december 2020
11dec8:00 pmConstellationsAuckland Town Hall, Concert Chamber
Concert Details
Join us for the third
Concert Details
Join us for the third of our 2020 Home Series concerts: Constellations, and the final NZTrio concert of the year. Bring on 2021!
Beethoven: Piano Trio No. 1
Saariaho: Light and Matter
Margetić: Lightbox
Korngold: Piano TrioAs the date of Beethoven’s 250th birthday approaches, we open this concert where it all began: his seminal Opus 1 No 1. Then our focus fans out to the Finnish-German-French influence in Kaija Saariaho’s spectral masterpiece Light and Matter. Staying in the brightest light, we experience the delightful return of the prizewinning Lightbox by New Zealander Karlo Margetić. The light then projects onto the silver screen in the Piano Trio by Erich Korngold, a work that bears all the hallmarks of his Austro-Hungarian upbringing, WW2-era immigration into America and film-music career.
Adults $50 / Subscribers and Groups 6+ $45 / Students $25
*If you attended Constellations at Mairangi Arts Centre on Dec 8 and wish to book at the special rate of $35 please email Jessica Duirs at manager@nztrio.com
Duration: Approx. 1.5 hours plus interval, followed by complimentary refreshments.
Click here for wheelchair accessibility and other special requirements.
Time
(Friday) 8:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber
301 Queen St Auckland, Auckland 1010 New Zealand
10dec7:00 pmConstellationsMairangi Arts Centre - Auckland
Concert Details
Join us on the North
Concert Details
Join us on the North Shore in the intimate gallery setting at Mairangi Arts Centre for the third and final concert in our 2020 Home Series: Constellations.
Beethoven: Piano Trio No. 1 (1st mvt)
Saariaho: Light and Matter
Margetić: Lightbox
Korngold: Piano Trio (1st mvt)As the date of Beethoven’s 250th birthday approaches, we open this concert where it all began: his seminal Opus 1 No 1. Then our focus fans out to the Finnish-German-French influence in Kaija Saariaho’s spectral masterpiece Light and Matter. Staying in the brightest light, we experience the delightful return of the prizewinning Lightbox by New Zealander Karlo Margetić. The light then projects onto the silver screen in the Piano Trio by Erich Korngold, a work that bears all the hallmarks of his Austro-Hungarian upbringing, WW2-era immigration into America and film-music career.
Adults $40 / Students $20
Duration: Approx. 1 hour no interval, followed by complimentary refreshments.
Full 2 hour version at the Auckland Town Hall, Concert Chamber Dec. 11, 8pm (special $35 ticket for those who attend both. Please email manager@nztrio.com for details).
Click here for wheelchair accessibility and other special requirements.
Time
(Thursday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Mairangi Arts Centre
20 Hastings Rd, Mairangi Bay, Auckland
8dec7:00 pmConstellationsGisborne
Concert Details
THIS
Concert Details
THIS EVENT HAS NOW SOLD OUT
Beethoven: Piano Trio No. 1
Saariaho: Light and Matter
Margetić: Lightbox
Korngold: Piano TrioAs the date of Beethoven’s 250th birthday approaches, we open this concert where it all began: his seminal Opus 1 No 1. Then our focus fans out to the Finnish-German-French influence in Kaija Saariaho’s spectral masterpiece Light and Matter. Staying in the brightest light, we experience the delightful return of the prizewinning Lightbox by New Zealander Karlo Margetić. The light then projects onto the silver screen in the Piano Trio by Erich Korngold, a work that bears all the hallmarks of his Austro-Hungarian upbringing, WW2-era immigration into America and film-music career.
Adults $25 / Students $15
Duration: Approx. 1.5 hours plus interval
Time
(Tuesday) 7:00 pm UtC+12:00
Location
House concert - Tiromoana Estate
41 Winifred Street, Okitu, Gisborne
november 2020
24nov8:00 pmTait Tuesdays: NZTrioOnline concert
Concert Details
NZTrio. Your place. Nov 24th. Thanks
Concert Details
NZTrio. Your place. Nov 24th.
Thanks to Tait Memorial Trust‘s new online concert venture, you can finally come to an NZTrio concert in your pyjamas! (not that you couldn’t before).
Tait Memorial Trust is a non-profit UK-based organisation created specifically to support the many Kiwi and Australian musicians affected so drastically this year by debilitating Covid-19 restrictions. We’re stoked to be able to expand our usual ‘reach’ and perform for our friends all across the globe.
Please tell all your friends around the world, then get into something comfortable, pour a glass of something delicious (NZ wine pairing?) and curl up for an intimate hour of beautiful ‘live’ music with Amalia Hall (violin), Ashley Brown (cello), and Somi Kim (piano):
TUESDAY, 24th NOVEMBER
Tickets from £8 / $15 NZD
BOOK HERE7pm UK GMT | 9pm AEDT | 8pm NZDT | 8pm EST | 8pm PDT
Tickets can be purchased, and concert viewed for 6 months from broadcast
80% of proceeds go to artists / 20% to Tait Emergency Fund
Become a ‘Friend of Tait” here and receive ticket discountsProgramme Info:
Alexander von Zemlinksy: Piano Trio Op. 3 (1st mvt)
Claire Cowan: Subtle Dances
Edvard Grieg: Andante con moto
Matthew Hindson: Rush
Approximately 45 mins
21nov5:00 pmOriginsNathan Homestead
Concert Details
Following recent Covid-19 interruptions, this
Concert Details
Following recent Covid-19 interruptions, this concert has been postponed until November 21st.
If you have already purchased tickets, you will receive a notice directly from Eventfinda where you can either choose to transfer your tickets to the new date, or opt for a refund.
The concert will only go ahead under Alert Level 1 and will be refunded if cancellation is necessary at that time.
ORIGINS
Beethoven: Ghost
Turnage: A Fast Stomp
Ballard (NZ): Prema Lahari *new commission
Yun: Piano Trio
Zemlinsky: Piano TrioOrigins opens with Beethoven’s mighty Ghost trio to celebrate his birth a quarter of a millennium ago before embarking on a tour through the varied heritages of NZTrio. 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. 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.
Saturday, 21st November – 5pm
Nathan Homestead – 70 Hill Rd., Manurewa – Auckland
Tickets $35 Adult / $20 Student
Duration: Approx. 1.5 hours plus interval
Complimentary refreshments with the musicians following the performance.
Time
(Saturday) 5:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Nathan Homestead
70 Hill Road, Manurewa, Auckland
Ludwig van Beethoven (GER; 1770 – 1827): Piano Trio No. 5 in D Major “Ghost”, Op. 70, No. 1, c. 22’
Allegro vivace e con brio
Largo assai ed espressivo
PrestoIt 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’
Allegro ma non troppo
Andante con molto espressione
AllegroThis 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
19nov7:00 pmOriginsCity Gallery Wellington
Concert Details
Beethoven: Ghost Turnage: A Fast Stomp Ballard
Concert Details
Beethoven: Ghost
Turnage: A Fast Stomp
Ballard (NZ): Prema Lahari (new commission)
Yun: Piano Trio
Zemlinsky: Piano TrioOrigins opens with Beethoven’s mighty Ghost trio to celebrate his birth a quarter of a millennium ago before embarking on a tour through the varied heritages of NZTrio. 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. 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.
Thursday, 19th November – 7pm
Tickets $40 Adults/$20 Students
Duration: Approx. 1.5 hours plus interval
Tickets include complimentary refreshments following the performance.
Time
(Thursday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
City Gallery Wellington
101 Wakefield St, Wellington
Ludwig van Beethoven (GER; 1770 – 1827): Piano Trio No. 5 in D Major “Ghost”, Op. 70, No. 1, c. 22’
Allegro vivace e con brio
Largo assai ed espressivo
PrestoIt 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’
Allegro ma non troppo
Andante con molto espressione
AllegroThis 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
october 2020
25oct5:30 pmInterFusionsHawkes Bay Festival
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful and
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful and foreboding C minor trio, an impressive affidavit to his masterful talents. Then we teleport far from Europe into works that are steeped in the diverse cultural backgrounds of their composers. Works by Greek-Canadian Christos Hatzis and Sri Lanka-Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne embrace a brand new work by New Zealander Salina Fisher. Her piece draws inspiration from the Japanese art of “Kintsugi”, where broken ceramic pieces are carefully reassembled, enhancing their inherent strength and beauty. We finish with Ravel’s famous Trio, bearing witness to the clear infusion of his French, Spanish, Basque and Roman Catholic influences.
Beethoven: Piano Trio in C minor, Op 1, No 3
Christos Hatzis: Old Photographs
Salina Fisher: Kintsugi (new commission)
Dinuk Wijeratne: Love Triangle
Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor
Duration approx. 1.5 hours plus interval
Time
(Sunday) 5:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Blyth Performing Arts Centre (Iona College)
42 Lucknow Road, Havelock North 4130, New Zealand
Ludwig van Beethoven (GER; 1770-1827): Piano Trio No. 3 in c minor. Op.1 no 3 (1794), c. 28’
- Allegro con brio
- Andante cantabile con variazione
- Menuetto quasi Allegro
- Finale. Prestissimo
“Though I had some instruction from Haydn, I never learned anything from him.”
So Beethoven claimed!
He was 24 years old when he decided he was finally ready to unleash his opus 1 onto the world. Three piano trios which were by no means the first things he had written, but which he was finally happy enough with to announce himself not just as a pianist, but as a composer, ready to astonish the world.
He had been in Vienna for two years then, having just missed Mozart but armed with a letter of introduction to Haydn, who had been teaching him counterpoint. Haydn found Beethoven bewildering. He was so wayward, refused to do anything by the book: his other teachers had the same complaint. Albrechtsberger remarked “He will never do anything in a proper decent style”. As for Beethoven, he found Haydn hopelessly old fashioned, a creature of the court, a composer of a different century. But he was still Joseph Haydn, the greatest composer in Vienna. So you can imagine Beethoven’s hurt when it came to the concert. Haydn was there, of course, and when everybody rushed for his opinion “he said many pretty things about them”, apparently, in the words of someone who was there: but he also advised Beethoven to withdraw this one, the third and last, from publication. But this was the best! Beethoven was outraged. He even wondered if Haydn was being malicious in saying so – if in fact he was jealous. It soured their relations for a while.
