Tag: piano

Categories
Reviews, News and Commentary

Sylvia Jiang’s lively and energetic performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Sylvia Jiang

Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra

Scheherezade

Auckland Town Hall

July 4

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

The first half of the APO’s Scheherezade concert featured two works composed a century apart with Melody Eötvös’ “The Saqqara Bird” of 2016 and Prokofiev’s “Piano Concerto No 2 of 1913/1923.”

The highlight of the concert was the Prokofiev Piano Concerto played by Sylvia Jiang. She is a Chinese born New Zealander and Juilliard graduate  who was ranked as a Rising Star in the Asialaw Profiles of 2023.

Last year she performed Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto with the Auckland Philharmonia and later in the year she will also be making her debut national tour as a soloist with Chamber Music New Zealand playing seven concerts.

Prokofiev’s second Piano Concerto is considered to be one of the most difficult piano concertos to play. Thankfully Jiang appears to have not been told that and she never faltered in her exploration of the work even when she was faced  with the massive solo cadenza of the first movement.

This section saw Jiang playing vigorously for over 4 minutes before the orchestra joins in again.

She opened the work delicately creating  gentle, magical sounds along with the woodwinds and strings which hinted at a shimmering watery setting with the orchestra developing the theme and Jiang providing streaks of colour and drama.

This quiet lyricism didn’t last long and was soon interrupted by menacing sounds from the orchestra and a darkness emerged which overpowered the piano which then responded with some ferocious sounds.

This early interaction of orchestra and pianist highlighted the emphasis of the concerto. This was the sense of competition between player and orchestra. With most  concerti there is a collaboration between soloist and orchestra but with this work there was more of an antagonism and intervention.

This is in part due to Prokofiev s music where we hear a clash between romanticism and modernism which is an indication of the composer struggling with his own idea.

In playing the first movement solo cadenza Jiang seemed to be physically attacking the keys and her playing eventually revealed an emerging theme and she was rejoined with the orchestra which enveloped her with the gentler music which had preceded the cadenza.

The short second movement saw Jiang playing  with a  lively energy, butting up against the  savage and insistent tones of the orchestra.

The third movement which opens with huge swells of brass and percussion and a rustic theme where Jiang dashed off flashes bright notes inserting herself into the orchestral themes. Here again the pianist and orchestra were in competition, with the orchestra seeming to overpower Jiang who fought back with a relentless energy finishing the movement with a few quiet  notes of victory.

She opened the fourth movement with a rapid-fire assault on the piano followed by a lethargic sequence where her fingers seemed to wander across the keyboard in search of a theme. Then as she managed to discover the theme the orchestra joined in, expanding and enhancing it.

Her playing at times seemed to be urged on by the energetic orchestra while at other times she seemed to strive against the orchestra.

In the final minutes of the work her playing returned to a simple romanticism before morphing into some frantic playing matched by an equally frenetic orchestra which overpowered the piano before the  final race to the climatic conclusion.

The “Saqqara Bird” refers to a bird/plane shaped relic found at Saqqara in Egypt in the late nineteenth century whose function was unknown. Melody Eötvös’ work explores the imagined reasons behind its creations and purposes and envisages it in search of its identity.

The work opens with the sounds of bird-like twittering from the woodwinds and strings which seem to be emerging from a dark forest of sounds conveyed by the blasts of brass and thumping drums.

Several of the instruments appeared to have been adapted or employed to create eerie sounds as though a backdrop to a fairy tale filled with shadowy beings.

In the middle section the woodwinds replicate  the sounds and movement of birds along with the ghostly forms leading to enigmatic encounters and discoveries.

The intriguing music ranged from sequences of unruly and strident sounds to the use of the simple single note which ends the work.

Categories
Reviews, News and Commentary

NZ Trio’s “Unquiet Dream”

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Amalia Hall, Sarah Watkins and Ashley Brown Image Chris Watson

NZ Trio

Unquiet Dream

Auckland Concert Chamber

May 19

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

With their latest concert “Unquiet Dream” the NZ Trio have shown again their ability to deliver concerts featuring music which is innovative as well as drawing on the established canon. This approach shows an intelligent and sophisticated approach to chamber music  which makes their concerts  always rewarding.

The first work on the programme was  Benjamin Britten’s “Introduction and Allegro for Piano Trio”, a very early work in which the young composer  was trying out his approaches to the modernist music which was then beginning to take an interest in.

