Allegro Largo Scherzo Finale

I haven’t exactly been thrilled with the way that the art music side of the New Zealand Festival of the Arts has been handled (which was probably fairly evident from my post about the lineup). Of course, I really have no idea about the kind of pressures involved in a running an event like this, but all the same I feel that there are a few areas that have been regrettably neglected.

• A festival will probably make more money or, more likely, recoup more of its losses, if it actually gets people to come to events. This also helps to justify the festival’s future existence. Because of this, it is most likely a good idea to actually advertise what the festival has on offer. Between the announcement of the programme and the start of the chamber music weekend there seems to have been a complete lack of advertising (exacerbated by the chamber music weekend never having been promoted when the programme was announced). The Festival seems to have chosen instead to promote a handful of theatre works – Sutra and The Sound of Silence. Aside from Apollo 13, which got quite a lot of publicity from the Dominion Post, everything else has been completely under the radar.
• Having decided that you will in fact not bother to advertise an event, it might be wise to pay some attention to ticket sales. Most of the tickets that are sold for an event that is only half-heartedly promoted once are probably going to be sold around that time, so it could well be worthwhile to see how many tickets are sold early on and then reconsider prices (or even better, recognise that an unadvertised show should probably have low ticket prices from that outset.
• Sometimes it looks better if there are actually younger people at chamber music events. Unfortunately, because ticket prices are outrageously high, they will either only be able to get to one or two concerts or none at all. So if you are going to offer NZSM students tickets for $10, it would be real nice to actually offer these from the outset. You know, before they spend quite a lot of money on going to one concert, and then find that they could have gone to every concert at the chamber music weekend for less money. Yeah.
• Having caused immense frustration to at least one NZSM student, please make sure that concert they spent six times too much money on is flawless.

Actually, that’s a bit harsh. After all, Nelson ostensibly has an orchestra (or did that finish up with that thieving conductor?), and yet I was still astonished early last month to discover that Winnipeg not only has an orchestra, but that orchestra is running a new music festival (which started on the 6th of this month), and that new music festival contains three works by ‘distinguished guest composer’ John Psathas. This means that the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra will be performing roughly the same amount of John Psathas’ music at this festival as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra will be performing any New Zealand music during its regular season. Not only this, but a full festival pass is only $49 for students.

For roughly the same price, you can go to one of the scarce art music concerts at the New Zealand Festival of the Arts. You cannot, of course, go to Mahler 8 unless you were far more organised than me and actually bought a ticket before they sold out (note: I haven’t seen any notice of, say, a repeat of the concert, clearly the most sought after event at the Festival). As a result, I’ll probably only be going to the Keith Lewis and Michael Houston concert, which is disappointing. Instead of Mahler 8, I went to Joanna Newsom, which was great fun and, I suppose, demonstrated why everybody should at least start a composition degree.

Much as I found out about John Psathas’ pretty much unheard of international success by randomly browsing Promethean Editions, I found out about the St Andrew’s on the Terrace Season in the Herald (I only touch it on Saturdays! Don’t shoot!), when their really quite excellent classical critic (maybe he’s just a little too excited about the merits of the APO over the NZSO sometimes) announced it with a large photo of SMP performing. There’s an incredible range of music available, with a fair swathe of contemporary and/or New Zealand music. It isn’t quite a new music festival. It doesn’t have an orchestra. But it does what the NZFotA should have done.

Amongst a number of other things during the summer break I’ve been trying (and largely failing) to make my way through a couple of volumes of a now reasonably old series entitled Man (and here my mother frowns) & Music. For whatever reason the editors decided to create a series of books about music that actually discuss music as little as possible, concentrating upon the links between society and musical practice, an approach that succeeds in the case of one volume (on the ‘early Romantic period’) and not so well in that of the other (the Renaissance), which largely consists of lists of the members of various royal and papal chapel choirs. While stupefyingly dull, the Renaissance volume did at least get me thinking once again about an area that has irked me for some time – the seemingly inescapable tension between art music and faith.

Onwards through Composition and Faith

I managed to mix up the programmes for the final NZSO tour, which meant that I missed the concert with the premiere of Leif Segerstam’s Symphony No. 191 Presumably it will turn up on RNZ Concert sometime, but right now I can only comment on the attention that the concert has received in the Dominion Post. John Button’s review was extremely positive, comparing the symphony favourably to Edgard Varèse – a connection I have since heard refuted by somebody who probably knows Varèse better. Apparently giving five stars to every single Mozart reissue to cross his bows is not enough for John Button to appease the heaving, aging masses, however, as this letter subsequently appeared in the Dominion Post.

…It would have been better had the conductor stayed away, not least because it would have prevented the audience from being subjected to 25 minutes of unremitting noise classed by Button as atonal.