In fact, Haydn simply feared that the public would not like it. It was so newfangled, so audacious, which is the astonishing thing about this very first opus. All those genius quirks that we associate with Beethoven are there already. There’s that brow-furrowed opening before the sun breaks out, contrasting emotional and dynamic extremes – pushing the instruments to their limits and sonata form to its limits, as well. He develops that first movement way beyond what Haydn would have considered polite. Variations follow, sweetly introduced by the piano, brilliantly exploiting the textures of the instruments: fancy one whole variation where the strings play nothing but pizzicato. And the totally virtuosic piano writing, and that snappy wrap-up, and those divinely lyrical tunes. Then a minuet that’s suddenly not a minuet. Those accents! You can’t dance to that. And it all ends in a stormy finale that makes countless unnerving turns before dying in a whisper – no wonder Haydn was alarmed. He needn’t have been: all three trios were instantly taken up by amateurs and professionals alike. Beethoven was on his way.
Christos Hatzis (GRC/CAN; b. 1953): Constantinople: Old Photographs (2000), c. 5’
“Staggeringly beautiful … one of the most talked about compositions of the decade… possibly the most talked about classical composition in Toronto’s history”… the composer, Christos Hatzis, was born in Greece but settled in Canada as a professor at the University of Toronto, and has won many awards for music which has its roots in his Byzantine heritage but casts widely among traditions that range from the Canadian Inuit to 20th century modernism, jazz, tango…. all of which you’ll hear in here. It’s the seventh and penultimate movement of a multi-media work for middle eastern singer, electronics and piano trio that took the world by storm – Constantinople.
Salina Fisher (NZ; b. 1993): Kintsugi (2020 new commission), c. 5’
Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. All of the broken pieces are carefully joined back together with gold-dusted urushi (lacquer). Rather than hiding the damage, kintsugi celebrates all the cracks or ‘scars’ for the unique history that they represent. The object is more beautiful for having been broken.
The composer writes: “I am personally drawn to kintsugi as a metaphor for embracing ‘brokenness’ and imperfection as a source of strength. This piece for piano trio is my expression and exploration of kintsugi, and involves musical fragmentation, fragility, mending, and finding beauty in the cracks. While writing this piece, I was very fortunate to meet Wellington-based Japanese ceramicist and kintsugi practitioner Kumiko Jacolin. I am grateful to Kumiko for her work and our discussions on Japanese philosophy in ceramics that have been influential in my creative process.”
Since recently graduating with a Master of Music in Composition from Manhattan School of Music, New York, Salina has been appointed Composer-in-Residence at New Zealand School of Music – Te Kōkī, Victoria University of Wellington, 2019-2020.
Dinuk Wijeratne (LKA/CAN; b. 1978): Love Triangle (2013), c. 16’
Classic genre-bending deliciousness from a composer who is very much a product of cross cultures himself. Born in Sri Lanka, growing up in Dubai, trained in England and the USA and now based in Toronto, Dinuk Wijeratne made his debut at Carnegie Hall with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and has performed all over the world as a conductor-pianist-composer, bewitching audiences with his particular brand of fusion and equally at home in collaborations with symphony orchestras and string quartets, tabla players and DJs, in places as diverse as the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Berlin Philharmonie. It’s a style that fuses funky jazz riffs with Indian tabla-like dance rhythms, tonal clusters, extended instrumental techniques, native North American and Middle Eastern influences, all bristling with the energy of a coiled spring … and it keeps winning awards, including a Juno award and a Nova Scotia Masterworks nomination for this very trio.
The composer says about this piece: “This music evolved rather rhapsodically from two distinctive features: the Middle Eastern-inspired melody heard in the strings at the outset, and the underlying rhythmic pattern inspired by a seven-beat Indian Classical ‘time cycle’. It also attempts to integrate a Western Classical sense of structure with three very improvisatory cadenzas from each instrument – the musicians and I are aiming for an effect akin to that glorious ‘out-of-time’-ness that occurs when an Arabic Oud solos over the unyielding fixed groove of the band.”
Maurice Ravel (FRA; 1875 – 1937): Piano Trio in A minor (1914), c. 26’
- Modéré
- Pantoum (Assez vif)
- Passacaille (Très large)
- Final (Animé)
“They say I’m dry at heart. That’s wrong. I am Basque! Basques feel things violently but they say little about it and only to a few.”
This mysterious, elusive, passionate, trio is the work that Ravel was writing when Europe plunged into war. August 1914: he had in fact been working on it for some time – six years, in fact, with his usual fastidiousness – and in earnest since March, taking it with him to St Jean de Luz in Basque country and telling his teacher, Gédalge, “I’ve written my trio. Now all I need are the themes.” What happened instead was the German invasion of France, which gave him all the impetus he needed. He rushed to finish it, “working on the Trio with the sureness and lucidity of a madman”, and immediately tried to enlist as a bomber in the French Air Force. He was rejected: his age (39), and something minor to do with his heart. But he continued applying, went through his training, until finally he was accepted as a truck driver into the 13th Artillery Regiment, driving munitions at night right on the front, under constant German bombardment, until the end of the war. Corresponding with Vaughan Williams throughout this period, he writes in June 1915: “It seems years since I left Paris: I have had moving, painful, and dangerous enough times to find it astonishing to come out of here still alive.”
One fancies that you hear some of the threat facing Europe – and Ravel personally – in the largely dark, elusive colours of this trio. But for him it was also a celebration of life, a tribute to his Basque heritage of which he was tremendously proud: his mother was Basque, and her own great love of the Basque language and folk songs had a tremendous influence on his life and music. You can hear the rhythm of the zortziko, a very distinctive Basque folk dance, in the first movement – rhythm is key to this whole work, the second movement Pantoum being based on a traditional Malaysian verse form in which the second and fourth lines of a stanza become the first and third lines of the next. The third movement is a passacaglia on the piano’s opening eight-bar theme in the bass: and the final animé, constantly alternating between time signatures over magical harmonics and trills drives towards a brilliant coda. And that, of course, is only part of Ravel’s genius. The inexorable weaving together of melodies and harmony: the shimmering atosmphere; the classically perfect form. At first, it attracted little notice – France was in chaos – but that didn’t last for long. Jean Marnold writes, on its publication in November 1915, “There is little in the musical repertoire that one can compare it with… No matter whether in writing technique, harmony, polyphony, rhythm or inspiration, everything is new, personal, totally original, and simple – of the simplicity which we are born with, which is our secret, and which constitutes the perfection of our masterworks.”
Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson
18oct5:00 pmInterFusionsAuckland Town Hall - Concert Chamber
Concert Details
Join us for the second
Concert Details
Join us for the second in our 2020 Home Series: InterFusions
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful and foreboding C minor trio, an impressive affidavit to his masterful talents. Then we teleport far from Europe into works that are steeped in the diverse cultural backgrounds of their composers. Works by Greek-Canadian Christos Hatzis and Sri Lanka-Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne embrace a brand new work by New Zealander Salina Fisher. Her piece draws inspiration from the Japanese art of “Kintsugi”, where broken ceramic pieces are carefully reassembled, enhancing their inherent strength and beauty. We finish with Ravel’s famous Trio, bearing witness to the clear infusion of his French, Spanish, Basque and Roman Catholic influences.
Beethoven: Piano Trio in C minor, Op 1, No 3
Christos Hatzis: Old Photographs
Salina Fisher: Kintsugi (new commission)
Dinuk Wijeratne: Love Triangle
Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor
Duration approx. 1.5 hours plus interval followed by complimentary refreshments in the bar.
Time
(Sunday) 5:00 pm
Location
Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber
301 Queen St Auckland, Auckland 1010 New Zealand
Ludwig van Beethoven (GER; 1770-1827): Piano Trio No. 3 in c minor. Op.1 no 3 (1794), c. 28’
- Allegro con brio
- Andante cantabile con variazione
- Menuetto quasi Allegro
- Finale. Prestissimo
“Though I had some instruction from Haydn, I never learned anything from him.”
So Beethoven claimed!
He was 24 years old when he decided he was finally ready to unleash his opus 1 onto the world. Three piano trios which were by no means the first things he had written, but which he was finally happy enough with to announce himself not just as a pianist, but as a composer, ready to astonish the world.
He had been in Vienna for two years then, having just missed Mozart but armed with a letter of introduction to Haydn, who had been teaching him counterpoint. Haydn found Beethoven bewildering. He was so wayward, refused to do anything by the book: his other teachers had the same complaint. Albrechtsberger remarked “He will never do anything in a proper decent style”. As for Beethoven, he found Haydn hopelessly old fashioned, a creature of the court, a composer of a different century. But he was still Joseph Haydn, the greatest composer in Vienna. So you can imagine Beethoven’s hurt when it came to the concert. Haydn was there, of course, and when everybody rushed for his opinion “he said many pretty things about them”, apparently, in the words of someone who was there: but he also advised Beethoven to withdraw this one, the third and last, from publication. But this was the best! Beethoven was outraged. He even wondered if Haydn was being malicious in saying so – if in fact he was jealous. It soured their relations for a while.
In fact, Haydn simply feared that the public would not like it. It was so newfangled, so audacious, which is the astonishing thing about this very first opus. All those genius quirks that we associate with Beethoven are there already. There’s that brow-furrowed opening before the sun breaks out, contrasting emotional and dynamic extremes – pushing the instruments to their limits and sonata form to its limits, as well. He develops that first movement way beyond what Haydn would have considered polite. Variations follow, sweetly introduced by the piano, brilliantly exploiting the textures of the instruments: fancy one whole variation where the strings play nothing but pizzicato. And the totally virtuosic piano writing, and that snappy wrap-up, and those divinely lyrical tunes. Then a minuet that’s suddenly not a minuet. Those accents! You can’t dance to that. And it all ends in a stormy finale that makes countless unnerving turns before dying in a whisper – no wonder Haydn was alarmed. He needn’t have been: all three trios were instantly taken up by amateurs and professionals alike. Beethoven was on his way.
Christos Hatzis (GRC/CAN; b. 1953): Constantinople: Old Photographs (2000), c. 5’
“Staggeringly beautiful … one of the most talked about compositions of the decade… possibly the most talked about classical composition in Toronto’s history”… the composer, Christos Hatzis, was born in Greece but settled in Canada as a professor at the University of Toronto, and has won many awards for music which has its roots in his Byzantine heritage but casts widely among traditions that range from the Canadian Inuit to 20th century modernism, jazz, tango…. all of which you’ll hear in here. It’s the seventh and penultimate movement of a multi-media work for middle eastern singer, electronics and piano trio that took the world by storm – Constantinople.
