Voyages and vespers: new classical material

At Wellington City Libraries we have the antidote to being aurally overwhelmed by a surfeit of Christmas carols: recent additions to our classical music collection include many wonderful new CDs in November and December, and this blog will explore some of these acquisitions. A special highlight is the Emerson String Quartet’s Infinite Voyage, the final recording by a venerable ensemble that disbanded in late 2023 after nearly half a century together. We also have Norman Meehan’s outstanding and much-needed biography of composer Jenny McLeod

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0C5FM1P1Z/ref=ase_wellingtoncit-21 Vespro della Beata Virgine / Monteverdi, Claudio
Raphaël Pichon founded the period-instrument ensemble Pygmalion in 2006, to explore the ‘filiations that link Bach to Mendelssohn, Schütz to Brahms or Rameau to Gluck and Berlioz.’ Since then, Pygmalion has demonstrated its ability to perform an enormous repertoire of music. The ensemble also holds a residency at the Opéra national de Bordeaux, and tours and records regularly. This recording of Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 opens with a veritable operatic explosion: the intonation ‘Deus, in adjutorium meum intende’ and the choral response ‘Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina’ suggest a lusty exhortation rather than a pious supplication. As the journey through Monteverdi’s Vespers continues, the overall mood remains operatic, but Pichon tempers bombast with moments of crystalline delicacy and tenderness. The instrumentalists and singers embrace their roles, expertly blending precision and expression to create a very memorable account of Monteverdi’s work.

Jenny McLeod : a Life in Music / Meehan, Norman
Norman Meehan’s biography of Jenny McLeod — one of the most extraordinary, innovative, and versatile talents in New Zealand music — is a welcome addition to our music and biography collection. As McLeod’s former student, Elizabeth Kerr, comments in her review, Meehan captures the enigmatic personality of his subject, drawing on many conversations, while also offering insightful and persuasive analyses of McLeod’s music, weaving together a narrative of her life with analyses of her music. Meehan’s depiction of McLeod is a compelling one, leading us on her journey: from Levin and Timaru to Wellington, then Paris and Olivier Messiaen, and Cologne and Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, before McLeod’s return to New Zealand and a turbulent encounter with academe at Victoria University, arguably a milieu for which McLeod’s unique vision and prodigious musical intellect were both too great and too soon.
What emerges from A Life in Music is McLeod’s lifelong ‘search for meaning’ and fulfillment in her creative and spiritual life; her continuing quest for attaining these objectives could be intellectually and physically draining, but ultimately, as works like the opera Hōhepathe score for Whale Rider, her song cycles setting New Zealand poets, the hymns and choral works, and of course, the Tone Clock pieces demonstrate, McLeod always surmounted these challenges. Meehan’s study of McLeod is, therefore, a  readable, incisive, and sensitive account of one of New Zealand’s most remarkable musical lives.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0CBSSFJ6X/ref=ase_wellingtoncit-21Infinite Voyage / Emerson String Quartet
The Emerson String Quartet was formed when its members were still students at the Julliard School, and endured for more than four decades as one of the world’s great string quartets. After countless international tours and recordings, the Emerson Quartet decided to disband in 2023, and made their final performance on 22 October at the New York Chamber Music Society.
As David Allen wrote in his review for the New York Times, the Emerson Quartet was far more than a string quartet,  ‘an establishment, a touchstone, a catalyst’ in the musical world. Although the repertoire choices in Infinite Voyage may appear disparate, this is all music that reflects the literal and figurative journies of the Emerson Quartet’s history.  The music is ideally chosen to reflect the Quartet’s collaborations, ambitions, and friendships.  Arnold Schoenberg’s Quartet No. 2 is a work that the Emerson Quartet had wanted to record since adding it to their repertoire, and in this recording they are joined by Barbara Hannigan. Hannigan also performs in Hindemith’s Melancholie, a song cycle setting four poems by Christian Morgenstern, and dedicated to Hindemith’s friend Karl Köhler who perished on the Western Front in 1918. Chanson perpétuelle by Chausson, here in its version for soprano, string quartet, and piano (Bertrand Chamayou), speaks of loss and separation, but also the comfort of memory. Berg’s String Quartet No. 3, completed in 1910 and premiered on 24 April 1911, is a work that still bristles with a sense of the avant-garde more than a century after its composition. The Emerson Quartet captures the audacious modernism of the work, as well as Berg’s immersion in and appreciation of lustrous late Romantic opulence. 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0CB4XVTKJ/ref=ase_wellingtoncit-21

 Mass in 40 parts = Missa Ecco sì beato giorno / Striggio, Alessandro
Alessandro Striggio (c. 1536/7–1592) was a virtuoso performer on the lute, viol, lira da braccio and lirone, as well as an adept and imaginative composer, and his music dominated the Medici court in Florence during the 1560s. For many years he was best known for his secular vocal music, including many madrigals and some intermedi (precursors to opera). However, Striggio’s reputation changed with I Fagiolini‘s 2011 recording of his Mass in 40 Parts, an extraordinary large-scale sacred work. That recording won several awards including the Gramophone Early Music Award and a Diapason d’Or de l’Année. In this new album, the original recording of Striggio’s Mass has been remastered, and it is complemented by the addition of Thomas Tallis’s great 40-part work Spem in Alium. In a departure from convention, Hollingworth has added continuo instruments to Spem in Alium, adding remarkable depth and resonance to the piece, and providing a rich foundation for the towering edifice of Tallis’s motet.