The so-called Symphony No 191 created by Segerstam was so unpleasant that I was rendered physically unwell – so much so I could not get up to walk out. By the end of the piece, I was in tears from the pain of the noise…

Wow. That’s quite something. Perhaps it’s alarming that my eye was immediately drawn to the words “classed by Button as atonal”. Does the letter writer have some better description of her own? How dare John Button make a correct judgement about the harmonic nature of the music? I am 100% certain that the letter writer would have come away free from nausea had she actually made some attempt to listen to the music rather than tried to block it out. Unfortunately, her hatred of Segerstam’s music (I think it might be worth pointing out here that much of the music with which Button compared Symphony No. 191 is eighty years old) also affected her enjoyment of the remainder of the concert

…The Karelia Suite was the NZSO at its best – possibly because they have made it their own and the conductor left them to the performance at one stage, acknowledging this point.

Having been to the pre-concert talk and heard some of the great sopranos sing the Four Last Songs with sympathetic orchestras, Saturday’s soprano didn’t have a chance because the conductor didn’t match the orchestra to her voice, allowing it to override her…

Or alternatively, the Karelia Suite succeeded without much conducting because it is a fairly simple repertoire work and any orchestral player will have performed it dozens of times. A professional orchestra does not need a conductor to keep time with pieces like this – the conductor’s role in shaping the performance to a far greater extent in rehearsal than on the concert stage, but because the letter writer is so determined to steer any credit away from Segerstam she ignores this consideration. If I have understood the comment about the Four Last Songs correctly, recordings of the work were played, which the letter writer feels were more balanced than the actual performance. This is, of course, exactly what one would expect. Recording a work, even live, will naturally create a better balance than the same work live, simply because microphone positioning and mixing will create a false impression of what is actually happening.

1 November at Wesley Church

• Traditional, arranged by Carol Shortis: Polskie Kwiaty
• Simon Eastwood: Jericho: Walls Will Fall
• Henryk Górecki: Three Pieces in Olden Style
• Witold Lutoslawski: Melodie Ludowe
• Krzysztof Penderecki: Allegro Moderato from Sextet
• Henryk Górecki: Totus Tuus
• Karol Szymanowski: Rymy Dzieciece  – Children’s Rhymes Op. 49
• Karlo Margetic: Hommage  à W.L.
• Carol Shortis: Tesknota (Yearning)

6 November at the ACR

• Traditional, arranged by Carol Shortis: Polskie Kwiaty
• Krysztof Penderecki: 3 miniature per clarinetto e pianoforte
• Grazyna Bacewicz: Quintet for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon and Horn
• Henryk Górecki: Piano Sonata No. 1
• Anton Killin: Podróze
• Aleksander Tansman: Sonatine for Bassoon and Piano
• Aleksander Tansman: Studio from Pièces brèves pour guitare and Canzonetta from Trois pièces pour guitare
• Andrzej Nowicki: Abstand und Nähe

7 November at St Andrew’s on the Terrace

• Traditional, arranged by Carol Shortis: Polskie Kwiaty
• Simon Dickson: Jericho: Walls Will Fall
• Henryk Górecki: Piano Sonata No. 1
• Henryk Górecki: Three Pieces in Olden Style
• Witold Lutoslawski: Melodie Ludowe
• Anton Killin: Podróze
• Henryk Górecki: Totus Tuus
• Karlo Margetic: Hommage  à W.L.
• Carol Shortis: Tesknota (Yearning)

SMP’s final concert series for 2009 was certainly an ambitious undertaking – three concerts featuring seventeen pieces by eleven composers. Each concert opened with a rendition of the Polish folk song Polskie Kwiaty. Jonathan Berkahn’s accordion offered both a connection to folk traditions and a keen timbre that echoed the song’s sentiments and matched well to Olga Gryniewicz’s voice. Her replacement in the second concert by countertenor Laurie Fleming due to family reasons could not be considered particularly successful – Fleming’s voice felt far too light for the arrangement – but this failed to prevent the Polish segments of the audience vocally endorsing each performance. Polskie Kwiaty was also an element in two of the commissioned works – Carol Shortis’ Tesknota and, to a lesser extent, Anton Killin’s Podróze.

Simon Eastwood’s work for trumpet, horn and trombone reflecting upon the Solidarity movement felt less successful. Jericho consists of a series of disjunct miniatures, with few discernable connections. Although it makes use of several appealing musical ideas and brass techniques, but none of these are explored in any detail, but are abruptly dropped in moving to the next section of music. Possibly some of these section changes could have been masked by the use of a slightly larger ensemble and a longer time frame, avoiding the necessity of an uncomfortable silence for the performers to change their mutes. The lengths of the miniatures also creates a rather unnatural, unresolved ending, that feels out of kilter with the messages of the work. Jericho shows defiance in spades, but not much hope.

