Recent Performances |

5jul5:00 pmHome Series 1: OriginsConcert Chamber - Auckland Town Hall

Concert Details

Due to the temporary closure of Q Theatre, Origins will now take place at the Auckland Town Hall’s Concert Chamber July 5th, 5pm.

Tickets on sale here via Ticketmaster

Apologies for the short notice and thank you for your patience while we work through the back end of concert logistics with a new venue and ticketing systems etc. It will all be well worth it when we can sit together in a live musical setting once again and let the music do its thing.

We are thrilled to be back in the game and look forward to bringing you the first in this year’s concert series:

ORIGINS

BEETHOVEN • TURNAGE • BALLARD • YUN • ZEMLINSKY

Origins opens with Beethoven’s mighty Ghost trio to celebrate his birth a quarter of a millennium ago. Then we celebrate the rebirth of NZTrio, introducing this new line-up with a tour through our cultural and musical backgrounds. Works by Mark Anthony Turnage (UK) and Isang Yun (Korea) envelop a brand new work (and world premiere) by Sarah Ballard (NZ) deeply inspired by Indian culture and music. (How do these works represent us? Come along and find out!) To finish, our attention turns to the worrying global upsurges of separatism and hatred, so the last word comes from Austrian-American Alexander von Zemlinsky whose Jewish-Muslim upbringing inspires understanding and love.

Beethoven: Ghost

Turnage: A Fast Stomp

Ballard (NZ): Prema Lahari (new commission and world premiere)

Yun: Piano Trio

Zemlinsky: Piano Trio

Duration: Approx. 2 hours, including interval

Programme notes now available below

TICKETS $50 Adults / $25 Students / $45 Subscription holders

Includes (limited) complimentary refreshments with the musicians following the performance.

Booking fees apply

New dates and locations for InterFusions and Constellations coming soon.

Time

(Sunday) 5:00 pm utC+12:00

Location

Concert Chamber

Add to your Calendar GoogleCal

Programme notes

Origins

Beethoven: Ghost
Turnage: A Fast Stomp
Ballard: Prema Lahari (new commission and world premiere)
~ interval ~
Yun: Piano Trio
Zemlinsky: Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 3

Ludwig van Beethoven (GER; 1770 – 1827): Piano Trio No. 5 in D Major “Ghost”, Op. 70, No. 1, c. 22’

I Allegro vivace e con brio
II Largo assai ed espressivo
III Presto

It was Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny who gave this masterpiece its nickname, likening the slow-motion second movement to the appearance of the ghost in Hamlet, long after Beethoven’s death. And Beethoven was toying with ideas for a second opera while he was writing this – Macbeth. There’s a rumour that this is the same music he intended for the Witches’ Sabbath. We’ll never know, and the opera never came to pass. What we do know is the circumstances for his writing this brilliant trio. He’d just completed the Pastoral Symphony: he’d applied for a position at the royal theatre in Vienna and lost it; instead, he’d been offered a position with Napoleon’s brother far off in Kassel – and his rich patrons had all banded together to offer him a pension in Vienna to keep him there.

One of them was the Countess Erdödy, Maria, who was a fine pianist and had been a close friend all through his increasing deafness, and through the demise of her own marriage. Beethoven fled to her country estate straight after writing the Heiligenstadt Testament, and had been spending every summer there since. By 1808 he was 38, she was 29: the count been gone for some years; and when she returned to the city in October she invited Beethoven to move in to her beautiful apartments on the Krugerstraße, only one block down from his own. He abandoned his house and stayed until March the next year.

And during that period, he wrote and dedicated to her the Ghost trio. It’s not only the slow movement that is the masterpiece – it’s the explosive opening, the unsettling harmony right there in the theme, the driving finale. It’s the ultimate expression of clouds clearing after the storm and it is sublime.

Mark-Anthony Turnage (UK; b. 1960): A Fast Stomp, c. 10’

Classic Mark Anthony Turnage, the composer of the opera Anna Nicole and Blood on the Floor for jazz quartet and orchestra – high voltage driving excitement, jazz-influenced, equally tender and profound at times, always interesting. He describes this trio himself:

A Fast Stomp is a very energetic and unrelenting Scherzo and Trio which started as a study for my orchestral piece Scherzoid and is almost a scaled down, compacted overview of that piece. The title refers to an episode around two minutes in, where the violin plays a pizzicato passage while the piano plays thick, stamping chords in extreme registers. The piece ends with an intense coda comprising long melodic lines in the violin and cello accompanied by resonant bell chords in the piano.

Sarah Ballard (NZ; b. 1989): Prema Lahari (new commission), c. 10’

This piece is a small musical offering to humanity of peace and affection. It attempts to express and channel the potency of the origin of pure love to the hearts of the listeners. ‘Prema Lahari’ is a Sanskrit term that means “waves on the ocean of pure love”. It is said that love makes the world go ‘round, and certainly the purest love can heal the heart and reveal the true self within, which is transcendental to and unaffected by duality. The true self in connection with its ultimate source is by nature eternal, full of knowledge and full of bliss. One can realise the self through the sublime and easy process known as Bhakti yoga, the science of the love supreme, which is freely available to all.

The piece ends with a Sanskrit prayer, inviting the original source of the self to enter into the courtyard of the heart and to soothe the consciousness of all who may hear it, so that as a civilisation we may be able to make progress in a way that brings relief to humanity and all living entities and to become reacquainted with the original source of peace and happiness, which we all share. So please allow these sound vibrations to enter into and soothe your hearts.

Isang Yun (KOR; 1917-1995): Piano Trio, c. 14’

The great South Korean composer with an extraordinary life: imprisoned by the Japanese during the Second World war, recipient of the Seoul culture award, travelling to Berlin for further study, making his name at Darmstadt and wider Europe in the mid 60s, only to be kidnapped by the South Korean secret service on suspicion of espionage and taken back to Seoul to be imprisoned, tortured, and threatened with the death sentence. It was only a petition signed by 200 of the world’s musicians that got him freed.

His music inhabits a western, avant-garde sound world infused everywhere with the 1,200 year-old traditions of Korean court music: glissandi, pizzicati, slides, vibrato, based always on the Tao and on the different Asian concept of tone.

“The tone of Europe and Asia is totally different. The tone of the West is like a liner pencil, while Asian tones are like a stroke of a brush thick and thin, and not even straight… if a tone has in itself a flexible movement while it is sounding, if the tone appears complex, then this tone is a whole cosmos.

“I always seek out the principles of Taoism in the creation of my works. The beginning of my music is actually a continuation of something invisible that has already been ringing without sounding. Likewise, the seeming end of my music in fact belongs to the unheard sound of the future, and would continue to ring in the unheard sound.”

