• Jack Body: Turtle Time
• Anton Killin: A Priori
• Simon Eastwood: Jericho: Walls Will Fall
• Karlo Margetic: Hommage à W.L..
• Jan W. Morthenson: Unisono
• Charles Ives: The unanswered question
  Interval
• John Adams: "John Philip Sousa"
• Francis Poulenc: Sonata for clarinet and bassoon
• Henryk Gorecki: Piano Sonata No. 1
• Richard Robertshawe and Andrzej Nowicki: Concertino 5b
• Carol Shortis: Tesknota

SMP Ensemble’s first concert of the year, part of the St. Andrew’s Season running concurrently with the New Zealand Festival of the Arts was promoted in the media only by an article in the New Zealand Herald (although there was a little thumbnail in the Dominion Post). As a result, the audience was undesirably small, particularly considering the number of performers, and the volume and quality of their music. The concert drew heavily on last year’s Podróze series, but mixed in several other works to form a programme that looked (particularly in the second half) towards the more joyful side of contemporary music.

The opening rendition of Jack Body’s Turtle Time saw Karlo Margetic performing his best imitation of an over-caffeinated puppy in the spoken-voice role, bursting through the swirling textures to deliver Russell Haley’s appealingly bizarre text, setting the scene for the other witty music further down the programme. Anton Killin’s A Priori is a diverting exploration of language, opening with a collage of vowel sounds from different languages and speakers, vaguely reminiscent of John Young’s Sju Rather than dissolving into (so-called) abstraction, however, it segues into spoken sentences of German (and possibly other languages – I’d need to listen again). Of course, language is just a different means of organising – and hence abstracting – sound.

Two of the local compositions from Podróze followed in Simon Eastwood and Karlo Margetic’s works. After hearing each of these compositions twice previously the awkward section endings in Jericho feel somewhat less disturbing, but the eighty seconds or so of each section really is only enough to establish its bare features. Sitting on the opposite side of the venue from the previous performances of Hommage à W.L. offered a slightly different perspective, particularly of the first section, with the piano sounding much more clearly above, rather than through the texture.

Unisono, for bassoon, piano and electronics is a curious piece; the performance  at the Adam Concert Room last year was far more successful. The piece opens with the instruments playing sustained unisons, and gathers complexity as the instruments depart from each other and electronics coarsen the bassoon. Unfortunately, something seemed a bit off about the electronics – possibly unsatisfactory speaker position (I’m really not an expert) – which caused them to distract from, rather than add to the performance. Ives’s The unanswered question is possibly as far removed as possible from the stereotype of impossible complexity that his music attracts. This is a proto-minimalist work, founded upon a continuous pattern of soft strings, against which a solo trumpet and woodwind section (which were both positioned at the rear of the church) occasionally interject with their own motifs. On the surface there isn’t an awful lot going on here. Ives’ personification of the instrumental groups offers an explanation better than any that could be provided by a student one hundred years after the work’s composition on the basis of a single hearing.

“John Philip Sousa” is so utterly tongue-in-cheek that one can’t help grinning broadly from beginning to end. Adams’ aleatoric score specifies the directions of changes in pitch, but not the actual values of the pitches, creating harmonic chaos within a rigid rhythmic framework. Although it could be construed as either a homage to or mockery of Sousa, in the end it’s simply a joy to hear. Little changed when the action switched to Poulenc’s Sonata for clarinet and bassoon, which – especially in the third movement – might have been mistaken for fairground music played by a pair of tipsy monkeys, in this case Andrzej Nowicki and Kylie Nesbit.

Gorecki’s Piano Sonata No. 1 has seen a change of personnel since last year, with Sam Jury taking over from Laurel Hungerford. This resulted in a substantially different performance, with Jury treading more lightly than Hungerford in the opening Allegro molto, con fuoco, but balancing the angst-equation with a ferocious Allegro vivace. Now, going simply on the basis of those movement titles, this might seem like the wrong way round, but then I Am Not Henryk Gorecki. In any case, the obviously technically tough third movement received a pleasingly polished treatment. Concertino 5b was an entry in the NZSM Composers’ Competition (besides having an SMP performance). The work’s organic structure make it difficult (in the absence of a lights show) to determine exactly when preparation finishes and music begins. However, the Concertino doesn’t really need lighting to be spectacular, particularly with the ear-shattering tones of the central section. Perhaps neither this nor the Gorecki fit into the narrative of ‘happy’ music, but their turbocharged natures are nevertheless thrilling.

