Allegro Largo Scherzo Finale

NZSO with Collin Currie (percussion), conducted by Alexander Shelley at the Michael Fowler Centre

• Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring Suite
• Jennifer Higdon: Percussion Concerto
• Lyell Cresswell: Landscapes of the Soul
• Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 “Pastoral”

First of all, I have not yet forgotten about the NYO. At some point I’ll hopefully write something about it.

Second, a hearty congratulations to the NZSO, who with this incredible concert took Beethoven’s 6th, punched it in the face, and hung a placard around its neck saying “Please stop playing me”. Lined up against one of American concert music’s definitive works, a spectacular concerto by one of the 21st Century’s most important composers and a dazzling new piece of Kiwi music, the Pastoral was finally exposed as an emotionless, music-less corpse, which ought now be interred into the thick loam of music history.

I must confess, I’ve never really appreciated the Appalachian Spring Suite as much as many others. That would be because I’ve never heard it played so brilliantly as at this concert. The chief attraction of the Appalachian Spring Suite is Copland’s thrilling arrangement of the “Shaker Tune” (or, for those of us who treat it as a religious moment, “Lord of the Dance”) near the end of the work, and the transitions between the suite’s images prior to this can be a little hairy. Shelley kept the NZSO in restrained, contemplative mood for much of the work, carefully controlling the  transitions and allowing the beautifully phrased woodwind lines to speak for themselves. To a large extent, this is a pastoral piece, but unlike Beethoven in the Pastoral, Copland clearly understood that the only way to make such music function is through contrast, particularly in timbre, and a clear sense of direction – managed so fluidly by Shelley.

Jennifer Higdon is a somewhat more recent American product, and  something of an unknown quantity for most New Zealand audience members (these members really should spend more time on LastFM listening to contemporary classical composers). Percussion concertos must be an extremely difficult task for a composer to plan: there are numerous instruments to show off, but there needs to be a reasonable motivation for the performer to utilise these. Higdon succeeds admirably, using the orchestra, and in particular the orchestral percussionists, to focus these transitions. Much of the work is built around the relationship between Currie and the other percussionists, creating an amazing sense of space as they play off against each other in imitative fashion. Much of the pitched percussion work appears to be based off the initial marimba phrases. The unpitched instruments receive a little less attention. They feature in a couple of short bursts after a session of mallet swapping with the marimba and vibraphone, sweeping the orchestra along with them in the process. Near the end of the work Currie returns to the drumkit for a ferocious (and rather trippy) cadenza that blurs into another duet with the orchestral percussionists to finish. And of course there’s the seemingly constant, unearthly hum of vibraphone motors. This is simply joyful, passionate, brash music, which is how Higdon works, at least on an orchestral scale. It’s how composers like John Psathas and Gareth Farr work too, albeit with vastly different colours.

Oh, and the audience went pretty wild.

Lyell Cresswell is a funny old composer (well, maybe he isn’t actually funny. I’ve never met him. To my knowledge). The first piece of his I heard, his trumpet concertino Alas, how swift! was fairly unspectacular; the second, The Pumpkin Massacre, was completely different, and considerably more satisfying. Landscapes of the Soul, for string orchestra, fits much more into the mould of The Pumpkin Massacre, but is vastly superior again. Landscapes of the Soul taps into (I believe) our collective memory of Greek mythology – the landscapes being the realm of Hades. Cresswell uses hushed, dissonant noises, rushing, rumbling and tumbling. While the music as a whole flows slowly past, the underlying parts are extraordinarily dynamic. If many of  the sounds may be familiar from the mid-20th century avant-garde, at least they are familiar from quality music, and it is simply impossible to tear one’s ears away from the work. It might not be an audience favourite, it might never be played again after this series, and it will certainly never win a Grammy, yet Landscapes of the Soul is inspired music, for me the unexpected highlight of the programme.

And Beethoven’s 6th! What have I not yet said about it? Frankly, the fact that the first two movements are the dullest twenty minutes in music is less important than (but related to) their complete failure to act like a well-constructed symphony. There is simply no contrast – certainly, there is motific development, but there is no moment capable of arresting the hearer, breaking them out of their slumber. All pastoral music is cursed with being “nice”. Beethoven’s 6th is certainly nice, like an old lady inviting one in for tea, except that after a couple of minutes you work out that the tea is actually mud flavoured with cat dribble. And she has no chocolate biscuits. And she’s knitted you a nice brown woolen jersey. Out of her own hair.

But the Pastoral is not just the sum of its first two movements! Oh no! Because after twenty five minutes you discover that the old lady is actually Megatron in drag! She? tears your face off, then offers you another cup of tea.