Alexander Zemlinsky (AUT; 1871 – 1942): Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 3, c. 28’

I Allegro ma non troppo

II Andante con molto espressione

III Allegro

This trio will grab you right from the opening bars. It’s the epitome of 1890s Vienna: lush, grand, romantic, impassioned, the Vienna over which Brahms ruled as an old man, and where Zemlinsky was a young student at the Vienna Conservatory. Brahms was president – an honorary position only, he never taught – when his friend Fuchs, the composition professor, told him about this talented youngster who had a first symphony being premiered soon and would he like to come. Brahms went, and was impressed. He was even more impressed by this trio, originally for clarinet and modelled on his own, and with classic Brahms kindness sent it off to his own publishers with a recommendation. The publishers liked it so much that they wanted two versions, one for clarinet, one for the standard piano trio: and Zemlinsky obliged by not simply arranging the clarinet part for violin, but writing a whole new part for it, meaning that there are two quite different versions of Op. 3 – each of which stands on its own.

The big, broad opening movement, beginning with that gorgeous stirring melody, is marked “Mit Schwung und Wärme” (warmly and with swing). The second movement, opening on the piano, has a wonderfully melodramatic middle section with the violin playing in a high register – the original calls for a high A clarinet to create that bright sort of sound. Finally, everything comes together in the dazzling, dancing allegro.

It’s worth adding that Zemlinsky was one of the Jewish diaspora to escape the Nazis. He came from an exceptionally multi-cultural family, with Roman Catholicism on the one side (his father’s) and Sephardic Judaism and Islam on the other – his grandmother was a Bosnian Muslim. His parents, to unite the two, converted to Judaism. By the time Hitler came to power he was in Berlin, teaching and working with Klemperer as a conductor at the Kroll Opera. In 1933 he moved back to Vienna, where he never really managed to find any satisfactory work, and in 1938 he and his young wife – Luise Sachsel, 29 years his junior – fled to New York. Just in time…

Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson

21may4:00 pmTectonic Echoes IISOUNZ Virtual Concert Series

7may4:00 pmTectonic Echoes ISOUNZ Virtual Concert Series

30apr7:00 pmAsian composers league festivalCANCELLED

23apr5:30 pmNew World Music Days FestivalCANCELLED

18apr7:30 pmNCMA Celebration Series: OriginsCANCELLED

Concert Details

Due to Coronavirus restrictions, this concert has now been cancelled.

The Nelson Centre of Musical Arts Celebration Series features NZTrio among their 2020 line-up. Celebrating the joy of music with 3 special concerts in March, April and May. Audience members will be able to relax and enjoy performances featuring wonderful local, national and international musicians.

PROGRAMME

Beethoven: Ghost
Turnage: A Fast Stomp
Ballard (NZ): Prema Lahari (new commission)
Yun: Piano Trio
Zemlinsky: Piano Trio

Origins opens with Beethoven’s mighty Ghost trio to celebrate his birth a quarter of a millennium ago. Then they celebrate the rebirth of NZTrio, introducing this new line-up with a tour through their cultural and musical backgrounds. Works by Mark Anthony Turnage (UK) and Isang Yun (Korea) envelop a brand new work by Sarah Ballard (NZ) deeply inspired by Indian culture and music. (How do these works represent NZTrio? Come along and find out!) To finish, the Trio’s attention turns to the worrying global upsurges of separatism and hatred, so the last word comes from Austrian-American Alexander von Zemlinsky whose Jewish-Muslim upbringing inspires understanding and love.

Duration: Approx. 1.5 hours plus interval

Saturday 18 April, 7:30pm

Tickets $35 Adult – BOOK NOW

Booking fees apply

Cash and eftpos available for door sales at Nelson Centre of Musical Arts from 9am – 5pm, Monday to Friday and one hour prior to the scheduled performance time.

Please contact Nelson Centre of Musical Arts if you require wheelchair seating on 03 548 9477 or music@ncma.nz.

Time

(Saturday) 7:30 pm

Location

Nelson Centre of Musical Arts

48 Nile St, Nelson

Add to your Calendar GoogleCal

5apr7:30 pmHome Series 1: OriginsCANCELLED

Concert Details

Due to Coronavirus restrictions, this concert has now been cancelled.

NZTrio’s 2020 concert series offers an inspiring exploration of ancestry, diversity and heritage. Each concert begins with a powerful masterwork from Beethoven in a toast to his enduring influence on our European music traditions. Then we swerve off towards more exotic realms representing a kaleidoscope of geographical, cultural and religious influences:

The first episode, Origins, celebrates the rebirth of NZTrio, introducing the new line-up with a journey through their musical and cultural influences – English, Korean, Indian, Jewish-American – and spotlights the inclusive understanding exemplified by Zemlinsky.

The second, InterFusions, tours through rich combinations of Greek-Canadian, Sri Lankan-Canadian and Japanese-Kiwi flavours, returning to Europe for the equally aromatic masterpiece of Ravel.

The final episode, Constellations, explores the spectral clusters of the cosmos, returning to Earth into the romantic embrace of Korngold.

SERIES SUBSCRIPTIONS NOW ON SALE – BOOK NOW and go in the draw to win a $200 WORLD clothing brand voucher (prize drawn over post-concert drinks April 7th).

Origins – 5/7 April
InterFusions – 5/7 July
Constellations – 18/20 October

ORIGINS

BEETHOVEN • TURNAGE • BALLARD • YUN • ZEMLINSKY

Origins opens with Beethoven’s mighty Ghost trio to celebrate his birth a quarter of a millennium ago. Then we celebrate the rebirth of NZTrio, introducing this new line-up with a tour through our cultural and musical backgrounds. Works by Mark Anthony Turnage (UK) and Isang Yun (Korea) envelop a brand new work by Sarah Ballard (NZ) deeply inspired by Indian culture and music. (How do these works represent us? Come along and find out!) To finish, our attention turns to the worrying global upsurges of separatism and hatred, so the last word comes from Austrian-American Alexander von Zemlinsky whose Jewish-Muslim upbringing inspires understanding and love.

Beethoven: Ghost

Turnage: A Fast Stomp

Ballard (NZ): Prema Lahari (new commission)

Yun: Piano Trio

Zemlinsky: Piano Trio

Duration: Approx. 90 mins plus interval

TICKETS $50 Adults / $25 Students / $135 Subscription

Booking fees apply

Sunday April 5th, 7:30pm* – BOOK NOW

Tuesday April 7th, 7pm – BOOK NOW

SOUNZ members choose 10% discount option

Q’s Loft Theatre – 305 Queen Street, Auckland 09 309 9771

*Note a later start time than our usual 5pm on Sundays. This is to accommodate any cross-over audience with CMNZ’s concert earlier that day at the Town Hall. If you are attending both concerts, keep hold of both tickets as we have a special thank you in store for you upon your arrival at Q.

Time

(Sunday) 7:30 pm UTC+12:00

Location

Loft at Q

305 Queen St Auckland 1011

Add to your Calendar GoogleCal

2apr7:30 pmCowra Festival of UnderstandingCANCELLED

15dec6:00 pmTectonic UprisingSunday Performance at AAG

Concert Details

NZTrio’s 2019 Tectonic series is all Empires and Superpowers – the fundamental forces that shape our land, our population, our society. Each concert charts a musical course from Captain Cook’s homeland in old England, to the sounds of Aotearoa prior to his arrival on these shores. We examine this European genre, piano trio music, as it has developed within Aotearoa’s unique culturally intertwined society, and compare with the result of development within a British environment.