Carol Shortis’ composition is another that leaves one smiling contentedly. Shortis’ use of Polish folksong is stirring; the choir’s canonical half-whispering (or however one might term it) still sounds fresh. Perhaps it doesn’t seem quite so fitting as at the close of two of the Podróze concerts, but it really is a very impressive work. It’s also about the only thing on the Podróze CD that my father can bear to hear.

It’s a crying shame that Stroma plays only two concerts a year, because the amount of work done by both performers and composers for these concerts must be immense. This concert, part of New Zealand Music Month, featured two world premieres (McLeod and Downes), along with two New Zealand premieres (Whitehead and Norris). The main body of chamber musicians were joined by clarinettist Richard Haynes and the inestimable Richard Nunns playing taonga puoro.

Jenny McLeod’s return to chamber music with Cat Dreams was quite magnificent, using a from of evocative abstractionism that combined complex tonalities with a carefully crafted timbral blend. While clearly a programmatic rather than “pure” composition, no single aspect could be clearly traced back to its inspiration. Rather than presenting a direct image of a cat, McLeod portrays the “idea” of a cat, dissecting each aspect of this into something that can be revealed through gesture and structure rather than mere notes. Although there is little explicit continuity between the many movements of the piece, each proves vital in shaping its overall effect. The use of kouauau (played by Ross Harris) as a fully integrated part of the ensemble was particularly striking – Maori instruments rarely work as intended when placed squarely within a well-tempered environment – not only for its timbre (a hollow, breathy sound not dissimilar to a husky ocarina) but also for the manner in which it allowed McLeod to bend harmonies and melodies. One small criticism would be that several notes in the harp’s high register were either notated or played too loudly, resulting in an undesirably harsh attack.

It’s always a pleasure to see Richard Nunns and his leather jacket, even if he seems to get frailer with each performance, and his collaboration with Gillian Whitehead is undoubtedly one of New Zealand’s most fruitful musical partnerships. Whitehead’s genius in this area is in creating spaces for Nunns to fill, balancing intense atonal passages that rely heavily on the Western instruments with subdued, yet passionate sections featuring Nunns’ flutes and the karakias of Aroha Yates-Smith. Although the transitions could have bee jarring in the hands of a lesser composer, Whitehead navigated them wisely by associating the sounds of the taonga puoro in normal practise with extended techniques on the flutes to create vivid rattlings and shimmerings.

David Downes’ new work Bliss Mechanisms, which opened the second half of the program, was focussed musically around the interactions between clarinet and piano. The clarinet part in particular was geared towards perpetual motion, constantly churning through new pitch material. As such it possessed similarity to some of John Psathas’ early work, although with a much lesser sense of organic growth. The sonic world of the music was enhanced by two of the brass players blowing and twirling hosepipes to create shrieking noises at climactic points, but their presence did somewhat detract from the other players. No matter how well somebody can play the clarinet, they will never be able to compete for the audience’s attention against some guy waving a pipe around, so in some ways it might have been beneficial to record these parts for performance playback.

Michael Norris’ unpronounceable tesserae… interstices featured a clarinet part based around Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III, recomposed and texturally enveloped by a small ensemble. The clarinet recomposition roughly follows a noise continuum, as distinct tones gradually disappear in favour of breath-like techniques. The surrounding textures also seem to become more complex to complement this, although they are forced to be slightly muted to allow the soloist space. This composition is an exercise in pure music far more than anything else on the programme, but it possesses a great deal of aural beauty nonetheless, much of which must be credited to Richard Haynes’ skill in shaping the complex clarinet part.

John Rimmer’s The Ring of Fire, written in 1976, was the only piece concert more than two years old, and it received a brilliant performance by the ensemble in its largest incarnation of the night. The title obviously refers to the volcanoes around the Pacific Rim, and contains some truly explosive music led by brass and percussion, contrasted by idyllic, ‘dormant’ sections. The players are seated in a wide semicircle, so that in one particularly vivid passage the music is swept around the group. Stroma played this with a great degree of theatricality, although the closing segment in which Bridget Douglas rose and replaced the conductor at the front of the stage with her shrieking piccolo was perhaps a little overdone – Rimmer’s intention here was a lament, but the dynamics were a little forceful to carry this off.

[I have a couple of draft symphony things waiting around for me to finish them. So coming up at some point should be Brian “Gothic” and Nielsen “Die Vier Temperamenten”]