Salina Fisher (NZ; b. 1993): Kintsugi (2020 new commission), c. 5’
Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. All of the broken pieces are carefully joined back together with gold-dusted urushi (lacquer). Rather than hiding the damage, kintsugi celebrates all the cracks or ‘scars’ for the unique history that they represent. The object is more beautiful for having been broken.
The composer writes: “I am personally drawn to kintsugi as a metaphor for embracing ‘brokenness’ and imperfection as a source of strength. This piece for piano trio is my expression and exploration of kintsugi, and involves musical fragmentation, fragility, mending, and finding beauty in the cracks. While writing this piece, I was very fortunate to meet Wellington-based Japanese ceramicist and kintsugi practitioner Kumiko Jacolin. I am grateful to Kumiko for her work and our discussions on Japanese philosophy in ceramics that have been influential in my creative process.”
Since recently graduating with a Master of Music in Composition from Manhattan School of Music, New York, Salina has been appointed Composer-in-Residence at New Zealand School of Music – Te Kōkī, Victoria University of Wellington, 2019-2020.
Dinuk Wijeratne (LKA/CAN; b. 1978): Love Triangle (2013), c. 16’
Classic genre-bending deliciousness from a composer who is very much a product of cross cultures himself. Born in Sri Lanka, growing up in Dubai, trained in England and the USA and now based in Toronto, Dinuk Wijeratne made his debut at Carnegie Hall with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and has performed all over the world as a conductor-pianist-composer, bewitching audiences with his particular brand of fusion and equally at home in collaborations with symphony orchestras and string quartets, tabla players and DJs, in places as diverse as the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Berlin Philharmonie. It’s a style that fuses funky jazz riffs with Indian tabla-like dance rhythms, tonal clusters, extended instrumental techniques, native North American and Middle Eastern influences, all bristling with the energy of a coiled spring … and it keeps winning awards, including a Juno award and a Nova Scotia Masterworks nomination for this very trio.
The composer says about this piece: “This music evolved rather rhapsodically from two distinctive features: the Middle Eastern-inspired melody heard in the strings at the outset, and the underlying rhythmic pattern inspired by a seven-beat Indian Classical ‘time cycle’. It also attempts to integrate a Western Classical sense of structure with three very improvisatory cadenzas from each instrument – the musicians and I are aiming for an effect akin to that glorious ‘out-of-time’-ness that occurs when an Arabic Oud solos over the unyielding fixed groove of the band.”
Maurice Ravel (FRA; 1875 – 1937): Piano Trio in A minor (1914), c. 26’
- Modéré
- Pantoum (Assez vif)
- Passacaille (Très large)
- Final (Animé)
“They say I’m dry at heart. That’s wrong. I am Basque! Basques feel things violently but they say little about it and only to a few.”
This mysterious, elusive, passionate, trio is the work that Ravel was writing when Europe plunged into war. August 1914: he had in fact been working on it for some time – six years, in fact, with his usual fastidiousness – and in earnest since March, taking it with him to St Jean de Luz in Basque country and telling his teacher, Gédalge, “I’ve written my trio. Now all I need are the themes.” What happened instead was the German invasion of France, which gave him all the impetus he needed. He rushed to finish it, “working on the Trio with the sureness and lucidity of a madman”, and immediately tried to enlist as a bomber in the French Air Force. He was rejected: his age (39), and something minor to do with his heart. But he continued applying, went through his training, until finally he was accepted as a truck driver into the 13th Artillery Regiment, driving munitions at night right on the front, under constant German bombardment, until the end of the war. Corresponding with Vaughan Williams throughout this period, he writes in June 1915: “It seems years since I left Paris: I have had moving, painful, and dangerous enough times to find it astonishing to come out of here still alive.”
One fancies that you hear some of the threat facing Europe – and Ravel personally – in the largely dark, elusive colours of this trio. But for him it was also a celebration of life, a tribute to his Basque heritage of which he was tremendously proud: his mother was Basque, and her own great love of the Basque language and folk songs had a tremendous influence on his life and music. You can hear the rhythm of the zortziko, a very distinctive Basque folk dance, in the first movement – rhythm is key to this whole work, the second movement Pantoum being based on a traditional Malaysian verse form in which the second and fourth lines of a stanza become the first and third lines of the next. The third movement is a passacaglia on the piano’s opening eight-bar theme in the bass: and the final animé, constantly alternating between time signatures over magical harmonics and trills drives towards a brilliant coda. And that, of course, is only part of Ravel’s genius. The inexorable weaving together of melodies and harmony: the shimmering atosmphere; the classically perfect form. At first, it attracted little notice – France was in chaos – but that didn’t last for long. Jean Marnold writes, on its publication in November 1915, “There is little in the musical repertoire that one can compare it with… No matter whether in writing technique, harmony, polyphony, rhythm or inspiration, everything is new, personal, totally original, and simple – of the simplicity which we are born with, which is our secret, and which constitutes the perfection of our masterworks.”
Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson
11oct4:00 pmInterfusionsCMNZ Tour - Warkworth
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful and foreboding C minor trio, an impressive affidavit to his masterful talents. Then we teleport far from Europe into works that are steeped in the diverse cultural backgrounds of their composers. Works by Greek-Canadian Christos Hatzis and Sri Lanka-Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne embrace a brand new work by New Zealander Salina Fisher. Her piece draws inspiration from the Japanese art of “Kintsugi”, where broken ceramic pieces are carefully reassembled, enhancing their inherent strength and beauty. We finish with Ravel’s famous Trio, bearing witness to the clear infusion of his French, Spanish, Basque and Roman Catholic influences.
Beethoven: Piano Trio in C minor, Op 1, No 3
Christos Hatzis: Old Photographs
Salina Fisher: Kintsugi (new commission)
Dinuk Wijeratne: Love Triangle
Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor
DATES & LOCATIONS
Wellington: Sunday, September 27, 3pm – St. Andrew’s on the Terrace – TICKETS
Rotorua: Thursday, October 1, 7:30pm – The Harvest Centre (door sales only)
Waikanae: Sunday, October 4, 2:30pm – Waikanae Memorial Hall (door sales only)
Christchurch: Wednesday, October 7, 7:30pm – The Piano – TICKETS
Lower Hutt: Thursday, October 8, 7:30pm – St. Marks Church, Woburn Road (door sales only)
Whangarei: Saturday, October 10, 7:00pm – Old Library Building Arts Centre (door sales only)
Warkworth: Sunday, October 11, 4:00pm – Warkworth Town Hall – TICKETS
Presented by CMNZ in association with Aroha Music Society, Chamber Music Wanganui, Expressions Whirinaki, Motueka Music Group, Rotorua Music Federation, Waikanae Music Society Inc., Wellington Chamber Music Trust, Whangarei Music Society.
Duration approx. 2 hours, including interval
Ticket prices may vary, please contact venue
Time
(Sunday) 4:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Warkworth Town Hall
2 Alnwick Street, Warkworth 0910
Ludwig van Beethoven (GER; 1770-1827): Piano Trio No. 3 in c minor. Op.1 no 3 (1794), c. 28’
- Allegro con brio
- Andante cantabile con variazione
- Menuetto quasi Allegro
- Finale. Prestissimo
“Though I had some instruction from Haydn, I never learned anything from him.”
So Beethoven claimed!
He was 24 years old when he decided he was finally ready to unleash his opus 1 onto the world. Three piano trios which were by no means the first things he had written, but which he was finally happy enough with to announce himself not just as a pianist, but as a composer, ready to astonish the world.
He had been in Vienna for two years then, having just missed Mozart but armed with a letter of introduction to Haydn, who had been teaching him counterpoint. Haydn found Beethoven bewildering. He was so wayward, refused to do anything by the book: his other teachers had the same complaint. Albrechtsberger remarked “He will never do anything in a proper decent style”. As for Beethoven, he found Haydn hopelessly old fashioned, a creature of the court, a composer of a different century. But he was still Joseph Haydn, the greatest composer in Vienna. So you can imagine Beethoven’s hurt when it came to the concert. Haydn was there, of course, and when everybody rushed for his opinion “he said many pretty things about them”, apparently, in the words of someone who was there: but he also advised Beethoven to withdraw this one, the third and last, from publication. But this was the best! Beethoven was outraged. He even wondered if Haydn was being malicious in saying so – if in fact he was jealous. It soured their relations for a while.
In fact, Haydn simply feared that the public would not like it. It was so newfangled, so audacious, which is the astonishing thing about this very first opus. All those genius quirks that we associate with Beethoven are there already. There’s that brow-furrowed opening before the sun breaks out, contrasting emotional and dynamic extremes – pushing the instruments to their limits and sonata form to its limits, as well. He develops that first movement way beyond what Haydn would have considered polite. Variations follow, sweetly introduced by the piano, brilliantly exploiting the textures of the instruments: fancy one whole variation where the strings play nothing but pizzicato. And the totally virtuosic piano writing, and that snappy wrap-up, and those divinely lyrical tunes. Then a minuet that’s suddenly not a minuet. Those accents! You can’t dance to that. And it all ends in a stormy finale that makes countless unnerving turns before dying in a whisper – no wonder Haydn was alarmed. He needn’t have been: all three trios were instantly taken up by amateurs and professionals alike. Beethoven was on his way.
Christos Hatzis (GRC/CAN; b. 1953): Constantinople: Old Photographs (2000), c. 5’
“Staggeringly beautiful … one of the most talked about compositions of the decade… possibly the most talked about classical composition in Toronto’s history”… the composer, Christos Hatzis, was born in Greece but settled in Canada as a professor at the University of Toronto, and has won many awards for music which has its roots in his Byzantine heritage but casts widely among traditions that range from the Canadian Inuit to 20th century modernism, jazz, tango…. all of which you’ll hear in here. It’s the seventh and penultimate movement of a multi-media work for middle eastern singer, electronics and piano trio that took the world by storm – Constantinople.
Salina Fisher (NZ; b. 1993): Kintsugi (2020 new commission), c. 5’
Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. All of the broken pieces are carefully joined back together with gold-dusted urushi (lacquer). Rather than hiding the damage, kintsugi celebrates all the cracks or ‘scars’ for the unique history that they represent. The object is more beautiful for having been broken.