In UPRISING, we hear parlour music from Bridge, and a rediscovered trio by Elgar – mannered distractions from the building of empires and the noise of war and industrialisation in the England of their time. Later the music of Charlotte Bray illuminates contemporary England while also looking back to the enduring words of Shakespeare – and New Zealand composer, Samuel Holloway, turns our gaze inward to the human landscape and the mechanisms of hearing. In the second half, the prescience and experimentation of US composer, Charles Ives meets the subversive rebellion of Shostakovich – two profoundly contrasting sides of an iron curtain that takes on new meaning and significance today.

Sunday December 15th, 6pm in Auckland Art Gallery’s beautiful North Atrium

Programme approx. 90 mins plus interval, followed by complimentary drinks and nibbles with the musicians:

Frank Bridge (UK): Hornpipe
Edward Elgar (UK): Lento assai – Allegro moderato
Samuel Holloway (NZ): Stapes
Frank Bridge (UK): Valse Russe
Charlotte Bray (UK): That Crazed Smile
Charles Ives (US): Trio
Dmitri Shostakovich (USSR): Piano Trio No.2 in e minor

Approx. 90 mins plus interval

Tickets $50 Adult / $40 AAG Members / $25 Students

Bookings via Eventfinda

Time

(Sunday) 6:00 pm UTC+12:00

Location

Auckland Art Gallery

Wellesley Street East, Auckland, 1010

Add to your Calendar GoogleCal

Programme notes

TECTONIC UPRISING

Frank Bridge (UK) Hornpipe
Edward Elgar (UK) Lento assai – Allegro moderato
Samuel Holloway (NZ) Stapes
Frank Bridge (UK) Valse Russe
Charlotte Bray (UK) That Crazed Smile
Charles Ives (USA) Trio
Dmitri Shostakovich (RUS) Piano Trio No.2 in e minor

Frank Bridge (UK; 1879 – 1941): 2 Miniatures for Piano Trio, Set 3

ii. Hornpipe
i. Valse Russe

More of Frank Bridge’s irresistible miniatures! His life falls into two periods: the composer of beautiful chamber music, much of it composed for himself to play on the viola (he was the violist of the fabulous Joachim quartet) or for friends of his at the Royal College of Music; and then the staunch pacifist and musical radical, Benjamin Britten’s beloved teacher, who also became a popular conductor at the Proms. What happened in between was the First World War. These lovely miniatures come from the first part, composed the year after he’d won first prize for piano trio in the famous Cobbett competition. Hornpipe opens the concert, and Valse Russe follows Samuel Holloway’s Stapes later in the programme.

Edward Elgar (UK; 1857 – 1934): Lento assai – Allegro moderato

Elgar wrote very little chamber music: massed string tone and the orchestra was more his style. The success of the Enigma variations in 1899 changed everything. This was a composer who was entirely self-taught – his only training came from his piano-tuner father and the rest from library books – who was expert enough at the piano and violin to be teaching when he was still in his teens. He was never able to afford study in Leipzig and yet did all the arranging and accompanying for the entire Worcester Glee Club, and when he was only 22 gave up his reliable full-time job as a solicitor’s clerk to become conductor of the band of the Worcester and County Lunatic Asylum. It was there that he learnt how to play almost every instrument there was. So we have the string quartet: the piano quintet: two pieces for violin, and a duet for trombone; and this! One of several attempts he made to write a piano trio, doomed like the others to incompletion. This one dates to 1920, just after the dismaying premiere of his cello concerto. It was completed by Elgar enthusiast Paul Adrian Rooke for the 150th birthday celebrations in 2007.

Samuel Holloway (NZ; b. 1981): Stapes

Stapes is the first piece in a series of three trios collectively entitled Middle Ear. The stapes (or stirrup) is the smallest in the chain of three bones that transmit vibrations from the eardrum to the internal ear in the process of transformation of external sound waves to a response within the listener. In this work, the players work both together and against each other, in individual and collective struggles for articulacy.

Samuel studied music and philosophy at the University of Auckland, and currently manages the contemporary art and design programmes at Unitec Institute of Technology. He is the Associate Director (Artistic) of the 2020 ISCM World New Music Days, was the 2013 Mozart Fellow at the University of Otago, 2016 Civitella Ranieri Fellow in Umbria, Italy, and finalist in the 2011 SOUNZ Contemporary Award for his work Sillage, a work that was selected for the 2014 ISCM World New Music Days in Poland.

Charlotte Bray (UK; b. 1982): That Crazed Smile

The second of three Shakespeare-inspired piano trios by Charlotte Bray, one of the UK’s most awarded and widely performed young composers. At the age of only 27, just after graduating, she was appointed apprentice Composer-in-Residence with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (one of the most famous new music groups in the world) and has made good on the promise, with commissions immediately flowing in from the big London orchestras and some of the best festivals in Europe, from chamber music for Aix-en-Provence and Cheltenham, to opera for Covent Garden and a concert-opener for the BBC Proms. This trio was commissioned by the Oberon Trio to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and evokes the fairies and star-crossed lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – as she puts it, a playful dream-world illuminated by occasional flashes of lightning.

~ Interval ~

Charles Ives (USA; 1874 – 1954): Trio

i.         Moderato
      ii.         TSIAJ (“This scherzo is a joke”). Presto
     iii.         Moderato con moto

“Music is life”

You understand Charles Ives better when you consider his father George. George Ives was the youngest bandmaster in the whole Civil War, with the finest band in the Union: returning to settle in a small town in Connecticut he turned it into the most musical town in the state, and he was clearly a force of nature like his son, innately inquisitive and enquiring, so fascinated by music – any music – that he taught his boys to sing in one key while he played in another. He built instruments to play in quarter-tones, took his cornet out into the middle of a lake to demonstrate the sound over water, and set two bands marching round a park with different tunes for the sheer joy of what would happen when they passed. When young Charles first banged with his fists upon the piano his father’s only remark was to suggest he learn the drums. And so we get the composer known as the great Yankee maverick, decades ahead of his time, whose music is at once incredibly sentimental and nostalgic, rooted in old American band tunes and church music, and in another sense so avant-garde and freewheeling that it can even seem challenging today.

He went his own way in life, too, choosing a career in life insurance purely as a way of funding whatever he wanted to do with his music. It worked rather too well. He made himself a fortune, composing whatever he wanted and supporting whoever he wanted (he funded a number of other American composers secretly), only to find that nobody wanted to listen to it. But other composers venerated him. His influence on American music has been incalculable and when Stravinsky was asked his definition of a musical masterpiece, he chose a piece not by Mozart or JS Bach, but Charles Ives.

This trio is the freewheeling Charles Ives, harking back to his student days at Yale – the best days of his life, when he was known as “Dasher” Ives and earned D+ for everything but music. It’s stuffed full of references to folk songs and glee club tunes, especially the scherzo, which includes everything from the folk tune Long, Long Ago to My Old Kentucky Home, fragments of Dixieland and much more besides. He described it himself: “The first movement recalled a rather short but serious talk by an old professor of Philosophy; the second, the games and antics by the students on a holiday afternoon; the last movement was partly a remembrance of a Sunday service on the campus”. You may recognize the church hymn Rock of Ages, which he played as an organist many times.