The work opened with the instruments tentatively seeking out an elusive  melody, playing various sequences which overlapped and intersected as though the composer was assembling his musical structure out of disparate elements.

Many of these sequences were ethereal, touching on the flickering images of water, wind, shadows and scudding clouds. This search for physicality was reflected in the physicality of the playing of the instruments – the blunt striking of the piano and the sharp rasps of the violin and cello.

In Chris Cree Browns  “The Second Triumvirate”  he imagines each of the instruments having its own language  with which they engage in communications  which range from the  simple human conversations  to the more intricate interactions of animal and bird sounds. All these interchanges there are filled dramatic echoes and reverberations.

Lera Auerbach’s  “Trio No2 Triptych” is sub-titled “This mirror has three faces” and she says of the work that “one can look at three different faces or roles of the same person or at three different personalities”.

So, each of the instruments takes on an aspect of the personality which can be in conflict or in harmony with the other. This psychoanalytic approach hints at the idea of multiple personalities or the different faces a person presents – the public, the private or the intimate.

The work is filled with shifting dynamics. Simple sequences develop and change, minimalist statements escalate to create bold and adventurous musical forms.

Shards of music coalesce and then disperse, in surreal juxtaposition, the various elements leaving the image of the person unresolved.

Where  things seem to fall apart in Auerbach’s piece there is a very different outcome with Mendelsohn’s “Piano Trio in D Minor”. With this piece the Trio was focussed on drawing all the elements together to create a symphonic sweep for one of his great “songs without words” providing the work with an emotional richness and depth.

The work hints at the composer’s own desires and struggles using the instruments to create a narrative in which he is by turns heroic, romantic and despondent.  

Throughout the work pianist Sarah Watkins provided the measured mainstay with both a delicacy and vividness of expression. Amalia Hall’s violin  provided a range of emotion from the sensuous to the dramatic and Ashley Brown’s cello ranged from the melancholic to the agitated.

With their playing they were able to capture the romanticism, the wistfulness and the drama of the work as well as effortlessly  incorporating references to  the composers his own Midsummer Night’s Dream and the that of Bach.

Categories
Reviews, News and Commentary

Barton and Brodsky

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Auckland Arts Festival

Barton and Brodsky

Auckland Concert Chamber

May 22

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

It seems misleading  to describe the didgeridoo as a primitive instrument. The sounds it makes fit well within the scope of much contemporary music, there is  complexity to their playing and they have an extraordinary musical history which parallels the history of many European instruments.

The instrument’s voice also seems to connect with the land and the history of the Aboriginal  people with a deep spirituality .

The opening of the recent Barton and Brodsky concert heard that voice as  the rumble of  the didgeridoo  welled up from the underworld to fill the Auckland Concert Chamber. This was didgeridoo of William Barton joining the string quarter for a remarkable concert of music, where the instrument contributed to several of the works.

Barton performed in Peter Sculthorpe’s “String Quartet No 11 “Jabiru Dreaming” which describes the Australian landscape and its animal life. His fitful and variable  breathing  gave a sense of the breath of life which giving soul to the land, and the sharp bursts of sound mapped out the patterns of landscape and geology. The strings contributed sharp shrill sounds of bird life and the murmurs of the bush.

In” Minjerribah” by Robert Davidson which paints a picture of the North Stradbroke Island Bartons didgeridoo again  provided a sense of the timeless landscape while the strings created  an almost romantic vision with evocative sounds of bird life,  the shrill of cicadas, waves churning over beaches, deep blue skies and sun.

Barton also made a major contribution to the concert with his own composition “Square Circles beneath the Red Desert Sand” which he introduced walking from the rear of the hall channelling the spirits and the song lines of Australia, the sounds of his  voice echoed by the strings.  His singings took the form of a ritual, like the chants of many religions. Here along with the savage strings of the quartet, the sounds of the European instruments and didgeridoo showed the power of music to provide memory and narrative  reaching across cultures.

Before the two works featuring the didgeridoo, the quartet played Henry Purcell’s early “Fantasia No 5 in D Minor” with all the elegance the work requires with Paul Cassidy’s viola adding a deep sonorous tone.

This finely crafted work was in marked contrast to the main work on the programme, “Janacek’s  String Quartet No 11”. This work is subtitled “Intimate Letters” and is a musical representation of some 700 letters sent between Janáček and Kamila Stösslová which represented the composer’s intense emotions in  that doomed  relationship.