Yeah, sorry, Herr Beethoven,, but your symphony is exactly that nonsensical. There is simply no musical motivation for the “storm”, which is not nearly convincing enough to pull off the imagery properly. And don’t tell me it’s pathetic because Beethoven didn’t have the techniques or instruments available to him. It’s just that musicians playing in uniform rhythm just don’t raise that violence quotient very high.

So, this is the lead story on Stuff right at the moment (I was looking for the John Button review for the previous post). Apparently we’re supposed do be shocked that Dame Kiri te Kanawa could possibly criticise poor helpless (and coincidentally now rather wealthy) Susan Boyle. Really? Unless the reporter conducting the interview for Radio Times actually knew absolutely nothing about who they were talking to (although perhaps one shouldn’t be too swift to eliminate that possibility), asking about Susan Boyle can only have been a deliberate insult. Certainly, ‘Dame Kiri’ is a first-rate snob. She’s taken snobbery to a whole new level, a particular achievement for a New Zealander, and it’s really, really simple to find her irritating as a result. Running a story like this is intended to incite us believe that ‘Dame Kiri’ feels threatened by Boyle, which is just completely wrong. Sure, she’s getting on a bit, but this dismissal wasn’t compelled by any urge to protect her territory, it’s the disdainful attitude of somebody who is completely and utterly confident in their superiority, and whose achievement actually go some way towards justifying this. As irritating as it might be to admit, ‘Dame Kiri’ really is a towering figure, the music she makes really is better than the music Susan Boyle makes, and when she says that “whizz-bang disappears”, she’s absolutely right. I’d completely forgotten about Susan Boyle, but it’s pretty nigh impossible to forget ‘Dame Kiri’.

John Button’s review of last Friday’s NZSO concert with Dame Malvina Major is certainly the most negative review I’ve seen him write in quite some time (although his review of the following concert is somewhat nicer). Although I didn’t attend the concert, I’m not surprised at all – all the issues that Button raises with the concert are the issues that I considered in choosing not to attend. The idea of giving Major two concerts in the subscription season as a farewell gesture, while doubtless well intentioned, was simply not a great move. The subscription series really ought to focus on the quality of performance above sentimentality – that’s why it attracts subscription prices, and a singer of sixty-something years cannot be expected to provide the same quality as a singer of thirty to forty years. That isn’t fair on the singer; it also isn’t fair on the audience; it isn’t fair on the conductor, or the other performers; it isn’t fair on the composer whose work is thrown in as a token gesture.

• Schumann: Piano Concerto in A Minor
• Shostakovich: Symphony No. 11 “The Year 1905”

New Zealand School of Music Orchestra at St. Andrew’s on the Terrace conducted by Ken Young with Diedre Irons, piano

There are two other concerts I had planned on writing about before getting to this one – but that was before actually going to the concert, which was really an amazing experience (at least in the second half). Robert Schumann is one of the biggest names of Romantic composition, but his reputation frankly exceeds the quality of his music; indeed, I’m sure I have spent considerably more time reading his music criticism than actually listening to his music. This Piano Concerto is in all honesty a deplorable piece of music, a vehicle for his wife’s virtuosity that never approaches the depth to which the word ‘concerto’ aspires. The first movement, the Fantasie to which the rest of the work was attached, is a shapeless, formless, emotionless, tuneless, too-long wretch with a pathetic coda affixed to patch over the utter lack of direction. The following Intermezzo is no better; it is not until the final Allegro vivace that the players have so much as a theme to get their teeth into* – in fact, they get two rather fine themes, although one is really only toyed with. It would be extremely unfair to judge any of the performers on the basis of this ‘concerto’, for although the balance of sound from the orchestra was rather lovely and intimate in the relatively small setting of St. Andrew’s, but this is simply shallow salon music (albeit for richly talented performers).

How wonderful then, and how much of a vindication for twentieth century composition that Schumann’s miserable work should be followed by an utterly spectacular performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11, surely the finest, most vital performance of a symphony I have been privileged to witness since the NZSO’s rendition of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 1 (with the hyper-energetic Alexander Lazarev). Some of Shostakovich’s work possibly suffers a little from taking it out of its historical context, but this symphony really flourishes, allowing the listener to get right into the composer’s headspace. The faux-patriotic sentiment of the melodies lifted from revolutionary songs is stripped away to leave an hour of sheer, abject terror. Shostakovich opens with a long passage focusing on strings and harp that is beautiful in isolation, but alarmingly tense at the same time. A jeering brass interjection breaks the flow temporarily, but cannot relieve the general anxiety.