Dmitri Shostakovich (RUS; 1906 – 1975): Piano Trio No. 2 in e minor

i.         Andante
      ii.         Allegro con brio
     iii.         Largo
    iv.         Allegretto

In February 1944 Shostakovich’s greatest friend, Ivan Sollertinsky, died of a heart attack at the age of only 41. Brilliant musicologist, critic, linguist, and professor and administrator at Leningrad University, he was also artistic director of the Leningrad Philharmonic and was with them in Siberia, where the entire orchestra had been evacuated for safety during WWII. They had known each other since they were students: it was Sollertinsky who had opened the composer’s eyes to the glory of Mahler and had stood by him through thick and thin – from the glorious successes of his 20s through to the devastating fall from favour of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which having been championed as a “major achievement of Socialist construction” was suddenly being officially denounced for formalism. So ever since 1936 Shostakovich had had to fend off terrifying inquisitions: he had watched many of his closest friends and relatives disappear into prisons or exile, never to be heard of again; he kept a suitcase by the door just in case a phone call came to flee. And so when Sollertinsky died, just as the war was drawing to a close and everybody was looking forward to better times, Shostakovich was devastated. He wrote to his widow: “I cannot express in words all of the grief I felt when I received the news of the death of Ivan Ivanovich, my closest friend. I owe all my education to him.”

This trio is dedicated to his memory. It’s an elegy to Sollertinsky, particularly the second movement Largo which was also played for the funeral rites of Shostakovich himself: but it’s also a meditation on war, written as the Nazis were retreating from the eastern front and the horrors of the death camps of Majdanek and Treblinka were being exposed to the world. Shostakovich was particularly horrified by reports that SS guards had made their victims dance beside their own graves, hence the Jewish finale – he uses this tune again in his autobiographical string quartet no 8.

The cello opens in eerily high harmonics, an andante lamentation which leads into an energetic fugue on all three instruments. A sharply rhythmical, violent scherzo follows and then the grief-laden Largo, the emotional heart of the piece. Finally, the Jewish dance, unrolling like a shell-shocked danse macabre before it gives way at the end to memories of the beginning, a brief glimpse of the piano’s passacaglia from the slow movement and the muted anguish of stratospheric strings.

Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson

11dec7:00 pmTectonic UprisingMairangi Arts Centre, Auckland

Concert Details

NZTrio’s 2019 Tectonic series is all Empires and Superpowers – the fundamental forces that shape our land, our population, our society. Each concert charts a musical course from Captain Cook’s homeland in old England, to the sounds of Aotearoa prior to his arrival on these shores. We examine this European genre, piano trio music, as it has developed within Aotearoa’s unique culturally intertwined society, and compare with the result of development within a British environment.

In UPRISING, we hear parlour music from Bridge, and a rediscovered trio by Elgar – mannered distractions from the building of empires and the noise of war and industrialisation in the England of their time. Later the music of Charlotte Bray illuminates contemporary England while also looking back to the enduring words of Shakespeare – and New Zealand composer, Samuel Holloway, turns our gaze inward to the human landscape and the mechanisms of hearing. In the second half, the prescience and experimentation of US composer, Charles Ives meets the subversive rebellion of Shostakovich – two profoundly contrasting sides of an iron curtain that takes on new meaning and significance today.

Wednesday December 11th, 7pm at Mairangi Arts Centre, Auckland North Shore

Programme approx. 90 mins plus interval, followed by complimentary drinks and nibbles with the musicians:

Frank Bridge (UK): Hornpipe
Edward Elgar (UK): Lento assai – Allegro moderato
Samuel Holloway (NZ): Stapes
Frank Bridge (UK): Valse Russe
Charlotte Bray (UK): That Crazed Smile
Charles Ives (US): Trio
Dmitri Shostakovich (USSR): Piano Trio No.2 in e minor

Tickets $40 Adult / $30 MAC Members / $20 Students

Click here to book via Eventfinda

Time

(Wednesday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00

Location

Mairangi Arts Centre

20 Hastings Rd, Mairangi Bay, Auckland

Add to your Calendar GoogleCal

Programme notes

TECTONIC UPRISING

Frank Bridge (UK) Hornpipe
Edward Elgar (UK) Lento assai – Allegro moderato
Samuel Holloway (NZ) Stapes
Frank Bridge (UK) Valse Russe
Charlotte Bray (UK) That Crazed Smile
Charles Ives (USA) Trio
Dmitri Shostakovich (RUS) Piano Trio No.2 in e minor

Frank Bridge (UK; 1879 – 1941): 2 Miniatures for Piano Trio, Set 3

ii. Hornpipe
i. Valse Russe

More of Frank Bridge’s irresistible miniatures! His life falls into two periods: the composer of beautiful chamber music, much of it composed for himself to play on the viola (he was the violist of the fabulous Joachim quartet) or for friends of his at the Royal College of Music; and then the staunch pacifist and musical radical, Benjamin Britten’s beloved teacher, who also became a popular conductor at the Proms. What happened in between was the First World War. These lovely miniatures come from the first part, composed the year after he’d won first prize for piano trio in the famous Cobbett competition. Hornpipe opens the concert, and Valse Russe follows Samuel Holloway’s Stapes later in the programme.

Edward Elgar (UK; 1857 – 1934): Lento assai – Allegro moderato

Elgar wrote very little chamber music: massed string tone and the orchestra was more his style. The success of the Enigma variations in 1899 changed everything. This was a composer who was entirely self-taught – his only training came from his piano-tuner father and the rest from library books – who was expert enough at the piano and violin to be teaching when he was still in his teens. He was never able to afford study in Leipzig and yet did all the arranging and accompanying for the entire Worcester Glee Club, and when he was only 22 gave up his reliable full-time job as a solicitor’s clerk to become conductor of the band of the Worcester and County Lunatic Asylum. It was there that he learnt how to play almost every instrument there was. So we have the string quartet: the piano quintet: two pieces for violin, and a duet for trombone; and this! One of several attempts he made to write a piano trio, doomed like the others to incompletion. This one dates to 1920, just after the dismaying premiere of his cello concerto. It was completed by Elgar enthusiast Paul Adrian Rooke for the 150th birthday celebrations in 2007.

Samuel Holloway (NZ; b. 1981): Stapes

Stapes is the first piece in a series of three trios collectively entitled Middle Ear. The stapes (or stirrup) is the smallest in the chain of three bones that transmit vibrations from the eardrum to the internal ear in the process of transformation of external sound waves to a response within the listener. In this work, the players work both together and against each other, in individual and collective struggles for articulacy.

Samuel studied music and philosophy at the University of Auckland, and currently manages the contemporary art and design programmes at Unitec Institute of Technology. He is the Associate Director (Artistic) of the 2020 ISCM World New Music Days, was the 2013 Mozart Fellow at the University of Otago, 2016 Civitella Ranieri Fellow in Umbria, Italy, and finalist in the 2011 SOUNZ Contemporary Award for his work Sillage, a work that was selected for the 2014 ISCM World New Music Days in Poland.