Passages of the work were played at not much more than a whisper which were then punctuated by dramatic piecing sounds from the strings as though representing the turmoil of  the composer’s mind. In many of the sequences, violinist Krysia Ocostowicz led the group with her insistent playing and in the final movement played with a fevered urgency mirroring that of the composer.

The group also  played Stravinsky’s “Three Pieces for String Quartet” which was written after his ballet music for Petrushka and owes much to folk music , the carnival and snippets recalling Latin chants.

They also played Salina Fisher’s “Torino – Echoes of the Putorino”. The putorino is  a Māori instrument which can produce sounds as varied as a trumpet or a flute which the group were able to replicate. But while they were able to produce the sounds of the instrument, they were also imitating the sounds of the New Zealand bush and the native birds with the bright strings achieving the sound of several birds including the kiwi.

With Andrew Ford’s “String Quartet No 7: Eden Ablaze” which was a memorial and requiem to the Australian bush fires of 2019 / 20 the group captured the drama of the event, visions of the devastated landscape and the flight of the animals.  There were surging sounds of the combined strings as well high-pitched sounds of distress while  the didgeridoo provided a plaintive background.

To subscribe or follow New Zealand Arts Review site – www.nzartsreview.org.

The “Follow button” at the bottom right will appear and clicking on that button  will allow you to follow that blog and all future posts will arrive on your email.

Or go to https://nzartsreview.org/blog/, Scroll down and click “Subscribe”

Categories
Reviews, News and Commentary

IMPASSIONED MUSIC ACROSS THREE CENTURIES.

Reviewed by Peter Simpson

Julian Steckel

Passion & Mystery

Auckland Philharmonia

Auckland Town Hall

February 15th

Reviewed by Peter Simpson

This was a concert of impassioned music across three centuries. Or four if you count the exquisite Bach encore played by Julian Steckel after his commanding performance of Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto (representing the twentieth century), which was preceded by Gemma Peacock’s sonorous White Horses, representing the 21st century and followed by Tchaikovsky’s mighty Symphony No. 6, The Pathétique, representing the nineteenth century.

‘Passion & Mystery’ was the opening concert of the Auckland Philarmonia Orchestra’s 2024 Premier Series, under its capable conductor Giordano Bellincampi.

I am not a musician; I can’t read a musical score or play a musical instrument, so am incapable of informed discrimination when it comes to performances, though I can point to more than half a century of avidly listening to concerts, radio and records as a dedicated consumer of music.

I found this an absorbing and enjoyable concert. All three works are emotionally intense, as was to be expected given the concert’s moniker, ‘Passion and Mystery’, though sufficiently various in musical idiom to avoid monotony. So far as I could tell the orchestra played splendidly throughout and was well directed by the resident conductor. The house was nearly full and the applause was deservedly prolonged.

Gemma Peacocke’s White Horses is a kind of orchestral tone poem, inspired by an extraordinary event in 1937 when a pioneer female New Zealand aviator, Waud Farmar, fell to her death in the ocean. In the words of the composer – a New Zealander working in the United States – ‘Farmar leapt without warning from a bi-plane above Cook Strait…The pilot saw her hit the sea and disappear.’ The pilot said: ‘The sea was pretty rough, with white horses everywhere’. These words provide the clue for Peacocke’s music treatment with lots of ominous rumblings of percussion, and intermittent sharp accents from strings and wind instruments. The sonic range is impressive, from a poignant violin solo to thunderous orchestral climaxes.

German cellist Julian Steckel was at his best in the intense opening Largo of Shostakovich’s sinewy concerto dating from 1966, the year of the composer’s 60th birthday. Like its predecessor, the concerto was written for the great Mistislav Rostropovich. How fortunate the Russian composer was to have such sublime musicians as Rostropovich, David Oistrakh and Svatoslav Richter for whom to write his concerti! Unsurprisingly the score exploits to the full the virtuosic capacities of the instrument, demands which the soloist was clearly capable of meeting with ease and polish.

Tchaikovsky’s last symphony was first performed just nine days after his death in 1893, and it is hard to avoid inferring that he poured his heart and soul into it as a kind of final testament. The music is remarkably various, from the achingly lovely melody of the opening movement, through the delicacy and fire of the middle movements to the surging, sobbing melancholia of the final Adagio. The orchestra sounded magnificent throughout every nuance of sentiment wrung from the composer’s feelings. A cathartic experience altogether for the satisfied audience.