The composer writes: “I am personally drawn to kintsugi as a metaphor for embracing ‘brokenness’ and imperfection as a source of strength. This piece for piano trio is my expression and exploration of kintsugi, and involves musical fragmentation, fragility, mending, and finding beauty in the cracks. While writing this piece, I was very fortunate to meet Wellington-based Japanese ceramicist and kintsugi practitioner Kumiko Jacolin. I am grateful to Kumiko for her work and our discussions on Japanese philosophy in ceramics that have been influential in my creative process.”
Since recently graduating with a Master of Music in Composition from Manhattan School of Music, New York, Salina has been appointed Composer-in-Residence at New Zealand School of Music – Te Kōkī, Victoria University of Wellington, 2019-2020.
Dinuk Wijeratne (LKA/CAN; b. 1978): Love Triangle (2013), c. 16’
Classic genre-bending deliciousness from a composer who is very much a product of cross cultures himself. Born in Sri Lanka, growing up in Dubai, trained in England and the USA and now based in Toronto, Dinuk Wijeratne made his debut at Carnegie Hall with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and has performed all over the world as a conductor-pianist-composer, bewitching audiences with his particular brand of fusion and equally at home in collaborations with symphony orchestras and string quartets, tabla players and DJs, in places as diverse as the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Berlin Philharmonie. It’s a style that fuses funky jazz riffs with Indian tabla-like dance rhythms, tonal clusters, extended instrumental techniques, native North American and Middle Eastern influences, all bristling with the energy of a coiled spring … and it keeps winning awards, including a Juno award and a Nova Scotia Masterworks nomination for this very trio.
The composer says about this piece: “This music evolved rather rhapsodically from two distinctive features: the Middle Eastern-inspired melody heard in the strings at the outset, and the underlying rhythmic pattern inspired by a seven-beat Indian Classical ‘time cycle’. It also attempts to integrate a Western Classical sense of structure with three very improvisatory cadenzas from each instrument – the musicians and I are aiming for an effect akin to that glorious ‘out-of-time’-ness that occurs when an Arabic Oud solos over the unyielding fixed groove of the band.”
Maurice Ravel (FRA; 1875 – 1937): Piano Trio in A minor (1914), c. 26’
- Modéré
- Pantoum (Assez vif)
- Passacaille (Très large)
- Final (Animé)
“They say I’m dry at heart. That’s wrong. I am Basque! Basques feel things violently but they say little about it and only to a few.”
This mysterious, elusive, passionate, trio is the work that Ravel was writing when Europe plunged into war. August 1914: he had in fact been working on it for some time – six years, in fact, with his usual fastidiousness – and in earnest since March, taking it with him to St Jean de Luz in Basque country and telling his teacher, Gédalge, “I’ve written my trio. Now all I need are the themes.” What happened instead was the German invasion of France, which gave him all the impetus he needed. He rushed to finish it, “working on the Trio with the sureness and lucidity of a madman”, and immediately tried to enlist as a bomber in the French Air Force. He was rejected: his age (39), and something minor to do with his heart. But he continued applying, went through his training, until finally he was accepted as a truck driver into the 13th Artillery Regiment, driving munitions at night right on the front, under constant German bombardment, until the end of the war. Corresponding with Vaughan Williams throughout this period, he writes in June 1915: “It seems years since I left Paris: I have had moving, painful, and dangerous enough times to find it astonishing to come out of here still alive.”
One fancies that you hear some of the threat facing Europe – and Ravel personally – in the largely dark, elusive colours of this trio. But for him it was also a celebration of life, a tribute to his Basque heritage of which he was tremendously proud: his mother was Basque, and her own great love of the Basque language and folk songs had a tremendous influence on his life and music. You can hear the rhythm of the zortziko, a very distinctive Basque folk dance, in the first movement – rhythm is key to this whole work, the second movement Pantoum being based on a traditional Malaysian verse form in which the second and fourth lines of a stanza become the first and third lines of the next. The third movement is a passacaglia on the piano’s opening eight-bar theme in the bass: and the final animé, constantly alternating between time signatures over magical harmonics and trills drives towards a brilliant coda. And that, of course, is only part of Ravel’s genius. The inexorable weaving together of melodies and harmony: the shimmering atosmphere; the classically perfect form. At first, it attracted little notice – France was in chaos – but that didn’t last for long. Jean Marnold writes, on its publication in November 1915, “There is little in the musical repertoire that one can compare it with… No matter whether in writing technique, harmony, polyphony, rhythm or inspiration, everything is new, personal, totally original, and simple – of the simplicity which we are born with, which is our secret, and which constitutes the perfection of our masterworks.”
Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson
10oct7:00 pmInterfusionsCMNZ Tour - Whangarei
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful and foreboding C minor trio, an impressive affidavit to his masterful talents. Then we teleport far from Europe into works that are steeped in the diverse cultural backgrounds of their composers. Works by Greek-Canadian Christos Hatzis and Sri Lanka-Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne embrace a brand new work by New Zealander Salina Fisher. Her piece draws inspiration from the Japanese art of “Kintsugi”, where broken ceramic pieces are carefully reassembled, enhancing their inherent strength and beauty. We finish with Ravel’s famous Trio, bearing witness to the clear infusion of his French, Spanish, Basque and Roman Catholic influences.
Beethoven: Piano Trio in C minor, Op 1, No 3
Christos Hatzis: Old Photographs
Salina Fisher: Kintsugi (new commission)
Dinuk Wijeratne: Love Triangle
Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor
DATES & LOCATIONS
Wellington: Sunday, September 27, 3pm – St. Andrew’s on the Terrace – TICKETS
Rotorua: Thursday, October 1, 7:30pm – The Harvest Centre (door sales only)
Waikanae: Sunday, October 4, 2:30pm – Waikanae Memorial Hall (door sales only)
Christchurch: Wednesday, October 7, 7:30pm – The Piano – TICKETS
Lower Hutt: Thursday, October 8, 7:30pm – St. Marks Church, Woburn Road (door sales only)
Whangarei: Saturday, October 10, 7:00pm – Old Library Building Arts Centre (door sales only)
Warkworth: Sunday, October 11, 4:00pm – Warkworth Town Hall – TICKETS
Presented by CMNZ in association with Aroha Music Society, Chamber Music Wanganui, Expressions Whirinaki, Motueka Music Group, Rotorua Music Federation, Waikanae Music Society Inc., Wellington Chamber Music Trust, Whangarei Music Society.
Duration approx. 2 hours, including interval
Ticket prices vary, please contact venues.
Time
(Saturday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Old Library Building
7 Rust Avenue, Whangarei 0110
Ludwig van Beethoven (GER; 1770-1827): Piano Trio No. 3 in c minor. Op.1 no 3 (1794), c. 28’
- Allegro con brio
- Andante cantabile con variazione
- Menuetto quasi Allegro
- Finale. Prestissimo
“Though I had some instruction from Haydn, I never learned anything from him.”
So Beethoven claimed!
He was 24 years old when he decided he was finally ready to unleash his opus 1 onto the world. Three piano trios which were by no means the first things he had written, but which he was finally happy enough with to announce himself not just as a pianist, but as a composer, ready to astonish the world.
He had been in Vienna for two years then, having just missed Mozart but armed with a letter of introduction to Haydn, who had been teaching him counterpoint. Haydn found Beethoven bewildering. He was so wayward, refused to do anything by the book: his other teachers had the same complaint. Albrechtsberger remarked “He will never do anything in a proper decent style”. As for Beethoven, he found Haydn hopelessly old fashioned, a creature of the court, a composer of a different century. But he was still Joseph Haydn, the greatest composer in Vienna. So you can imagine Beethoven’s hurt when it came to the concert. Haydn was there, of course, and when everybody rushed for his opinion “he said many pretty things about them”, apparently, in the words of someone who was there: but he also advised Beethoven to withdraw this one, the third and last, from publication. But this was the best! Beethoven was outraged. He even wondered if Haydn was being malicious in saying so – if in fact he was jealous. It soured their relations for a while.
In fact, Haydn simply feared that the public would not like it. It was so newfangled, so audacious, which is the astonishing thing about this very first opus. All those genius quirks that we associate with Beethoven are there already. There’s that brow-furrowed opening before the sun breaks out, contrasting emotional and dynamic extremes – pushing the instruments to their limits and sonata form to its limits, as well. He develops that first movement way beyond what Haydn would have considered polite. Variations follow, sweetly introduced by the piano, brilliantly exploiting the textures of the instruments: fancy one whole variation where the strings play nothing but pizzicato. And the totally virtuosic piano writing, and that snappy wrap-up, and those divinely lyrical tunes. Then a minuet that’s suddenly not a minuet. Those accents! You can’t dance to that. And it all ends in a stormy finale that makes countless unnerving turns before dying in a whisper – no wonder Haydn was alarmed. He needn’t have been: all three trios were instantly taken up by amateurs and professionals alike. Beethoven was on his way.
Christos Hatzis (GRC/CAN; b. 1953): Constantinople: Old Photographs (2000), c. 5’
“Staggeringly beautiful … one of the most talked about compositions of the decade… possibly the most talked about classical composition in Toronto’s history”… the composer, Christos Hatzis, was born in Greece but settled in Canada as a professor at the University of Toronto, and has won many awards for music which has its roots in his Byzantine heritage but casts widely among traditions that range from the Canadian Inuit to 20th century modernism, jazz, tango…. all of which you’ll hear in here. It’s the seventh and penultimate movement of a multi-media work for middle eastern singer, electronics and piano trio that took the world by storm – Constantinople.
Salina Fisher (NZ; b. 1993): Kintsugi (2020 new commission), c. 5’
Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. All of the broken pieces are carefully joined back together with gold-dusted urushi (lacquer). Rather than hiding the damage, kintsugi celebrates all the cracks or ‘scars’ for the unique history that they represent. The object is more beautiful for having been broken.
The composer writes: “I am personally drawn to kintsugi as a metaphor for embracing ‘brokenness’ and imperfection as a source of strength. This piece for piano trio is my expression and exploration of kintsugi, and involves musical fragmentation, fragility, mending, and finding beauty in the cracks. While writing this piece, I was very fortunate to meet Wellington-based Japanese ceramicist and kintsugi practitioner Kumiko Jacolin. I am grateful to Kumiko for her work and our discussions on Japanese philosophy in ceramics that have been influential in my creative process.”
Since recently graduating with a Master of Music in Composition from Manhattan School of Music, New York, Salina has been appointed Composer-in-Residence at New Zealand School of Music – Te Kōkī, Victoria University of Wellington, 2019-2020.