Charlotte Bray (UK; b. 1982): That Crazed Smile

The second of three Shakespeare-inspired piano trios by Charlotte Bray, one of the UK’s most awarded and widely performed young composers. At the age of only 27, just after graduating, she was appointed apprentice Composer-in-Residence with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (one of the most famous new music groups in the world) and has made good on the promise, with commissions immediately flowing in from the big London orchestras and some of the best festivals in Europe, from chamber music for Aix-en-Provence and Cheltenham, to opera for Covent Garden and a concert-opener for the BBC Proms. This trio was commissioned by the Oberon Trio to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and evokes the fairies and star-crossed lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – as she puts it, a playful dream-world illuminated by occasional flashes of lightning.

~ Interval ~

Charles Ives (USA; 1874 – 1954): Trio

i.         Moderato
      ii.         TSIAJ (“This scherzo is a joke”). Presto
     iii.         Moderato con moto

“Music is life”

You understand Charles Ives better when you consider his father George. George Ives was the youngest bandmaster in the whole Civil War, with the finest band in the Union: returning to settle in a small town in Connecticut he turned it into the most musical town in the state, and he was clearly a force of nature like his son, innately inquisitive and enquiring, so fascinated by music – any music – that he taught his boys to sing in one key while he played in another. He built instruments to play in quarter-tones, took his cornet out into the middle of a lake to demonstrate the sound over water, and set two bands marching round a park with different tunes for the sheer joy of what would happen when they passed. When young Charles first banged with his fists upon the piano his father’s only remark was to suggest he learn the drums. And so we get the composer known as the great Yankee maverick, decades ahead of his time, whose music is at once incredibly sentimental and nostalgic, rooted in old American band tunes and church music, and in another sense so avant-garde and freewheeling that it can even seem challenging today.

He went his own way in life, too, choosing a career in life insurance purely as a way of funding whatever he wanted to do with his music. It worked rather too well. He made himself a fortune, composing whatever he wanted and supporting whoever he wanted (he funded a number of other American composers secretly), only to find that nobody wanted to listen to it. But other composers venerated him. His influence on American music has been incalculable and when Stravinsky was asked his definition of a musical masterpiece, he chose a piece not by Mozart or JS Bach, but Charles Ives.

This trio is the freewheeling Charles Ives, harking back to his student days at Yale – the best days of his life, when he was known as “Dasher” Ives and earned D+ for everything but music. It’s stuffed full of references to folk songs and glee club tunes, especially the scherzo, which includes everything from the folk tune Long, Long Ago to My Old Kentucky Home, fragments of Dixieland and much more besides. He described it himself: “The first movement recalled a rather short but serious talk by an old professor of Philosophy; the second, the games and antics by the students on a holiday afternoon; the last movement was partly a remembrance of a Sunday service on the campus”. You may recognize the church hymn Rock of Ages, which he played as an organist many times.

Dmitri Shostakovich (RUS; 1906 – 1975): Piano Trio No. 2 in e minor

i.         Andante
      ii.         Allegro con brio
     iii.         Largo
    iv.         Allegretto

In February 1944 Shostakovich’s greatest friend, Ivan Sollertinsky, died of a heart attack at the age of only 41. Brilliant musicologist, critic, linguist, and professor and administrator at Leningrad University, he was also artistic director of the Leningrad Philharmonic and was with them in Siberia, where the entire orchestra had been evacuated for safety during WWII. They had known each other since they were students: it was Sollertinsky who had opened the composer’s eyes to the glory of Mahler and had stood by him through thick and thin – from the glorious successes of his 20s through to the devastating fall from favour of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which having been championed as a “major achievement of Socialist construction” was suddenly being officially denounced for formalism. So ever since 1936 Shostakovich had had to fend off terrifying inquisitions: he had watched many of his closest friends and relatives disappear into prisons or exile, never to be heard of again; he kept a suitcase by the door just in case a phone call came to flee. And so when Sollertinsky died, just as the war was drawing to a close and everybody was looking forward to better times, Shostakovich was devastated. He wrote to his widow: “I cannot express in words all of the grief I felt when I received the news of the death of Ivan Ivanovich, my closest friend. I owe all my education to him.”

This trio is dedicated to his memory. It’s an elegy to Sollertinsky, particularly the second movement Largo which was also played for the funeral rites of Shostakovich himself: but it’s also a meditation on war, written as the Nazis were retreating from the eastern front and the horrors of the death camps of Majdanek and Treblinka were being exposed to the world. Shostakovich was particularly horrified by reports that SS guards had made their victims dance beside their own graves, hence the Jewish finale – he uses this tune again in his autobiographical string quartet no 8.

The cello opens in eerily high harmonics, an andante lamentation which leads into an energetic fugue on all three instruments. A sharply rhythmical, violent scherzo follows and then the grief-laden Largo, the emotional heart of the piece. Finally, the Jewish dance, unrolling like a shell-shocked danse macabre before it gives way at the end to memories of the beginning, a brief glimpse of the piano’s passacaglia from the slow movement and the muted anguish of stratospheric strings.

Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson

21oct7:00 pmNZTrio Winners Concert: ImpetusImpetus: Auckland

Concert Details

What would you choose to shine a spotlight on? This was our brief to tertiary level
composing students across Aotearoa New Zealand for this year’s 3rd biennial
NZTrio Composing Competition. They’ve blown us away with their thought-provoking musical renditions of what’s meaningful for them and why we should listen.

After dozens of entries and a few live workshopping sessions up and down the country,
we are proud to present to you the nine winning works performed
live in Auckland on Monday, October 21st.

Ewan Collins: Tinnitus of a City
Rakuto Kurano: Fantail in Tokyo
Nathaniel Otley: …dimension of loss
Kassandra Wang: Matakite for the Microbiome
Joshua Taylor: quirkdale
Robert Bryce: Caillte
Ming Shi: Villager’s Whisper
Ihlara McIndoe: (ir)rationality
Liam Pram: Auckland Housing

We hope you will join us in celebrating NZ’s extraordinary young talent!

Winners Concert
Auckland School of Music Theatre
Friday October 21st • 7pm, 6 Symonds Street, Auckland

No bookings required / General Admission

Special thanks to APRA AMCOS and the Universities of Canterbury, Waikato, Otago, Auckland, and Wellington for their support.

Time

(Monday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00

Location

Auckland School of Music

6 Symonds Street, Auckland

Add to your Calendar GoogleCal

Programme notes

Ewan Collins (NZ; b. 1999)
University of Auckland / 3rd year
Tinnitus of a City

Noise pollution is scarcely talked about, but it’s slowly contributing to the degradation of our hearing. The volume of sound it takes to cause permanent hearing damage is scarily close to the regular volume of a city. On top of that, our technology is also often used in ways that are unknowingly reducing our ability to hear. As our hearing gets fainter, the ringing in our ears simultaneously gets turned all the way up until even the momentary silences that life allows will be filled with the piercing tone of tinnitus. This is our collective degradation of the ears: the tinnitus of a city.