 http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0C98T5MYF/ref=ase_wellingtoncit-21Sounds and Sweet Airs : a Shakespeare songbook
Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Roderick Williams (baritone), and Joseph Middleton (piano) collaborate here on an array of settings of Shakespeare’s texts.  Their recording brings together such familiar songs as Schubert’s An Silvia (D. 106) and Haydn’s canzonetta She Never Told Her Love setting Viola’s words from Act 2 of Twelfth Night with newer responses to Shakespeare’s words, including Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s song cycle Rosalind, and Roderick Williams’s own Sigh No More, Ladies. The ingenious programming makes for diverting pairings of works: Michael Tippet’s Songs for Ariel alongside Arthur Honegger’s Deux chants d’Ariel, and Benjamin Britten’s Fancie next to Francis Poulenc’s Fancy (both setting the same text from The Merchant of Venice) demonstrate Shakespeare’s great reach across time and place. Representing the eighteenth century are J. C. Smith and Thomas Arne. The artists’ imaginative approach to this Shakespeare project makes for an illuminating song recital.

Choral Works / Cage, John
In 2022, BBC Music Magazine described performing this choral music by Cage as ‘the musical equivalent of climbing Mount Everest,’ and praised the Latvian Radio Choir for surmounting its ‘jagged, fragmented notes and pitches’ with accuracy and expression. Of particular interest is the work Hymns and Variations, in which Cage took two hymn melodies (‘Old North’ and ‘Heath’)  by William Billings that form part of the New-England Psalm Singer (1770) and manipulated the tunes by altering the note values and durations and erasing some notes. In each of the variations Cage altered these manipulations, so that a mere revenant of Billings’s original melodies haunts the texture. The result is evocative and veiled, attributes strengthened by the excellence of the Latvian Radio Choir and the intuition of their director, Sigvards Kļava.

Nocturnes & Barcarolles / Fauré, Gabriel
Recorded in 2022, these nocturnes and barcarolles by Fauré add to the more than seventy albums Marc-André Hamelin has made for Hyperion, alongside chamber music by Franck, Dohnányi, Shostakovich, Brahms, and Schumann, solo sonatas by Mozart, Haydn, Liszt, CPE Bach, and Chopin, concertos by Alkan and Strauss, and shorter works by Debussy and Catoire, Bolcom and Feldman, among many others. In these Fauré pieces, Hamelin reveals his ‘innate affinity‘ with French music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; his performance of these works explores the subtle dramas of Fauré’s music. Hamelin’s complete command of the pieces’ harmonic intricacies is almost painterly, tiny brushstrokes and choices of colour that coalesce into a large and beautiful poetic canvas.

Red Moon: Inner Visions of Berg’s Wozzeck

Saturday 11 November 2023 sees the finale of Orchestra Wellington’s ‘Inner Visions’ season with a concert performance of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck. This will be the first performance of Berg’s complete work in New Zealand, nearly a full century after its premiere in Berlin in December 1925. Orchestra Wellington and Music Director Marc Taddei will be joined by a constellation of outstanding singers in the principal roles, as well as the Scholar Cantorum of St Mark’s School, and the Tudor Consort.

This blog will explore some of the background to Wozzeck and highlight some of the books and audiovisual materials in the Wellington City Library that will offer still more context for and analysis of Berg’s opera. Whether you are interested in the history of Wozzeck, Berg’s creative process and the structure of the work, atonality, Expressionism, or the early-nineteenth century play Woyzeck that provided Berg with his source and inspiration, there will be something here for you: Roger Parker, Carolyn Abbate, Theodore Adorno, and several other authors have all written perceptively and revealingly about Wozzeck.

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New Classical CDs: Concertos for Piano, Horn, Violin & Clarinet

October has brought us a gleaming array of new classical CDs that include well-known pieces, and music by composers who should be better-known. This blog looks at several new recordings of concertos for piano, clarinet, horn, and violin. Of particular interest are two new recordings of music by Florence Price (1887-1953), including Randall Goosby’s interpretation of Price’s violin concertos with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Jeneba Kanneh-Mason’s performance of Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement, accompanied by the Chineke! Orchestra.

Although Florence Price’s music is, at last, becoming more widely performed, more about her life should also be known. Price was one of the USA’s foremost twentieth-century composers, producing music in a variety of genres including chamber and orchestral works, concerti, piano and organ pieces, and a significant body of art songs. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price first learned music with her mother before moving to Boston where she studied piano, organ, and composition at the New England Conservatory, one of the only American conservatoires that would admit African-American students at that time. Price then held several prestigious teaching posts at colleges in Little Rock and Atlanta and married in 1912. 