Dinuk Wijeratne (LKA/CAN; b. 1978): Love Triangle (2013), c. 16’
Classic genre-bending deliciousness from a composer who is very much a product of cross cultures himself. Born in Sri Lanka, growing up in Dubai, trained in England and the USA and now based in Toronto, Dinuk Wijeratne made his debut at Carnegie Hall with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and has performed all over the world as a conductor-pianist-composer, bewitching audiences with his particular brand of fusion and equally at home in collaborations with symphony orchestras and string quartets, tabla players and DJs, in places as diverse as the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Berlin Philharmonie. It’s a style that fuses funky jazz riffs with Indian tabla-like dance rhythms, tonal clusters, extended instrumental techniques, native North American and Middle Eastern influences, all bristling with the energy of a coiled spring … and it keeps winning awards, including a Juno award and a Nova Scotia Masterworks nomination for this very trio.
The composer says about this piece: “This music evolved rather rhapsodically from two distinctive features: the Middle Eastern-inspired melody heard in the strings at the outset, and the underlying rhythmic pattern inspired by a seven-beat Indian Classical ‘time cycle’. It also attempts to integrate a Western Classical sense of structure with three very improvisatory cadenzas from each instrument – the musicians and I are aiming for an effect akin to that glorious ‘out-of-time’-ness that occurs when an Arabic Oud solos over the unyielding fixed groove of the band.”
Maurice Ravel (FRA; 1875 – 1937): Piano Trio in A minor (1914), c. 26’
- Modéré
- Pantoum (Assez vif)
- Passacaille (Très large)
- Final (Animé)
“They say I’m dry at heart. That’s wrong. I am Basque! Basques feel things violently but they say little about it and only to a few.”
This mysterious, elusive, passionate, trio is the work that Ravel was writing when Europe plunged into war. August 1914: he had in fact been working on it for some time – six years, in fact, with his usual fastidiousness – and in earnest since March, taking it with him to St Jean de Luz in Basque country and telling his teacher, Gédalge, “I’ve written my trio. Now all I need are the themes.” What happened instead was the German invasion of France, which gave him all the impetus he needed. He rushed to finish it, “working on the Trio with the sureness and lucidity of a madman”, and immediately tried to enlist as a bomber in the French Air Force. He was rejected: his age (39), and something minor to do with his heart. But he continued applying, went through his training, until finally he was accepted as a truck driver into the 13th Artillery Regiment, driving munitions at night right on the front, under constant German bombardment, until the end of the war. Corresponding with Vaughan Williams throughout this period, he writes in June 1915: “It seems years since I left Paris: I have had moving, painful, and dangerous enough times to find it astonishing to come out of here still alive.”
One fancies that you hear some of the threat facing Europe – and Ravel personally – in the largely dark, elusive colours of this trio. But for him it was also a celebration of life, a tribute to his Basque heritage of which he was tremendously proud: his mother was Basque, and her own great love of the Basque language and folk songs had a tremendous influence on his life and music. You can hear the rhythm of the zortziko, a very distinctive Basque folk dance, in the first movement – rhythm is key to this whole work, the second movement Pantoum being based on a traditional Malaysian verse form in which the second and fourth lines of a stanza become the first and third lines of the next. The third movement is a passacaglia on the piano’s opening eight-bar theme in the bass: and the final animé, constantly alternating between time signatures over magical harmonics and trills drives towards a brilliant coda. And that, of course, is only part of Ravel’s genius. The inexorable weaving together of melodies and harmony: the shimmering atosmphere; the classically perfect form. At first, it attracted little notice – France was in chaos – but that didn’t last for long. Jean Marnold writes, on its publication in November 1915, “There is little in the musical repertoire that one can compare it with… No matter whether in writing technique, harmony, polyphony, rhythm or inspiration, everything is new, personal, totally original, and simple – of the simplicity which we are born with, which is our secret, and which constitutes the perfection of our masterworks.”
Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson
8oct7:30 pmInterfusionsCMNZ Tour - Lower Hutt
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful and foreboding C minor trio, an impressive affidavit to his masterful talents. Then we teleport far from Europe into works that are steeped in the diverse cultural backgrounds of their composers. Works by Greek-Canadian Christos Hatzis and Sri Lanka-Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne embrace a brand new work by New Zealander Salina Fisher. Her piece draws inspiration from the Japanese art of “Kintsugi”, where broken ceramic pieces are carefully reassembled, enhancing their inherent strength and beauty. We finish with Ravel’s famous Trio, bearing witness to the clear infusion of his French, Spanish, Basque and Roman Catholic influences.
Beethoven: Piano Trio in C minor, Op 1, No 3
Christos Hatzis: Old Photographs
Salina Fisher: Kintsugi (new commission)
Dinuk Wijeratne: Love Triangle
Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor
DATES & LOCATIONS
Wellington: Sunday, September 27, 3pm – St. Andrew’s on the Terrace – TICKETS
Rotorua: Thursday, October 1, 7:30pm – The Harvest Centre (door sales only)
Waikanae: Sunday, October 4, 2:30pm – Waikanae Memorial Hall (door sales only)
Christchurch: Wednesday, October 7, 7:30pm – The Piano – TICKETS
Lower Hutt: Thursday, October 8, 7:30pm – St. Marks Church, Woburn Road (door sales only)
Whangarei: Saturday, October 10, 7:00pm – Old Library Building Arts Centre (door sales only)
Warkworth: Sunday, October 11, 4:00pm – Warkworth Town Hall – TICKETS
Presented by CMNZ in association with Aroha Music Society, Chamber Music Wanganui, Expressions Whirinaki, Motueka Music Group, Rotorua Music Federation, Waikanae Music Society Inc., Wellington Chamber Music Trust, Whangarei Music Society.
Duration approx. 2 hours, including interval
Ticket prices may vary, please contact venue
Time
(Thursday) 7:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
St. Marks Church
58 Woburn Road, Lower Hutt
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (GER; 1770-1827): PIANO TRIO NO. 3 IN C MINOR. OP.1 NO 3 (1794), C. 28’
- Allegro con brio
- Andante cantabile con variazione
- Menuetto quasi Allegro
- Finale. Prestissimo
“Though I had some instruction from Haydn, I never learned anything from him.”
So Beethoven claimed!
He was 24 years old when he decided he was finally ready to unleash his opus 1 onto the world. Three piano trios which were by no means the first things he had written, but which he was finally happy enough with to announce himself not just as a pianist, but as a composer, ready to astonish the world.
He had been in Vienna for two years then, having just missed Mozart but armed with a letter of introduction to Haydn, who had been teaching him counterpoint. Haydn found Beethoven bewildering. He was so wayward, refused to do anything by the book: his other teachers had the same complaint. Albrechtsberger remarked “He will never do anything in a proper decent style”. As for Beethoven, he found Haydn hopelessly old fashioned, a creature of the court, a composer of a different century. But he was still Joseph Haydn, the greatest composer in Vienna. So you can imagine Beethoven’s hurt when it came to the concert. Haydn was there, of course, and when everybody rushed for his opinion “he said many pretty things about them”, apparently, in the words of someone who was there: but he also advised Beethoven to withdraw this one, the third and last, from publication. But this was the best! Beethoven was outraged. He even wondered if Haydn was being malicious in saying so – if in fact he was jealous. It soured their relations for a while.
In fact, Haydn simply feared that the public would not like it. It was so newfangled, so audacious, which is the astonishing thing about this very first opus. All those genius quirks that we associate with Beethoven are there already. There’s that brow-furrowed opening before the sun breaks out, contrasting emotional and dynamic extremes – pushing the instruments to their limits and sonata form to its limits, as well. He develops that first movement way beyond what Haydn would have considered polite. Variations follow, sweetly introduced by the piano, brilliantly exploiting the textures of the instruments: fancy one whole variation where the strings play nothing but pizzicato. And the totally virtuosic piano writing, and that snappy wrap-up, and those divinely lyrical tunes. Then a minuet that’s suddenly not a minuet. Those accents! You can’t dance to that. And it all ends in a stormy finale that makes countless unnerving turns before dying in a whisper – no wonder Haydn was alarmed. He needn’t have been: all three trios were instantly taken up by amateurs and professionals alike. Beethoven was on his way.
CHRISTOS HATZIS (GRC/CAN; B. 1953): CONSTANTINOPLE: OLD PHOTOGRAPHS (2000), C. 5’
“Staggeringly beautiful … one of the most talked about compositions of the decade… possibly the most talked about classical composition in Toronto’s history”… the composer, Christos Hatzis, was born in Greece but settled in Canada as a professor at the University of Toronto, and has won many awards for music which has its roots in his Byzantine heritage but casts widely among traditions that range from the Canadian Inuit to 20th century modernism, jazz, tango…. all of which you’ll hear in here. It’s the seventh and penultimate movement of a multi-media work for middle eastern singer, electronics and piano trio that took the world by storm – Constantinople.
SALINA FISHER (NZ; B. 1993): KINTSUGI (2020 NEW COMMISSION), C. 5’
Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. All of the broken pieces are carefully joined back together with gold-dusted urushi (lacquer). Rather than hiding the damage, kintsugi celebrates all the cracks or ‘scars’ for the unique history that they represent. The object is more beautiful for having been broken.
The composer writes: “I am personally drawn to kintsugi as a metaphor for embracing ‘brokenness’ and imperfection as a source of strength. This piece for piano trio is my expression and exploration of kintsugi, and involves musical fragmentation, fragility, mending, and finding beauty in the cracks. While writing this piece, I was very fortunate to meet Wellington-based Japanese ceramicist and kintsugi practitioner Kumiko Jacolin. I am grateful to Kumiko for her work and our discussions on Japanese philosophy in ceramics that have been influential in my creative process.”
Since recently graduating with a Master of Music in Composition from Manhattan School of Music, New York, Salina has been appointed Composer-in-Residence at New Zealand School of Music – Te Kōkī, Victoria University of Wellington, 2019-2020.
DINUK WIJERATNE (LKA/CAN; B. 1978): LOVE TRIANGLE (2013), C. 16’
Classic genre-bending deliciousness from a composer who is very much a product of cross cultures himself. Born in Sri Lanka, growing up in Dubai, trained in England and the USA and now based in Toronto, Dinuk Wijeratne made his debut at Carnegie Hall with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and has performed all over the world as a conductor-pianist-composer, bewitching audiences with his particular brand of fusion and equally at home in collaborations with symphony orchestras and string quartets, tabla players and DJs, in places as diverse as the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Berlin Philharmonie. It’s a style that fuses funky jazz riffs with Indian tabla-like dance rhythms, tonal clusters, extended instrumental techniques, native North American and Middle Eastern influences, all bristling with the energy of a coiled spring … and it keeps winning awards, including a Juno award and a Nova Scotia Masterworks nomination for this very trio.