Rakuto Kurano (JPN; b. 2000)
University of Canterbury / 2nd year
Fantail in Tokyo

“Am I a Japanese composer or a New Zealand composer?”

This is a question I’ve started asking myself. I am a citizen of Japan, but a resident of New Zealand. Born in Japan, but I have spent most of my life in New Zealand. Fantail in Tokyo takes me on a journey exploring my identity as both a Japanese and New Zealand composer. The piece is composed using many idioms of Japanese pop music, whilst gaining inspiration from the New Zealand Fantail.

During the composition process of this piece, I came up with an answer to my initial question.
I am both a Japanese and New Zealand composer.

A Fantail wanders into the city of Tokyo.
A busy city that never goes to sleep.
Flying between the high-rise buildings,
the Fantail explores the city.
Will it call Tokyo its new home?

Nathaniel Otley (NZ; b. 1997)
University of Otago / 4th year
…dimension of loss

“…dimensions of loss” is a statement about one of the major ecological crises currently affecting the planet. The loss of global biodiversity, and in forests in particular, is starting to have noticeable and catastrophic effects on the wider environment across the planet. In particular, the mass loss of insect life due to climate change and human intervention (including pesticides and habitat destruction) is something that gets far too little attention. Especially when one considers the effect loss of insect life could have on the planet. Insects carry out essential processes in almost every ecosystem, providing pollination, recycling of nutrients, and food for other organisms and the mass extinction of insects is likely to prove catastrophic without a conservation intervention. Unfortunately, it tends to be easier to rally support for single larger animals than the cause of insects as a collective and as such little is being done currently to solve this important and pressing problem.

This issue is addressed in music by using small and delicate sounds, and a tactile approach to the sound of the violin, cello and piano. The material is developed at extremes of the instruments, in ways that are often not the usual method of playing; but that are exploring ways or aspects of playing and sound that are overlooked or taken for granted when the instruments are played normally. Themes and melodies often consist of quite small cells of pitch material but they are developed in such a way that the collective texture is often constant and evolving. The theme is therefore represented in bot literal and abstract ways. In a literal sense the music is paying attention to the smaller scale details and aspects of sound and the production of sound, scratches, rustling and quiet sound often being present. But more important is the abstract representation of the issue structurally. Insects prove an essential underlying basis to the natural environment, being the impetus for many ecological processes we take for granted. In the music, this is represented through underlying energy and the dynamism of the systems set in motion by the three instruments. As these systems lose their impetus, they become unstable and less regular, with tempo changes and unpredictable and disparate atmosphere changes happening with increasing and alarming frequency.

Kassandra Wang (NZ; b. 2000)
Victoria University of Wellington /2nd year
Matakite for the Microbiome

Matakite for the Microbiome highlights the urgency of increasingly pervasive antibiotic
resistance, threatening both human populations by rendering seemingly innocuous illnesses
uncurable, and transforming the global micro-biosystem in unforeseeable ways. This is a
crisis caused entirely by human action, and thus too can be mitigated by our actions, from
refusing to support overuse of antibiotics in large meat farms, to taking prescribed
medications correctly and avoiding unnecessary antibiotic soaps and cleaning products. The
increasing urgency and chaos in the piece reflect how as the clock ticks faster towards an age
where we are again helpless against even the mildest of infections, time is the essence.

Joshua Taylor (NZ; b. 1995)
University of Auckland / 4th year
quirkdale

[quirkdale] is an ongoing series of vignettes in progress for piano trio inspired by the quirks, mannerisms, personalities and neurodiversity of creative personalities. Evoking tangential musings, painterly spaces, millennial Bohemianism, gazes into liquid ambers, symbolic erotica and a relentless concern for colour, the work attempts to capture varying attributes and temperaments of creatives. Neurodiversity and its manifestations through creativity and the wider concern of the role of creatives and art is integral to many contemporary issues.

Robert Bryce (NZ; b. 1988)
University of Canterbury / 5th year Masters
Caillte

A people lost within another culture is the personal issue that inspired this work. Caillte is
the Gàidhlig (Scots Gaelic) and Gaeilge (Irish) word for lost. This is something I have
witnessed in the last year as I have personally started learning about my own ethnicity.
From doing this I came across my native tongue which is the living essence of my people.
My inheritance from the lands of Alba (Scotland)and Éire (Ireland). The gift from my
ancestors, both that make me an Albannach and Éireannach, as well as a Gael.

Sadly, this is diminishing, as our people from centuries of oppression and suppression have
turned their back on the very thing that makes them a people. A language that stretches
back for several millennia and has slowly been declining to the point our own children do
not know, understand or have access to the tongue of our people. A people that have been
resilient for thousands of years are finally losing the most important element of the culture
due to racism, ignorance and a lack of education around the subject.

As my journey continues to unfold there are many challenges that face me as I go. The
language is unfamiliar with new sounds, grammar and a way of thinking/being. I am
challenged with racist thinking and lazy rhetoric around the language. A stance that has
even been adopted by my own people. But I persist in my journey of self-discovery as I
stumble and fall. A journey of discovery that is echoed in the music. A journey I wish my
people would join me in. Breathe life into our language and allow it to give our people a
voice again. A beautiful voice that is being lost and will be if we do not choose to be it.

A poem that illustrates this issue from an unknown author:
An Ghaeilge

Is mise an Ghaeilge

Is mise do theanga

Is mise do chultúr

D’Úsáid na Filí mé

D’Úsáid na huaisle

D’Úsáid na daoine mé

is d’Úsáid na lenaí

Go bródúil a bhí siad

Agus mise faoi réim.

Ach tháinig an strainséir

Chuir sé faoi chois mé

Is rud ní ba mheasa

Nior mhaith le mo chlann mé

Anois táim lag

Anois táim tréith

Ach fós táim libh

Is beidh mé go beo.

Tóg suas mo cheann

Cuir áthas ar mo chroí

Labhraígí mé

Ó labhraígí mé!

The Irish Language

I am Irish

I am your language

I am your culture

The poets used me

The nobles used me

The people used me

and the children used me

Proud they were

And I flourished

But the stranger came

He suppressed me

Something worse than that was

my own people rejected me

Now I am weak

Now I am feeble

But still I am with you

and I will be forever.

Raise up my head

Put joy in my heart

Speak me

Oh speak me!

Ming Shi (CHN; b. 1988)
Victoria University of Wellington / 5th year
Villager’s Whisper

One of the main issues I feel in 2019 is the need to revitalise and centralise the place of the arts in society. A lot of emphasis has been placed on STEM subjects, but the arts are where people learn to express, to question, to communicate and to critique complacency in society. As a composer, I face this issue when seeking out performances with exceptional, lively performers who have a similar questioning attitude to the received history and culture of their ensemble. This is the truly and most direct source which drives me to compose the piece. NZTrio is a fantastic ensemble, and they have directly contributed to the revitalising of innovative chamber music in New Zealand, both honouring and questioning the legacy of piano trio repertoire. When I saw this opportunity, I told myself I have to write a piece and join in.