The music of Henryk Górecki proved an integral part of all three programmes. The utterly unpretentious Three Pieces in Olden Style are amongst Górecki’s best known work and the SMP String Ensemble performed them with appropriate crispness. Only in the third of the pieces is there any hint of the angst that pervades much of the composer’s work; the first two pieces are based on simple folk-like melodies that might come from any country in Europe. These pieces could not be any more different from the Piano Sonata No. 1. This is a proto-minimalist work, foreshadowing Górecki’s later output. The first movement throws out melodic fragments from a thick – and violent – chordal texture before an abrupt departure into a sparse, quiet interlude. When the original texture returns it still possesses the latent fury of the opening, but with more positive undertones. The middle movement is an extreme contrast – a stagnant monophonic theme and subsequent harmonisation. Unfortunately, this does not in itself make a particularly effective piece of music – the movement feels as if it has been thrown in to justify the ‘sonata’ title. The third movement returns to the spirit of the first, although this time it is the chords that seem to be spat out of the melody; Laurel Hungerford experienced some difficulties with this movement during both performances, but still did a great job of harnessing the work’s energy. Totus Tuus simply does not measure up to either of these works. Although the sounds are attractive, they are simply repeated too often, rendering the music almost lifeless. In the first performance there also seemed to be some issues of balance with the choir – which felt a little bottom-heavy – although these cleared up on the 7th.

Witold Lutoslawski’s Melodie Ludowe are hardly the  most exciting part of his output; one cannot help wondering whether the time of both the composer and the string ensemble could have been put to better use. Karlo Margetic’s homage to Witold Lutoslawski has everything that Melodie Ludowe does not; Hommage  à W.L. uses a variety of interesting sounds arranged within a clear structure. The overall tripartite form is delineated by woodblock interludes, while sectional changes within these parts are dictated by the conductor. Particularly effective were the use of bowed cymbal in the first part, which really sang at times, and the densely packed second part. There were some aethetic similarities between Margetic’s work and the Allegro Moderato from Penderecki’s Sextet. Although the music is hardly boneshattering, Penderecki does not flinch from some quite complex instrumental interactions that provide a superb sonic soup. The miniatures performed in the second concert provided a further stripped down iteration of the composer’s style that showcased the skills of Andrzej Nowicki to marvellous effect.

Karol Szymanowski, although a prominent part of Polish compositional history, never made a significant impact in the wider world; his music lacks the distinctive style that propelled Czech and Russian nationalists to prominence. The Children’s Rhymes written for his niece might be a very personal compositional statement, but they largely lacked the most important trait of the genre – that any child or parent might ever want to sing them. Perhaps Szymanowski was simply well ahead of his time in this one area, or perhaps a Polish upbringing is even further from the New Zealand experience than one might imagine, but a children’s song really ought to have an attractive melody. Olga Gryniewicz sang better than the music deserved.

Alexander Tansman provided three works of varying quality for the second programme. The Sonatine for Bassoon and Piano is an attractive work that manages to be energetic without Studio betrays its faults in its title; while it may function perfectly well as an etude for study, the absence of textural or rhythmic variation makes it unsuitable as concert piece, particularly as the somewhat fractured performance revealed an apparent host of technical difficulties for little aural reward. While the Canzonetta was played with more surety and expression, it did much less than the Sonatine to make a case for the composer’s abilities. Grazyna Bacewicz’s wind quintet proved an accessible, yet oftentimes intriguing piece of music. In particular that “Air”, which played with both the musical and literal meanings of the title in the swirling interludes of the flute, oboe and clarinet.

It tends to be quite difficult to consider a piece of New Zealand anecdotal/radiophonic music without thinking of John Cousins, but although Podróze displays many of the signs it manages to move beyond these. The use of unnervingly loud bangs at sectional points is one link, but these tend to be used as part of dramatic events rather than as changes in focus. Podróze is electroacoustic music for an audience not necessarily very familiar with the genre. Unlike in Cousins’ work (and that of his protégés), the narrative takes a linear form, and many of the sound choices are obvious emphases of various elements of the journey – particularly things like water noises. Other sounds, like the long, barely heightening drumroll near the beginning might be assigned several meanings. The gamelan interlude, however, really needs an explanation of some kind.

Andrzej Nowicki’s piece Abstand und Nähe, originally written for gamelan and bassoon, survives the transfer to marimba and bassoon remarkably well. Unsurprisingly, the marimba writing is hardly idiomatic, which leaves the audience to consider the missing elements, but it is still an engaging work. Carol Shortis’ Tesknota, which finished the 1st and 3rd concerts, is an entirely different kettle of fish. Much of its material originates from Polskie Kwaity and a second traditional song, but the string parts appear to reference Górecki’s style. The choir sings a complex array of murmured fragments, while soprano and countertenor bear the pieced together verses. The second performance (with better balance between the soloists) was utterly intoxicating between the unchecked power of the folksong and the churning background noise.