The composer says about this piece: “This music evolved rather rhapsodically from two distinctive features: the Middle Eastern-inspired melody heard in the strings at the outset, and the underlying rhythmic pattern inspired by a seven-beat Indian Classical ‘time cycle’. It also attempts to integrate a Western Classical sense of structure with three very improvisatory cadenzas from each instrument – the musicians and I are aiming for an effect akin to that glorious ‘out-of-time’-ness that occurs when an Arabic Oud solos over the unyielding fixed groove of the band.”
MAURICE RAVEL (FRA; 1875 – 1937): PIANO TRIO IN A MINOR (1914), C. 26’
- Modéré
- Pantoum (Assez vif)
- Passacaille (Très large)
- Final (Animé)
“They say I’m dry at heart. That’s wrong. I am Basque! Basques feel things violently but they say little about it and only to a few.”
This mysterious, elusive, passionate, trio is the work that Ravel was writing when Europe plunged into war. August 1914: he had in fact been working on it for some time – six years, in fact, with his usual fastidiousness – and in earnest since March, taking it with him to St Jean de Luz in Basque country and telling his teacher, Gédalge, “I’ve written my trio. Now all I need are the themes.” What happened instead was the German invasion of France, which gave him all the impetus he needed. He rushed to finish it, “working on the Trio with the sureness and lucidity of a madman”, and immediately tried to enlist as a bomber in the French Air Force. He was rejected: his age (39), and something minor to do with his heart. But he continued applying, went through his training, until finally he was accepted as a truck driver into the 13th Artillery Regiment, driving munitions at night right on the front, under constant German bombardment, until the end of the war. Corresponding with Vaughan Williams throughout this period, he writes in June 1915: “It seems years since I left Paris: I have had moving, painful, and dangerous enough times to find it astonishing to come out of here still alive.”
One fancies that you hear some of the threat facing Europe – and Ravel personally – in the largely dark, elusive colours of this trio. But for him it was also a celebration of life, a tribute to his Basque heritage of which he was tremendously proud: his mother was Basque, and her own great love of the Basque language and folk songs had a tremendous influence on his life and music. You can hear the rhythm of the zortziko, a very distinctive Basque folk dance, in the first movement – rhythm is key to this whole work, the second movement Pantoum being based on a traditional Malaysian verse form in which the second and fourth lines of a stanza become the first and third lines of the next. The third movement is a passacaglia on the piano’s opening eight-bar theme in the bass: and the final animé, constantly alternating between time signatures over magical harmonics and trills drives towards a brilliant coda. And that, of course, is only part of Ravel’s genius. The inexorable weaving together of melodies and harmony: the shimmering atosmphere; the classically perfect form. At first, it attracted little notice – France was in chaos – but that didn’t last for long. Jean Marnold writes, on its publication in November 1915, “There is little in the musical repertoire that one can compare it with… No matter whether in writing technique, harmony, polyphony, rhythm or inspiration, everything is new, personal, totally original, and simple – of the simplicity which we are born with, which is our secret, and which constitutes the perfection of our masterworks.”
Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson
7oct7:30 pmInterfusionsCMNZ Tour - Christchurch
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful and foreboding C minor trio, an impressive affidavit to his masterful talents. Then we teleport far from Europe into works that are steeped in the diverse cultural backgrounds of their composers. Works by Greek-Canadian Christos Hatzis and Sri Lanka-Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne embrace a brand new work by New Zealander Salina Fisher. Her piece draws inspiration from the Japanese art of “Kintsugi”, where broken ceramic pieces are carefully reassembled, enhancing their inherent strength and beauty. We finish with Ravel’s famous Trio, bearing witness to the clear infusion of his French, Spanish, Basque and Roman Catholic influences.
Beethoven: Piano Trio in C minor, Op 1, No 3
Christos Hatzis: Old Photographs
Salina Fisher: Kintsugi (new commission)
Dinuk Wijeratne: Love Triangle
Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor
DATES & LOCATIONS
Wellington: Sunday, September 27, 3pm – St. Andrew’s on the Terrace – TICKETS
Rotorua: Thursday, October 1, 7:30pm – The Harvest Centre (door sales only)
Waikanae: Sunday, October 4, 2:30pm – Waikanae Memorial Hall (door sales only)
Christchurch: Wednesday, October 7, 7:30pm – The Piano – TICKETS
Lower Hutt: Thursday, October 8, 7:30pm – St. Marks Church, Woburn Road (door sales only)
Whangarei: Saturday, October 10, 7:00pm – Old Library Building Arts Centre (door sales only)
Warkworth: Sunday, October 11, 4:00pm – Warkworth Town Hall – TICKETS
Presented by CMNZ in association with Aroha Music Society, Chamber Music Wanganui, Expressions Whirinaki, Motueka Music Group, Rotorua Music Federation, Waikanae Music Society Inc., Wellington Chamber Music Trust, Whangarei Music Society.
Duration approx. 2 hours, including interval
Ticket prices may vary, please contact venue
Time
(Wednesday) 7:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
The Piano
156 Armagh Street, Christchurch, NZ
Ludwig van Beethoven (GER; 1770-1827): Piano Trio No. 3 in c minor. Op.1 no 3 (1794), c. 28’
- Allegro con brio
- Andante cantabile con variazione
- Menuetto quasi Allegro
- Finale. Prestissimo
“Though I had some instruction from Haydn, I never learned anything from him.”
So Beethoven claimed!
He was 24 years old when he decided he was finally ready to unleash his opus 1 onto the world. Three piano trios which were by no means the first things he had written, but which he was finally happy enough with to announce himself not just as a pianist, but as a composer, ready to astonish the world.
He had been in Vienna for two years then, having just missed Mozart but armed with a letter of introduction to Haydn, who had been teaching him counterpoint. Haydn found Beethoven bewildering. He was so wayward, refused to do anything by the book: his other teachers had the same complaint. Albrechtsberger remarked “He will never do anything in a proper decent style”. As for Beethoven, he found Haydn hopelessly old fashioned, a creature of the court, a composer of a different century. But he was still Joseph Haydn, the greatest composer in Vienna. So you can imagine Beethoven’s hurt when it came to the concert. Haydn was there, of course, and when everybody rushed for his opinion “he said many pretty things about them”, apparently, in the words of someone who was there: but he also advised Beethoven to withdraw this one, the third and last, from publication. But this was the best! Beethoven was outraged. He even wondered if Haydn was being malicious in saying so – if in fact he was jealous. It soured their relations for a while.
In fact, Haydn simply feared that the public would not like it. It was so newfangled, so audacious, which is the astonishing thing about this very first opus. All those genius quirks that we associate with Beethoven are there already. There’s that brow-furrowed opening before the sun breaks out, contrasting emotional and dynamic extremes – pushing the instruments to their limits and sonata form to its limits, as well. He develops that first movement way beyond what Haydn would have considered polite. Variations follow, sweetly introduced by the piano, brilliantly exploiting the textures of the instruments: fancy one whole variation where the strings play nothing but pizzicato. And the totally virtuosic piano writing, and that snappy wrap-up, and those divinely lyrical tunes. Then a minuet that’s suddenly not a minuet. Those accents! You can’t dance to that. And it all ends in a stormy finale that makes countless unnerving turns before dying in a whisper – no wonder Haydn was alarmed. He needn’t have been: all three trios were instantly taken up by amateurs and professionals alike. Beethoven was on his way.
Christos Hatzis (GRC/CAN; b. 1953): Constantinople: Old Photographs (2000), c. 5’
“Staggeringly beautiful … one of the most talked about compositions of the decade… possibly the most talked about classical composition in Toronto’s history”… the composer, Christos Hatzis, was born in Greece but settled in Canada as a professor at the University of Toronto, and has won many awards for music which has its roots in his Byzantine heritage but casts widely among traditions that range from the Canadian Inuit to 20th century modernism, jazz, tango…. all of which you’ll hear in here. It’s the seventh and penultimate movement of a multi-media work for middle eastern singer, electronics and piano trio that took the world by storm – Constantinople.
Salina Fisher (NZ; b. 1993): Kintsugi (2020 new commission), c. 5’
Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. All of the broken pieces are carefully joined back together with gold-dusted urushi (lacquer). Rather than hiding the damage, kintsugi celebrates all the cracks or ‘scars’ for the unique history that they represent. The object is more beautiful for having been broken.
The composer writes: “I am personally drawn to kintsugi as a metaphor for embracing ‘brokenness’ and imperfection as a source of strength. This piece for piano trio is my expression and exploration of kintsugi, and involves musical fragmentation, fragility, mending, and finding beauty in the cracks. While writing this piece, I was very fortunate to meet Wellington-based Japanese ceramicist and kintsugi practitioner Kumiko Jacolin. I am grateful to Kumiko for her work and our discussions on Japanese philosophy in ceramics that have been influential in my creative process.”
Since recently graduating with a Master of Music in Composition from Manhattan School of Music, New York, Salina has been appointed Composer-in-Residence at New Zealand School of Music – Te Kōkī, Victoria University of Wellington, 2019-2020.
Dinuk Wijeratne (LKA/CAN; b. 1978): Love Triangle (2013), c. 16’
Classic genre-bending deliciousness from a composer who is very much a product of cross cultures himself. Born in Sri Lanka, growing up in Dubai, trained in England and the USA and now based in Toronto, Dinuk Wijeratne made his debut at Carnegie Hall with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and has performed all over the world as a conductor-pianist-composer, bewitching audiences with his particular brand of fusion and equally at home in collaborations with symphony orchestras and string quartets, tabla players and DJs, in places as diverse as the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Berlin Philharmonie. It’s a style that fuses funky jazz riffs with Indian tabla-like dance rhythms, tonal clusters, extended instrumental techniques, native North American and Middle Eastern influences, all bristling with the energy of a coiled spring … and it keeps winning awards, including a Juno award and a Nova Scotia Masterworks nomination for this very trio.