To sum up, my issue is to work with a top ensemble that have an innovative, critical
approach to their repertoire, and to use that energy as inspiration for a new work. I felt very
happy during this compositional process, and benefitted from the experience. This drives
me and inspired the ideas of this new composition.

Ihlara McIndoe (NZ; b. 1997)
University of Otago / 3rd year
(ir)rationality

Society’s expectation is that the law is fair, objective, and just. In reality this is far from true.
The law is biased in many ways. Biased against indigenous people, biased against minorities, biased against women, the list goes on. This work is inspired by the continuing issue of biased drafting and application of the law.

The law, particularly in the criminal sphere, rests on the concept of “the reasonable man”, a
perspective that developed through the analysis of white, well-educated men. Our laws are framed around an Anglosaxon tradition; a tradition that has spent the last 180 years breaking down bonds of whanau (family), disregarding tikanga (Maori custom), discouraging and at times banning te reo (the Maori language), and denying Tino rangatiratanga (Maori right to independence). A tradition that has led to a long judicial history of framing women as irrational and frivolous, where it is the State’s role to determine whether a woman is sufficiently “worth” enough to receive sympathy or assistance. A tradition that has resulted in legislation still in force today which grants the State not only control over women’s bodies, but also the right to make a judgement of a woman’s mind.

This work is inspired by the juxtaposing supposed intention versus the actual reality of law. The law is supposed to be fair and rational. However, for those who do not fit the hegemonic ideal of rationality, the New Zealand criminal justice system does not seem just at all.

Liam Pram (NZ; b. 1990)
University of Auckland / 2nd year
Auckland Housing

Retorts against the densification of many suburbs in Tāmaki Makaurau often seem to deal in aesthetics. That
damage will be done to some of the most “beautiful” suburbs, and protections need to be put in place for “Heritage” housing.

There is something disingenuous happening here. Suburban sprawl, the desire for individual homes, the
kiwi backyard, all spewing from an unbalanced sense of heritage. The prospect of government protections for
colonialist English heritage should make us all feel a healthy skepticism in Aotearoa.

This musical work germinates from encouraging some of the progress being made through the Auckland Unitary Plan, and other state and social initiatives creating opportunities for growth throughout the city, and
questioning of the values vocalised by those opposed, and its allegiance to a problematic sense of national
identity.

As a poetic work, I don’t believe this musical composition has any direct commentary on these ideas. It may simply offer itself as a fan of complexity, pluralism, and the aesthetic pleasures gained when opportunities are open to all kinds of density.

15oct7:00 pmTectonic ImpactBlenheim

Concert Details

Frank Bridge (UK) Saltarello

Martin Lodge (NZ) Nga Whetu Hou (new commission)

Frank Bridge (UK) Intermezzo

Ross Harris (NZ) Senryu

Rebecca Clarke (UK) Piano Trio

=

Alfred Schnittke (USSR) Trio

Daniel Schnyder (USA) Piano Trio

NZTrio’s 2019 TECTONIC series examines the fundamental forces that shape environments and communities, focussing in on Aotearoa New Zealand’s turbulent relationship with the United Kingdom, and the struggle between Cold War superpowers Russia and America.

In this episode, IMPACT, the first half compares and contrasts the very English sounds of Frank Bridge’s parlour music and UK’s shining star Rebecca Clarke, colliding them with NZTrio’s latest commission from Martin Lodge which responds to the evolving Māori-Pakeha relationship, and a time-twisting earlier commission from kiwi composing colossus, Ross Harris. The second half delivers a battle between Russia’s aching angst and America’s swing and swagger, with Schnittke in one corner and Schnyder in the other. This programme packs a punch.

Approx. 90 mins plus interval followed by complimentary drinks and nibbles.

Bookings via Ticketek here

Time

(Tuesday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00

Location

ASB Theatre Marlborough

ASB Theatre Marlborough, 2 Hutcheson Street, Blenheim

Add to your Calendar GoogleCal

Programme notes

Frank BRIDGE (UK; 1879 – 1941): 3 Miniatures for Piano Trio, Set 2

iii. Saltarello, c. 2’

Frank Bridge’s life falls into two periods: the composer of beautiful chamber music, much of it composed for himself to play on the viola (he was the violist of the fabulous Joachim Quartet) or for friends of his at the Royal College of Music; and later the staunch pacifist, musical radical, and beloved teacher to Benjamin Britten, who also became a popular conductor at the Proms. What happened in between was the First World War. These lovely miniatures – Saltarello and Intermezzo – come from the first part, composed the year after he’d won first prize for piano trio in the famous Cobbett competition.

(Intermezzo will follow the next piece on the programme).

Martin LODGE (NZ; 1954): Ngã Whetu Hou (new commission), c. 5’

Martin writes “The title Ngã Whetu Hou, New Stars, reflects how the annual reappearance of the Matariki (Pleiades) constellation may be taken to signal new beginnings. But as we gaze upwards and outwards beyond ourselves, sometimes new stars are discovered, as well as familiar ones being welcomed back. We are living in a time when it is becoming imperative for us all to find new ways of living if the familiar world is to endure. It is time to re-evaluate familiar things.

Musically, Nga Whetu Hou was created as a response to gestures on the pukaea (wooden trumpet) and putatara (conch trumpet) by my composer/performer colleague and friend Horomona Horo. Some key qualities signalled were vitality, challenge and optimism.”

Ngã Whetu Hou was commissioned by NZTrio in 2019. Support of the University of Waikato is gratefully acknowledged.

Frank BRIDGE (UK; 1879 – 1941): 3 Miniatures for Piano Trio, Set 2

ii. Intermezzo, c. 2’

Ross HARRIS (NZ; b. 1945): Senryu, c. 5’

泥棒を dorobō o
捕えてみれば toraete mireba
我が子なり wagako nari
Catching him / you see the robber / is your son

That’s senryu – named after its creator, the 18th century Edo period poet Senryū Karai – and similar to haiku in that it has no rhyme, and a set number of syllables running over three lines – but different in that where haiku is noble and atmospheric, usually about nature, senryu pokes fun at human foibles – as Ross puts it, “An inquiry into the nature of man.”

This is Ross’s first work for NZTrio, written during his tenure as Composer in Residence with the Auckland Philharmonia, not long after he left his teaching position at Victoria University in Wellington. He describes it with characteristic concision: “This music concerns the regular balanced proportions of section lengths associated with a poetic form. This strict formal outline is articulated freely and intuitively.”

