemed to attract a mixed audience to the university theatre; a concert of gay composers, but an experience for anyone interested in music.

19 February 2013

Review: Stroma’s Pierrot Lunaire

Q Theatre Loft, Auckland

Performers: Madeleine Pierard, soprano; Kirstin Eade, flutes; Phil Green, clarinets; Sarah Watkins, piano; Andrew Thomson, violin/viola; Robert Ibell, cello; Megan Molina, violin (Eisler/Webern only); Hamish McKeich, conductor

Carolyn Drake

Stroma’s much-awaited trip to Auckland on Sunday was greeted with enormous enthusiasm and nervous excitement from the audience, a full house: those trying their luck for a ticket at the door were turned away, missing a rare performance of Schoenberg’s classic vocal mindbender, Pierrot Lunaire. Q Theatre made an attractive, if acoustically deficient, venue, and Stroma director Michael Norris provided insightful programme notes, along with a vivid English translation of the German text.

If Pierrot promised surreal drama, Hanns Eisler's soundtrack to Joris Ivens’s film Regen (Rain) seemed an exercise in the mundane, spluttering and meandering through an acerbic, predictable serial score to a strikingly open ending. While the journey felt rather dry in its tightly focused, bustling activity, the destination lifted the music into a more transcendental sphere, washing out the cares of the day with open fifths. There was also a memorable solo turn from pianist Sarah Watkins, who had a chance to showcase her remarkable dexterity and clear tone.

Webern's Streichtrio op. 20 is a platform for his intricate patterning of accumulation and synchronisation; this is a masterwork, and its performance here was lacklustre, with the presence of a conductor deeply distracting and surely unnecessary, one would have thought, for performers of this calibre. Furthermore, the performance did not make the structure clear: apart from the very ending and one or two other moments of absolute clarity, there needed to be a greater awareness of how the phrases and “cadences” were constructed, in order to better project the music in performance. Although wrestling with a dry acoustic, the violin needed more presence.

After the previous two slightly underwhelming offerings, Pierrot Lunaire confronted us with the almost lizard-like figure of Madeleine Pierard, whose German swung and hissed with richly expressive diction. Pierard possesses a surprisingly powerful lower register, which served her well throughout the demanding vocal part, although her sprechstimme was often more sung than spoken. I also wondered whether she had really got to grips with the pitch material, or whether she had purposefully adopted a looser approach to pitching. Just as the string trio in the Webern seemed trapped behind their conductor, Pierard too was at times constrained between the piano and her music stand. For me the theatrical potential of the work was never fully realised. 

The ensemble was generally very tight, with a great blend of tone, although balance was sometimes an issue, with the violin in particular often fighting to be heard over the piano and lower instruments. Of the instrumentalists, cellist Robert Ibell was the undoubted standout, displaying a fearlessness and formidable variety of tone colour even in tackling the most technically difficult passages. Although generally leading the ensemble very precisely, conductor Hamish McKeich sometimes struggled to align the piano and wind/string quartet, and his approach to tempo was simply too laid-back to adequately differentiate the potentially stark characters of the individual movements in Part 1.

If Part 1 lacked some of the rawness and momentum it might have had, Part 2 more than made up for it in an utterly compelling cluster of activity: Nacht's gigantic black moths had a truly frightening menace, the dark and feathery timbre of Ibell's cello periodically devouring the texture, while Gebet an Pierrot (Prayer to Pierrot) featured a maniacally neighing Pierard leading the ensemble into an incisive, cantering Raub (Theft). The ensemble achieved a particularly stunning composite sound in Rote Messe (Red Mass), which balanced perfectly with the following Galgenlied (Gallows Song), whose disconcertingly crisp tone foretold a sudden, precipitous ending.

Part 3 provided a strange, dreamy counterweight to the sustained violence of Part 2, and though the broadly symmetrical structure of the work makes it difficult to sustain the intensity of the second part into the third, Stroma did an admirable job. The final movement, O Alter Duft, wafted by in a beautifully nostalgic haze; even today, a century after its composition, Pierrot still proved confronting, alluring and utterly unique.