The composer says about this piece: “This music evolved rather rhapsodically from two distinctive features: the Middle Eastern-inspired melody heard in the strings at the outset, and the underlying rhythmic pattern inspired by a seven-beat Indian Classical ‘time cycle’. It also attempts to integrate a Western Classical sense of structure with three very improvisatory cadenzas from each instrument – the musicians and I are aiming for an effect akin to that glorious ‘out-of-time’-ness that occurs when an Arabic Oud solos over the unyielding fixed groove of the band.”
Maurice Ravel (FRA; 1875 – 1937): Piano Trio in A minor (1914), c. 26’
- Modéré
- Pantoum (Assez vif)
- Passacaille (Très large)
- Final (Animé)
“They say I’m dry at heart. That’s wrong. I am Basque! Basques feel things violently but they say little about it and only to a few.”
This mysterious, elusive, passionate, trio is the work that Ravel was writing when Europe plunged into war. August 1914: he had in fact been working on it for some time – six years, in fact, with his usual fastidiousness – and in earnest since March, taking it with him to St Jean de Luz in Basque country and telling his teacher, Gédalge, “I’ve written my trio. Now all I need are the themes.” What happened instead was the German invasion of France, which gave him all the impetus he needed. He rushed to finish it, “working on the Trio with the sureness and lucidity of a madman”, and immediately tried to enlist as a bomber in the French Air Force. He was rejected: his age (39), and something minor to do with his heart. But he continued applying, went through his training, until finally he was accepted as a truck driver into the 13th Artillery Regiment, driving munitions at night right on the front, under constant German bombardment, until the end of the war. Corresponding with Vaughan Williams throughout this period, he writes in June 1915: “It seems years since I left Paris: I have had moving, painful, and dangerous enough times to find it astonishing to come out of here still alive.”
One fancies that you hear some of the threat facing Europe – and Ravel personally – in the largely dark, elusive colours of this trio. But for him it was also a celebration of life, a tribute to his Basque heritage of which he was tremendously proud: his mother was Basque, and her own great love of the Basque language and folk songs had a tremendous influence on his life and music. You can hear the rhythm of the zortziko, a very distinctive Basque folk dance, in the first movement – rhythm is key to this whole work, the second movement Pantoum being based on a traditional Malaysian verse form in which the second and fourth lines of a stanza become the first and third lines of the next. The third movement is a passacaglia on the piano’s opening eight-bar theme in the bass: and the final animé, constantly alternating between time signatures over magical harmonics and trills drives towards a brilliant coda. And that, of course, is only part of Ravel’s genius. The inexorable weaving together of melodies and harmony: the shimmering atosmphere; the classically perfect form. At first, it attracted little notice – France was in chaos – but that didn’t last for long. Jean Marnold writes, on its publication in November 1915, “There is little in the musical repertoire that one can compare it with… No matter whether in writing technique, harmony, polyphony, rhythm or inspiration, everything is new, personal, totally original, and simple – of the simplicity which we are born with, which is our secret, and which constitutes the perfection of our masterworks.”
Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson
4oct2:30 pmInterfusionsCMNZ Tour - Waikanae
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful and foreboding C minor trio, an impressive affidavit to his masterful talents. Then we teleport far from Europe into works that are steeped in the diverse cultural backgrounds of their composers. Works by Greek-Canadian Christos Hatzis and Sri Lanka-Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne embrace a brand new work by New Zealander Salina Fisher. Her piece draws inspiration from the Japanese art of “Kintsugi”, where broken ceramic pieces are carefully reassembled, enhancing their inherent strength and beauty. We finish with Ravel’s famous Trio, bearing witness to the clear infusion of his French, Spanish, Basque and Roman Catholic influences.
Beethoven: Piano Trio in C minor, Op 1, No 3
Christos Hatzis: Old Photographs
Salina Fisher: Kintsugi (new commission)
Dinuk Wijeratne: Love Triangle
Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor
DATES & LOCATIONS
Wellington: Sunday, September 27, 3pm – St. Andrew’s on the Terrace – TICKETS
Rotorua: Thursday, October 1, 7:30pm – The Harvest Centre (door sales only)
Waikanae: Sunday, October 4, 2:30pm – Waikanae Memorial Hall (door sales only)
Christchurch: Wednesday, October 7, 7:30pm – The Piano – TICKETS
Lower Hutt: Thursday, October 8, 7:30pm – St. Marks Church, Woburn Road (door sales only)
Whangarei: Saturday, October 10, 7:00pm – Old Library Building Arts Centre (door sales only)
Warkworth: Sunday, October 11, 4:00pm – Warkworth Town Hall – TICKETS
Presented by CMNZ in association with Aroha Music Society, Chamber Music Wanganui, Expressions Whirinaki, Motueka Music Group, Rotorua Music Federation, Waikanae Music Society Inc., Wellington Chamber Music Trust, Whangarei Music Society.
Duration approx. 2 hours, including interval
Ticket prices vary, please contact venues.
Time
(Sunday) 2:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Waikanae Memorial Hall
Pehi Kupa Street, Waikanae 5036
Ludwig van Beethoven (GER; 1770-1827): Piano Trio No. 3 in c minor. Op.1 no 3 (1794), c. 28’
- Allegro con brio
- Andante cantabile con variazione
- Menuetto quasi Allegro
- Finale. Prestissimo
“Though I had some instruction from Haydn, I never learned anything from him.”
So Beethoven claimed!
He was 24 years old when he decided he was finally ready to unleash his opus 1 onto the world. Three piano trios which were by no means the first things he had written, but which he was finally happy enough with to announce himself not just as a pianist, but as a composer, ready to astonish the world.
He had been in Vienna for two years then, having just missed Mozart but armed with a letter of introduction to Haydn, who had been teaching him counterpoint. Haydn found Beethoven bewildering. He was so wayward, refused to do anything by the book: his other teachers had the same complaint. Albrechtsberger remarked “He will never do anything in a proper decent style”. As for Beethoven, he found Haydn hopelessly old fashioned, a creature of the court, a composer of a different century. But he was still Joseph Haydn, the greatest composer in Vienna. So you can imagine Beethoven’s hurt when it came to the concert. Haydn was there, of course, and when everybody rushed for his opinion “he said many pretty things about them”, apparently, in the words of someone who was there: but he also advised Beethoven to withdraw this one, the third and last, from publication. But this was the best! Beethoven was outraged. He even wondered if Haydn was being malicious in saying so – if in fact he was jealous. It soured their relations for a while.
In fact, Haydn simply feared that the public would not like it. It was so newfangled, so audacious, which is the astonishing thing about this very first opus. All those genius quirks that we associate with Beethoven are there already. There’s that brow-furrowed opening before the sun breaks out, contrasting emotional and dynamic extremes – pushing the instruments to their limits and sonata form to its limits, as well. He develops that first movement way beyond what Haydn would have considered polite. Variations follow, sweetly introduced by the piano, brilliantly exploiting the textures of the instruments: fancy one whole variation where the strings play nothing but pizzicato. And the totally virtuosic piano writing, and that snappy wrap-up, and those divinely lyrical tunes. Then a minuet that’s suddenly not a minuet. Those accents! You can’t dance to that. And it all ends in a stormy finale that makes countless unnerving turns before dying in a whisper – no wonder Haydn was alarmed. He needn’t have been: all three trios were instantly taken up by amateurs and professionals alike. Beethoven was on his way.
Christos Hatzis (GRC/CAN; b. 1953): Constantinople: Old Photographs (2000), c. 5’
“Staggeringly beautiful … one of the most talked about compositions of the decade… possibly the most talked about classical composition in Toronto’s history”… the composer, Christos Hatzis, was born in Greece but settled in Canada as a professor at the University of Toronto, and has won many awards for music which has its roots in his Byzantine heritage but casts widely among traditions that range from the Canadian Inuit to 20th century modernism, jazz, tango…. all of which you’ll hear in here. It’s the seventh and penultimate movement of a multi-media work for middle eastern singer, electronics and piano trio that took the world by storm – Constantinople.
Salina Fisher (NZ; b. 1993): Kintsugi (2020 new commission), c. 5’
Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. All of the broken pieces are carefully joined back together with gold-dusted urushi (lacquer). Rather than hiding the damage, kintsugi celebrates all the cracks or ‘scars’ for the unique history that they represent. The object is more beautiful for having been broken.
The composer writes: “I am personally drawn to kintsugi as a metaphor for embracing ‘brokenness’ and imperfection as a source of strength. This piece for piano trio is my expression and exploration of kintsugi, and involves musical fragmentation, fragility, mending, and finding beauty in the cracks. While writing this piece, I was very fortunate to meet Wellington-based Japanese ceramicist and kintsugi practitioner Kumiko Jacolin. I am grateful to Kumiko for her work and our discussions on Japanese philosophy in ceramics that have been influential in my creative process.”
Since recently graduating with a Master of Music in Composition from Manhattan School of Music, New York, Salina has been appointed Composer-in-Residence at New Zealand School of Music – Te Kōkī, Victoria University of Wellington, 2019-2020.
Dinuk Wijeratne (LKA/CAN; b. 1978): Love Triangle (2013), c. 16’
Classic genre-bending deliciousness from a composer who is very much a product of cross cultures himself. Born in Sri Lanka, growing up in Dubai, trained in England and the USA and now based in Toronto, Dinuk Wijeratne made his debut at Carnegie Hall with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and has performed all over the world as a conductor-pianist-composer, bewitching audiences with his particular brand of fusion and equally at home in collaborations with symphony orchestras and string quartets, tabla players and DJs, in places as diverse as the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Berlin Philharmonie. It’s a style that fuses funky jazz riffs with Indian tabla-like dance rhythms, tonal clusters, extended instrumental techniques, native North American and Middle Eastern influences, all bristling with the energy of a coiled spring … and it keeps winning awards, including a Juno award and a Nova Scotia Masterworks nomination for this very trio.
The composer says about this piece: “This music evolved rather rhapsodically from two distinctive features: the Middle Eastern-inspired melody heard in the strings at the outset, and the underlying rhythmic pattern inspired by a seven-beat Indian Classical ‘time cycle’. It also attempts to integrate a Western Classical sense of structure with three very improvisatory cadenzas from each instrument – the musicians and I are aiming for an effect akin to that glorious ‘out-of-time’-ness that occurs when an Arabic Oud solos over the unyielding fixed groove of the band.”
Maurice Ravel (FRA; 1875 – 1937): Piano Trio in A minor (1914), c. 26’
- Modéré
- Pantoum (Assez vif)
- Passacaille (Très large)
- Final (Animé)
“They say I’m dry at heart. That’s wrong. I am Basque! Basques feel things violently but they say little about it and only to a few.”