The second movement is simply astonishing – wailings from the strings and brass that gather in intensity and cut straight to the heart. In classic Shostakovich style it isn’t until the xylophone is brought in that the work becomes truly horrifying. The xylophone is truly Shostakovich’s death rattle, driving the closing portion of the invasion section of the “Leningrad” Symphony and appearing to spine-chilling effect in the On the Watch movement of Symphony No. 14. Even in the music’s brief returns to the theme of the first movement there is little relief. In the third movement the audience hears a similar journey to that of the first; the strings play a sweet, yet ominous theme, growly slowly in intensity, gnawing into the mind, and once again everything breaks down in an orgy of agony. Shostakovich’s ‘vulgar’ side (much abhorred – and underestimated – by critics) comes straight to the fore of the beginning of the final movement with a violent, oppressively loud introduction dominated by some wonderfully clear brass playing. After a brief lull the onslaught continues, Shostakovich placing all his fear and horror of tyranny onto the page. One can’t help feeling shattered by the finish, wrung out by the ferocity and emotional intensity of the music. Amazing.

*yes, I realise this blog is subtitled “What do you mean, you don’t like Stockhausen”, but Stockhausen’s work has far more thematic flesh on it than Schumann’s, even if it isn’t all melodic. Schumann has nothing.

It would probably be fair to say that my past few months as a ‘self-taught’ harpist probably haven’t taught me a whole lot, at least in conventional terms. At some point I’ll probably remember that I should be buying more music from somewhere (or knuckling down to learn the Nicholas Moor Three Pieces for Lever Harp), but in the interim I’ve been perfectly happy alternately trawling through old pieces and improvising (and let’s be honest – learning new music can be quite challenging when one’s harp is in non-standard tuning 95% of the time). In improvising I’ve had three broad areas of focus which I’m hoping (almost certainly in vain) will be of some use, for something, sometime in the future.

• Improvising on traditional melodies and folk songs. I may spend most of my time listening to contemporary art music, but as a harpist it’s important to maintain a soft spot for folk music, and while there may be plenty off it lying around in neat little books around my bedroom, folk music just isn’t supposed to live that way – it needs to be played around with. Most folk songs are pretty epic creatures – they aren’t simply a couple of lines of music repeated – and so it’s important for a performance (even if it’s purely instrumental) to reflect the development of the song, both in terms of its content and history.
• Creating fresh and hopefully coherent music that exploits the lever harp. When I’m performing in public, this currently tends to be modal music, because it’s easier both on the ears of anybody listening and on my brain (at the moment). It’s easy enough to root around for a set of chords and melodic fragments, that will transpose easily and can be used creatively enough while sliding into place almost entirely from muscle memory (which allows me to plot a direction for the music and plan for lever changes if necessary. It’s a pretty relaxing way to play for, say, an hour. Playing more chromatic music, however, actually requires some planning beforehand. The lever harp offers twelve tones (or far more, depending on tuning), and although improvising serial music would be a bridge too far, plotting a few things out beforehand allows for some pretty interesting sounds.
• Finding and using a variety of extended techniques and performance practices. This is really tremendous fun. Everybody knows what a harp sounds like, and most standard techniques do little to disillusion them of their conceptions, so a major focus for me has been trying to find ‘dirty sounds’ – techniques that completely change the character of the instrument. Maybe it’s something to do with being a male harpist?
  • Plastic bags! We don’t seem to have nearly as many of them around the house as in previous times, thank goodness, but they are still useful for something! Just grabbing a couple of bags and sticking them over your hands changes pretty much the entire experience of playing the harp. For a start, it’s much more difficult because, um, there’s plastic in the way of your fingers, and this affects the way the strings must be plucked. Depending on how loosely the bags are in place, they will also affect dampening, buzzing around adjacent strings. Oh. And they also rustle when you move your hands. It’s particularly effective in the upper range as a very dry staccatissimo.
  • Tuning key-soundboard buzz! Whether this will work will depend largely on what type of tuning key you have. Place the tuning key flat on the soundboard, holding the key bit loosely with the left hand between two central strings. Plucking a string should sound the tuning key against the soundboard in something like a snare effect. 
  • A few little things. I’ve been working quite often with stopped strings and exploring which techniques work best in conjuction with this, at least with my harp. Although it isn’t necessarily the nicest sound, I’ve found that using the nails is extremely useful when trying to play with the left hand any higher up the strings than sons xylophoniques position, certainly when not in a harmonic position. In addition, there’s a nice plucking method that can be achieved by pressing 1 and 2 together, sliding them over the string and pulling away (not too forcefully). Sounds niiice. Especially with sons xylophoniques, for some reason.

Sooo… I think this is a pretty good summary of what I’ve been up to, harp-wise. There’s some music up on Last.FM – an album called Idylls of some pretty lousy recordings made for a friend, featuring most of the above stuff. Unfortunately, Last has got rid of full length previews, so, um, you’d have to subscribe to listen to it.