5 February 2013

Review: Mark Menzies with 175 East

Musgrove Theatre, Auckland
Performers: Mark Menzies, violin; Samuel Holloway, electronics and percussion; Katherine Hebley, cello; Andrew Uren, clarinets; Luca Manghi, flutes; Glenda Keam and James Gardner, percussion

Carolyn Drake

“Thank you for coming out.” Samuel Holloway’s opening greeting provided an interesting angle from which to hear the evening's offerings: with James Gardner's Queer Studies on the programme along with a number of other suggestively-titled works, one might infer an agenda of openness, of coming to grips with difficult material, and perhaps even of the sensuality of music. Whether the phrasing was intentional is moot but even so, from the outset this was a concert of bristling ideas and sensations.

The enigmatic hyperkinesis of Holloway's Management Decision-Making in Chinese Enterprises set the tone for what was a bewildering and sometimes quite strange concert event. Flicking between crisply shaped, angular episodes and highly exaggerated, almost syrupy expressiveness, Mark Menzies' violin paired with Holloway's performance – consisting of both physical gestures such as jumping, and live electronics – to present a thoroughly indecipherable language. The sensation was of watching and listening to the fascinating trajectories and inflections of a mathematically apportioned language that was nevertheless completely foreign. Menzies seemed to be having fun here: perhaps almost to the point of danger, in that the indulgent expressiveness of the improvised material often threatened to overwhelm the structure containing it.

No less enigmatic, but certainly more subtly expressed, were Holloway's aphoristic pair of Dualities. The first of the pair was a particularly concise, delicately constructed musical object; the stippled undulating of the upper and lower voices of Menzies's solo violin was skillfully woven in and out of audibility, joining together in a final elusive wispy sigh. The second piece combined rhythmically independent left and right hands to produce a taut, jittery effect. In both pieces it was not a simplistic dualism but a thoroughly dynamic interplay between elements that created tension and movement.

Between Decision-Making and Dualities, Rachael Morgan's attractively crafted Whisperings felt almost catatonically calm, with its limited harmonic and dynamic palette focusing the ear on the fine timbral gradations of flute and cello. Sadly balance was an issue here, with the dominance of the flute preventing a really satisfying blended texture.

Completing the first half was Laurence Crane's Estonia, warmly meditative and transparent, though marred by some uneven intonation in such unforgivably simple material. It was surprising that these musicians – technically excellent in many ways – at times struggled to play in tune with each other. Perhaps most contemporary aesthetic approaches provide avenues for hiding issues of intonation, but this was not such an aesthetic.

After the interval, Bryn Harrison's Five miniatures in three parts was sandwiched between two much larger, much more materially diverse works. Harrison's focus on intricate heterophonic textures through counterpoint rather than timbre provided an interesting counterbalance to the colourific world of Morgan's Whisperings in the first half. His technique of zooming in on very limited material – with each movement slower than the preceding one – revealed a fascinating jungle of seesawing lines and gradients.

Although Mark Menzies's technique and charisma as a violinist was clear throughout the evening, his compositional contribution was less successful. Ending the concert was Menzies’ like Georgie (auckland's) gardens: / uncaged music / with piwakawaka / and swongering butterfly, a protracted work that at times felt like a catalogue of violin maneuvers. The violin performance was indeed impressive, but most of the work seemed purely an exercise in virtuosity, with seven performers on stage and all but one of them woefully under-utilised.

For me the undoubted highlight of this unique, frustrating event was James Gardner's Queer Studies. These pieces swooped and hovered, sang and cackled, and generally reveled in an accomplished sense of drama and narrative. A fine attention to embellishment and the striking use of hard accents complimented the compelling structure and drew the ear to multiple layers of discourse. This was a feathery, ephemeral, sensual masterpiece, showcasing Menzies at his sensitive and satanic best.