• Henry Purcell: So when the glittering Queen of night; Not all my torments; Cold Song; Evening Hymn
• Jenny McLeod: Peaks of Cloud
• Benjamin Britten: On this Island
• Samuel Barber: Three songs from Ten Early Songs; Three songs from Collected Songs; Two songs from Hermit Songs

At the time the Festival programme was announced I pondered why the Festival chose to employ Michael Houstoun to accompany Keith Lewis for this concert rather than a professional accompanist. Although Jenny McLeod worked hard in her piano writing to justify Houstoun’s appearance, I’m still not convinced it was altogether necessary.

The four Purcell songs were all artfully and delicately sung, although the use of a piano as accompaniment detracted slightly from So when the glittering Queen of night in particular, the block chords seemingly alien and irrelevant to the finely detailed vocal line. Possibly a spread approach might have lent more homogeneity, but ultimately the piano is simply not the best way to experience this music. Happily, none of the other Purcell songs were particularly affected by this, and the Evening Hymn proved particularly powerful. The Cold Song’s accompaniment is almost amusing in the light of minimalism – Philip Glass could easily stick on some cheesy synthesisers and claim it for his own.

Jenny McLeod’s Peaks of Cloud, commisioned by Lewis and composed in 2007, although not premiered until this concert, may have to wait some time to receive a representative performance. One has to ponder the degree of communication between composer and performer, because Lewis struggled at both ends of his range, sucking the power out of what ought to have been the most effective song. Promise, the fourth of seven songs, possessed a frightening intensity until its ending, when Lewis could only muster a half-hearted “scream”. The following song, Gods, was also beautiful music that suffered from uncertainty in the lower register. This is not to suggest that the entire song cycle was unsatisfactorily performed – the first two songs were especially enjoyable; the dichotomy between the characters of the piano and voice in the opening song I Met a Man was cleverly conceived and executed.

The concert’s highlight proved to be Britten’s cycle On this island, settings of Auden poems. Britten’s songs displayed more of a common nature with the Purcell selection than with either McLeod or Barber’s music. Both composers display a certain English restraint; while his music might not carry quite thee same intensity as Peaks of Cloud, this does not affect its expressiveness. Moreover, Lewis displayed an ability to reach some of the notes that seemed to elude him in the McLeod cycle. The Nocturne displayed a wonderful harmony of intent between performer and composer, never straining for emotional effect, but rather commenting upon the curiosities of the lyrics from a distance.

If nothing else, the Barber songs illustrated the effect that a poor text can have upon a piece of music. Although Barber’s music is impossibly capital-R Romantic in any case, the combination of his music with these overwhelmingly cloying texts (Joyce being the prime suspect) is simply nauseating and unmusical. They offered nothing in any way thoughtful or unexpected, and thus there was no point in either their composition, their performance, or the continued presence of the audience, with the exception of the setting of The Cruxifiction.

• 26 February 8pm: Mahler Symphony No. 8. Will be awesome. There is a free live broadcast in Civic Square, tickets for the real thing range from $46 to $176. I suspect that the $46 tickets will be really, really bad, probably a worse option than the broadcast, but probably that’s where I’ll end up.
• 5 March 8pm: Simon O’Neill sings a selection of Wagner. The Festival describes this as a “banquet of delights for opera-lovers”, but on the whole I’d rather have an actual opera, or at least a proper orchestral concert featuring contemporary music. In any case, didn’t essentially the same concert happen in Wellington fairly recently? Thanks are due to everybody who didn’t turn up at Resonances at the last festival – you’re the reason we can’t have nice things. $40-$125. Don’t throw your money away.
• 6-7 March between events: Breath of Wind, featuring the Levin Brass Band. I’ve no idea what this will actually sound/look like, but it’s free!
• 6 March 12pm: organ recital by John Wells. Free!
• 6 March 2pm: Stockhausen’s Helicopter String Quartet. Or, at least, a film of it, rather than the actual thing. Free.
• 6 March 4pm: the NZTrio perform a variety of movements from various string trios. The highlight will probably be a new work by David Downes, if only for the fact that it won’t have its integrity compromised by the Greatest Hits concept. Why is this happening at 4pm? $45 (one class of seating).
• 6 March 7.30pm: The Borodin Quartet play string quartets by Borodin, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky. Not an astonishingly exciting programme, but it has Shostakovich 8th and there will supposedly be $15 student rush tickets available.
• 7 March 12pm: organ recital by Douglas Mews. Free!
• 7 March 2pm: a (mostly) children’s concert of music inspired by Tolkein and Dahl with the Zephyr Wind Quintet. Tickets are $36, kids $18.
• 7 March 4pm: the NZSQ perform Schubert, Alban Berg, Ross Harris and Beethoven (with Jenny Wollerman). The Alban Berg String Quartet really turned me on to 20th century music. It’s an absolute masterpiece, and definitely worth hearing. The Ross Harris should be interesting as well, although the Schubert is rather dull. $45 (one class of seating).
• 7 March 7.30pm: Keith Lewis in recital accompanied by Michael Houstoun. This is a total waste of Houstoun and of the festival’s money – a professional accompanist would do an equally good job. On the programme are Purcell, Britten, Barber and the inestimable Jenny McLeod. Probably the best programme on offer at the festival. $58 B reserve, $68 A reserve.
• 12 March 8pm: Ravi Shankar is 90 years old. This is the probably the last chance to see him play (I hope so, he certainly deserves a rest at that age) – and he certainly is a great musician – but there is quite a possibility that – as with Pavarotti’s tour a couple of years ago, he’s simply past it. Tickets range from $73 to $120.
• 17 March 7.30pm: The Freiburg Baroque orchestra performs Haydn and Mozart. Although the festival claims they are interpreters of “Classical Romantic and even contemporary music”, their two programmes belie this. It would be a fair bet that these two concerts will sound exactly the same, but if you must go to one, make it this first one, featuring the fourth Mozart Horn Concerto. $46-$98. You’ll need to spend $88 to be in a half-reasonable position.
• 18 March 7.30pm: The FBO snore their way through their second concert of Haydn and Mozart. $46-$98

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”]