Rebecca CLARKE (UK; 1886 – 1979): Piano Trio in E flat minor, c. 24’

i.         Moderato ma appassionato
ii.         Andante molto semplice
iii.         Allegro vigoroso

One of the first great viola soloists, one of the first female students at the Royal College of Music, and for a while the “only lady” in Henry Wood’s Queen’s Hall Orchestra, Rebecca Clarke was much too busy to write very much: she was kicked out of home by her father for complaining about all his extra-marital affairs, and thereafter supported herself by playing viola just as it was emerging into the limelight, touring the world with her all-female chamber ensembles, and making many early recordings for the BBC. She also made her name across Europe: Artur Rubinstein called her ‘the glorious Rebecca Clarke’. Her best known works date from this period, most famously her viola sonata which is one of the great three of 1919 – Clarke, Hindemith, Bloch (Ernest Bloch was a good friend, as was Maurice Ravel). The great American philanthropist Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge picked her up into her stable of patronage – the only woman there – and in fact she ended up emigrating to the USA, joining her brothers in New York City to escape the fighting during the second world war. But then, having been actually disowned by her father, she never managed to get a visa back home! No problem. Almost the first thing that happened to her, walking along one of the streets of Manhattan to get her bearings, was she ran into one of her pianist friends from the RCM, a long-lost love. They got married, both in their late 50s, encouraged each other in their work and lived happily ever after – a first marriage for both of them. Later she wrote a fascinating autobiography entitled I Had a Father Too (or the Mustard Spoon).

Her music is typical of that lush, novel, impressionistic 20th-century sound world. And this piano trio is one of the greats: three movements all sewn together by that insistent gesture on the piano that you hear at the beginning. The first movement, engaging as it is, is perfect classical sonata form. The slow movement is like a gentle violin ballad – she wrote dozens of songs – before it all winds up in a darker, defiant, energetic finale.

The first review said this:
How remarkable it is that our women composers are so much more virile in style than some of our young men. Miss Rebecca Clarke has a strong right arm (We speak figuratively, of course). She can lay down the foundation of a big chamber work like her piano trio heard last night, with all the emphasis of a Liszt, and carry on with the sturdiness of a Frank Bridge. Sturdy!

There’s a wonderful interview with her on the internet if you can find it, recorded for WQXR New York for her 90th birthday, 1976.

Alfred SCHNITTKE (RUS; 1934 – 1998): Trio, c. 24’

i. Moderato
ii. Adagio

“Holding up a defiant, even joyous, two fingers to the denizens of stylistic purity” – The Guardian

Schnittke came from a long line of linguists. Originally from Germany, his family had been one of those to follow Catherine the Great to Russia, speaking German fluently and living in that curious German Soviet community that Lenin created on the banks of the Volga. His father was a journalist and translator, and the defining moment in his life came when the family was posted to Vienna for two years when he was 12 – the world of The Third Man, in the immediate aftermath of the second world war. And it’s there that he fell in love with music, and found his vocation. Later writing: “I felt every moment there to be a link of the historical chain: all was multi-dimensional; the past represented a world of ever-present ghosts, and I was not a barbarian without any connections, but the conscious bearer of the task in my life.”

And Vienna repaid the compliment. Although he only began his musical training in Moscow, later becoming a professor there, Schnittke turned throughout his life to the Viennese composers Mozart, Schubert, Mahler, rejecting Tchaikovsky and the other romantic Russians. He used to talk of “that certain Mozart-Schubert sound that I’ve carried with me for decades” and it’s a sound that shines on much of his music, “never too blatant”, and always through that inordinately modern, individual, historical Schnittke prism. But what he loved most was the Second Viennese School, and specifically the composer Alban Berg, and in 1985 he was delighted to accept a commission from the Alban Berg society of Vienna, for a string trio for Berg’s centenary – the trio that would eventually become this trio for piano, somehow lighter than the original and more classical and refined.

It begins with something that could be straight out of a Schubert piano sonata, or a Mahler symphony – a figure which we’ll be hearing in every possible permutation through this first movement, starting and stopping, fast and slow, insistent and intimate, tonal and atonal in turn (this is thrilling), going through a wonderful period of Mahler cantilena, then something that almost sounds like minimalism, and ending in an exhausted four-part minuet. The second movement is like all that, but sadder. It’s not only Berg’s centenary, it’s the 50th anniversary of his totally precocious death, and this is where you can hear Schnittke’s choral training coming to the fore. Russian dirge-like chorales follow late-Romantic lyricism; long string lines and crystalline piano writing all leading to a furious moment of catharsis and then sublimating into thin air. This is where Arvo Pärt comes from! Schnittke did it first – so beautifully.

Daniel SCHNYDER (USA; b. 1961): Piano Trio, c. 23’

i.
ii.
iii. Scherzo
iv. Very fast; Tempo di funk”

Daniel Schnyder got the jazz bug off the radio when he was 12. Stan Getz inspired him to swap cello for saxophone: Gil Evans inspired him to form his own chamber ensemble, and start to compose: and within only a few years he was being commissioned by the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the finest orchestra in Switzerland. Add to that his middle eastern interest, his father was an archeologist and amateur musician who travelled there frequently on digs, and then his strangely reverse path to classical music studying flute and the music of the 14th and 15th centuries, and you get a musician who everybody agreed was a prodigy and yet completely failed to fit in.

All that changed when he was 30 and moved to New York. He fell in with bass trombonist David Taylor and the New York brass scene, just as the big jazz orchestras were giving some way to more intimate ensembles: he began incorporating the African and middle eastern rhythms he’d grown up with; and immediately began making his name not only as a horn player and jazz arranger but also as a classical composer, with four symphonies so far, his first residency at the Milwaukee Symphony, and his first Grammy nomination for his trio, Worlds Beyond.

This trio shows all his signature effects – swinging jazz, legato tunes, shifting harmonies, figured bass – all leading towards the fabulous last movement where this asymmetric rhythm comes and goes against backbeats and counterpoint – and then wraps up in a tease before you know it. One of the most endearing qualities of Schnyder’s music is that it never overstays its welcome. As he says: “I am a musical farmer, who is simply tilling the soil and people who are hungry, come and take something. Once in a while they even pay for it!”

Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson

13oct6:00 pmTectonic ImpactAuckland Art Gallery, North Atrium

Concert Details

NZTrio’s 2019 TECTONIC series examines the fundamental forces that shape environments and communities, focussing in on Aotearoa New Zealand’s turbulent relationship with the United Kingdom, and the struggle between Cold War superpowers Russia and America.

In this episode, IMPACT, the first half compares and contrasts the very English sounds of Frank Bridge’s parlour music and UK’s shining star Rebecca Clarke, colliding them with NZTrio’s latest commission from Martin Lodge which responds to the evolving Māori-Pakeha relationship, and a time-twisting earlier commission from kiwi composing colossus, Ross Harris. The second half delivers a battle between Russia’s aching angst and America’s swing and swagger, with Schnittke in one corner and Schnyder in the other. This programme packs a punch.

Sunday October 13th, 6pm in Auckland Art Gallery’s beautiful North Atrium.

Ticket include complimentary refreshments with the musicians following the performance.

Tectonic Impact programme:

Frank Bridge (UK) Saltarello
Martin Lodge (NZ) Nga Whetu Hou (new commission)
Frank Bridge (UK) Intermezzo
Ross Harris (NZ) Senryu
Rebecca Clarke (UK) Piano Trio
Alfred Schnittke (USSR) Trio
Daniel Schnyder (USA) Piano Trio

Approx. 90 mins plus interval

Tickets $50 Adult / $40 AAG Members / $25 Students

Book here via Eventfinda