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Inner Visions: Orchestra Wellington Presents ‘Pharaoh’

On Saturday 7 October, Orchestra Wellington presents ‘Pharaoh‘, the penultimate concert of its 2023 Inner Visions season. The programme brings together five works that each realise ‘inner visions’: from Gemma Peacocke’s response to the mysterious world of manta rays in the Hauraki Gulf in her new work Manta; there is a collision of archaism and ultra-modernism in Webern’s Passacaglia (1908). Briar Prastiti’s White, Red, Black envisions a folkloric world, through the symbolic qualities of these three colours in story-telling. John Psathas’s Planet Damnation, a concerto for timpani and orchestradraws us into a different time and landscape, taking its inspiration from the chapter in Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation that gives the author’s eyewitness account of catastrophic events in the Gulf War. To conclude the programme, Mozart’s music for the play Thamos, King of Egypt heightens the themes of treachery and death that pervade the drama by Tobias Philipp, Freiherr von Gebler (1726-1786). Joining Orchestra Wellington, conducted by Music Director Marc Taddei, will be the Arohanui Strings in Manta, percussionist Tomomi Ozaki, and the Orpheus Choir.

Today’s blog explores some of the books in the WCL collection about the two composers central to the First and Second Viennese Schools of composition, providing additional context to the music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), and Anton von Webern (1883-1945).

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Strike the Viol! Renaissance and Baroque Music for Viola da Gamba

Strike the viol, touch the lute,
Wake the harp, inspire the flute.
Sing your patroness’s praise,
In cheerful and harmonious lays.

Treble viol by Alan Clayton. Picture © Alan Clayton. Picture reproduced with permission from Alan Clayton.
A treble violin by Alan Clayton

The viol — a bowed, fretted string instrument also known as a viola da gamba — rose to prominence in Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, and by the seventeenth century, it was one of the most popular ensemble and solo instruments. In Renaissance England, the viol consort, a group of viols of different sizes (treble, tenor, and bass), was one of the preeminent ensembles of the day, playing extraordinarily complex music; right through to the mid-eighteenth century, the viol remained an important solo instrument, especially for French and German composers. Eclipsed by the violoncello in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the viol was relegated to the status of a quaint relic until the ‘early music revival’ of the twentieth century reignited interest in viols and their music. Today, different members of the viol family can be found in many ensembles — and not only those specialising in early music or historical performance. The sound of viols and the virtuosity of their players inspire increasing numbers of contemporary composers (Nico Muhly, Sally Beamish, James MacMillan, and New Zealand’s own Yvette Audain, and Ross Harris to name a few) to write music for solo and ensemble viols. 

Pardessus de viole in the workshop. Picture © Alan Clayton.Image reproduced with permission from Alan Clayton.
In the workshop: a pardessus de viole by Alan Clayton

Locally, Wellington is home to Aotearoa’s only viol consort, the Palliser Viols. While the repertoire of the group is predominantly that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they also demonstrate the versatility of the viol by commissioning and performing new works including Ross Harris’s Gaudete and Image of Melancholy, Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead’s Douglas Lilburn, travelling on the Limited, regards the mountains in the moonlight and Colin Decio’s Lord have MercyAnd, perhaps more unexpectedly, there is a specialist maker of viols based in Wellington as well: Alan Clayton’s beautiful instruments — which he makes on commission from musicians here and overseas — can sometimes be seen at Alastair’s Music in Cuba Street. Today’s blog explores some of the recordings of music played by viols in different combinations and emerging from different countries and eras.

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The Musical Legacy of Gillian Bibby MNZM

The pianist, composer, teacher, and scholar Gillian Bibby who passed away in Wellington on 7 August 2023, was integral to Wellington’s musical world for several decades. While countless numbers of young musicians in Wellington and beyond benefitted from Gillian’s work — whether through piano or music theory lessons, chamber music coaching, the Institute of Registered Music Teachers, the New Zealand Suzuki Institute, or by learning pieces from her edited collections of piano music — her legacy as a composer and performer is less well-known than it should be.

Bibby’s career took her from a childhood in Lower Hutt and Greymouth to university in Dunedin, and then postgraduate study in Germany, where her teachers included Karlheinz Stockhausen. She was the recipient of prestigious awards, including the Kranichsteiner Music Prize (1972), and she was a Mozart Fellow at Otago University (1976-77). After returning to Wellington, Bibby established a flourishing teaching studio in Roseneath and became heavily involved in Suzuki Talent Education, receiving in 1992 a Churchill Fellowship to pursue further study in Suzuki teaching training in North America.

It is impossible to do justice to Gillian Bibby’s career here, but something of the scale of her achievements can be seen in Bibby’s 70th birthday concert in 2015. Many eminent members of the music profession, including friends, family, and former pupils, came together to perform her music in Wellington’s Adam Concert Room. SOUNZ recorded these performances, which you can view here, alongside a fascinating interview with Bibby, and short introductions to the pieces. This collection of performances and discussions provides a rich portrait of Bibby’s work as a composer: eclectic, drawing on avant-garde techniques, diverse in instrumentation, and encompassing a wide variety of influences. A more extensive catalogue of her compositions can again be accessed via SOUNZ, while additional recordings and scores are available at the Alexander Turnbull Library.

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