This mysterious, elusive, passionate, trio is the work that Ravel was writing when Europe plunged into war. August 1914: he had in fact been working on it for some time – six years, in fact, with his usual fastidiousness – and in earnest since March, taking it with him to St Jean de Luz in Basque country and telling his teacher, Gédalge, “I’ve written my trio. Now all I need are the themes.” What happened instead was the German invasion of France, which gave him all the impetus he needed. He rushed to finish it, “working on the Trio with the sureness and lucidity of a madman”, and immediately tried to enlist as a bomber in the French Air Force. He was rejected: his age (39), and something minor to do with his heart. But he continued applying, went through his training, until finally he was accepted as a truck driver into the 13th Artillery Regiment, driving munitions at night right on the front, under constant German bombardment, until the end of the war. Corresponding with Vaughan Williams throughout this period, he writes in June 1915: “It seems years since I left Paris: I have had moving, painful, and dangerous enough times to find it astonishing to come out of here still alive.”
One fancies that you hear some of the threat facing Europe – and Ravel personally – in the largely dark, elusive colours of this trio. But for him it was also a celebration of life, a tribute to his Basque heritage of which he was tremendously proud: his mother was Basque, and her own great love of the Basque language and folk songs had a tremendous influence on his life and music. You can hear the rhythm of the zortziko, a very distinctive Basque folk dance, in the first movement – rhythm is key to this whole work, the second movement Pantoum being based on a traditional Malaysian verse form in which the second and fourth lines of a stanza become the first and third lines of the next. The third movement is a passacaglia on the piano’s opening eight-bar theme in the bass: and the final animé, constantly alternating between time signatures over magical harmonics and trills drives towards a brilliant coda. And that, of course, is only part of Ravel’s genius. The inexorable weaving together of melodies and harmony: the shimmering atosmphere; the classically perfect form. At first, it attracted little notice – France was in chaos – but that didn’t last for long. Jean Marnold writes, on its publication in November 1915, “There is little in the musical repertoire that one can compare it with… No matter whether in writing technique, harmony, polyphony, rhythm or inspiration, everything is new, personal, totally original, and simple – of the simplicity which we are born with, which is our secret, and which constitutes the perfection of our masterworks.”
Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson
3oct6:00 pmInterFusionsThe Wallace Arts Centre, Pah Homestead (SOLD OUT)
Concert Details
Beethoven: Piano Trio in C minor,
Concert Details
Beethoven: Piano Trio in C minor, Op 1, No 3 (1st mvmt)
Christos Hatzis: Old Photographs
Salina Fisher: new commission
Dinuk Wijeratne: Love Triangle
Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor (1st mvmt)
Join us at the beautiful Pah Homestead for an Art³ experience of music surrounded by artworks.
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful and foreboding C minor trio, an impressive affidavit to his masterful talents. Then we teleport far from Europe into works that are steeped in the diverse cultural backgrounds of their composers. Works by Greek-Canadian Christos Hatzis and Sri Lanka-Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne embrace a brand new work by New Zealander Salina Fisher. Her piece draws inspiration from the Japanese art of “Kintsugi”, where broken ceramic pieces are carefully reassembled, enhancing their inherent strength and beauty. We finish with Ravel’s famous Trio, bearing witness to the clear infusion of his French, Spanish, Basque and Roman Catholic influences.
Duration approx. 1 hour, no interval
Tickets via Eventfinda NOW SOLD OUT
Tickets still available for Oct 18th at Auckland Town Hall, Concert Chamber 5pm – BOOK HERE
Adults $40 / Students $20
Includes complimentary refreshments following the performance
Time
(Saturday) 6:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
The Wallace Arts Centre, Pah Homestead
72 Hillsborough Road, Hillsborough, Auckland 1345
1oct7:30 pmInterfusionsCMNZ Tour - Rotorua
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful and foreboding C minor trio, an impressive affidavit to his masterful talents. Then we teleport far from Europe into works that are steeped in the diverse cultural backgrounds of their composers. Works by Greek-Canadian Christos Hatzis and Sri Lanka-Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne embrace a brand new work by New Zealander Salina Fisher. Her piece draws inspiration from the Japanese art of “Kintsugi”, where broken ceramic pieces are carefully reassembled, enhancing their inherent strength and beauty. We finish with Ravel’s famous Trio, bearing witness to the clear infusion of his French, Spanish, Basque and Roman Catholic influences.
Beethoven: Piano Trio in C minor, Op 1, No 3
Christos Hatzis: Old Photographs
Salina Fisher: Kintsugi (new commission)
Dinuk Wijeratne: Love Triangle
Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor
DATES & LOCATIONS
Wellington: Sunday, September 27, 3pm – St. Andrew’s on the Terrace – TICKETS
Rotorua: Thursday, October 1, 7:30pm – The Harvest Centre (door sales only)
Waikanae: Sunday, October 4, 2:30pm – Waikanae Memorial Hall (door sales only)
Christchurch: Wednesday, October 7, 7:30pm – The Piano – TICKETS
Lower Hutt: Thursday, October 8, 7:30pm – St. Marks Church, Woburn Road (door sales only)
Whangarei: Saturday, October 10, 7:00pm – Old Library Building Arts Centre (door sales only)
Warkworth: Sunday, October 11, 4:00pm – Warkworth Town Hall – TICKETS
Presented by CMNZ in association with Aroha Music Society, Chamber Music Wanganui, Expressions Whirinaki, Motueka Music Group, Rotorua Music Federation, Waikanae Music Society Inc., Wellington Chamber Music Trust, Whangarei Music Society.
Duration approx. 2 hours, including interval
Tickets via each venue (some links pending)
Time
(Thursday) 7:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
The Harvest Centre
342 Malfroy Road, Rotorua
Ludwig van Beethoven (GER; 1770-1827): Piano Trio No. 3 in c minor. Op.1 no 3 (1794), c. 28’
- Allegro con brio
- Andante cantabile con variazione
- Menuetto quasi Allegro
- Finale. Prestissimo
“Though I had some instruction from Haydn, I never learned anything from him.”
So Beethoven claimed!
He was 24 years old when he decided he was finally ready to unleash his opus 1 onto the world. Three piano trios which were by no means the first things he had written, but which he was finally happy enough with to announce himself not just as a pianist, but as a composer, ready to astonish the world.
He had been in Vienna for two years then, having just missed Mozart but armed with a letter of introduction to Haydn, who had been teaching him counterpoint. Haydn found Beethoven bewildering. He was so wayward, refused to do anything by the book: his other teachers had the same complaint. Albrechtsberger remarked “He will never do anything in a proper decent style”. As for Beethoven, he found Haydn hopelessly old fashioned, a creature of the court, a composer of a different century. But he was still Joseph Haydn, the greatest composer in Vienna. So you can imagine Beethoven’s hurt when it came to the concert. Haydn was there, of course, and when everybody rushed for his opinion “he said many pretty things about them”, apparently, in the words of someone who was there: but he also advised Beethoven to withdraw this one, the third and last, from publication. But this was the best! Beethoven was outraged. He even wondered if Haydn was being malicious in saying so – if in fact he was jealous. It soured their relations for a while.
In fact, Haydn simply feared that the public would not like it. It was so newfangled, so audacious, which is the astonishing thing about this very first opus. All those genius quirks that we associate with Beethoven are there already. There’s that brow-furrowed opening before the sun breaks out, contrasting emotional and dynamic extremes – pushing the instruments to their limits and sonata form to its limits, as well. He develops that first movement way beyond what Haydn would have considered polite. Variations follow, sweetly introduced by the piano, brilliantly exploiting the textures of the instruments: fancy one whole variation where the strings play nothing but pizzicato. And the totally virtuosic piano writing, and that snappy wrap-up, and those divinely lyrical tunes. Then a minuet that’s suddenly not a minuet. Those accents! You can’t dance to that. And it all ends in a stormy finale that makes countless unnerving turns before dying in a whisper – no wonder Haydn was alarmed. He needn’t have been: all three trios were instantly taken up by amateurs and professionals alike. Beethoven was on his way.
Christos Hatzis (GRC/CAN; b. 1953): Constantinople: Old Photographs (2000), c. 5’
“Staggeringly beautiful … one of the most talked about compositions of the decade… possibly the most talked about classical composition in Toronto’s history”… the composer, Christos Hatzis, was born in Greece but settled in Canada as a professor at the University of Toronto, and has won many awards for music which has its roots in his Byzantine heritage but casts widely among traditions that range from the Canadian Inuit to 20th century modernism, jazz, tango…. all of which you’ll hear in here. It’s the seventh and penultimate movement of a multi-media work for middle eastern singer, electronics and piano trio that took the world by storm – Constantinople.
Salina Fisher (NZ; b. 1993): Kintsugi (2020 new commission), c. 5’
Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. All of the broken pieces are carefully joined back together with gold-dusted urushi (lacquer). Rather than hiding the damage, kintsugi celebrates all the cracks or ‘scars’ for the unique history that they represent. The object is more beautiful for having been broken.
The composer writes: “I am personally drawn to kintsugi as a metaphor for embracing ‘brokenness’ and imperfection as a source of strength. This piece for piano trio is my expression and exploration of kintsugi, and involves musical fragmentation, fragility, mending, and finding beauty in the cracks. While writing this piece, I was very fortunate to meet Wellington-based Japanese ceramicist and kintsugi practitioner Kumiko Jacolin. I am grateful to Kumiko for her work and our discussions on Japanese philosophy in ceramics that have been influential in my creative process.”
Since recently graduating with a Master of Music in Composition from Manhattan School of Music, New York, Salina has been appointed Composer-in-Residence at New Zealand School of Music – Te Kōkī, Victoria University of Wellington, 2019-2020.
Dinuk Wijeratne (LKA/CAN; b. 1978): Love Triangle (2013), c. 16’
Classic genre-bending deliciousness from a composer who is very much a product of cross cultures himself. Born in Sri Lanka, growing up in Dubai, trained in England and the USA and now based in Toronto, Dinuk Wijeratne made his debut at Carnegie Hall with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and has performed all over the world as a conductor-pianist-composer, bewitching audiences with his particular brand of fusion and equally at home in collaborations with symphony orchestras and string quartets, tabla players and DJs, in places as diverse as the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Berlin Philharmonie. It’s a style that fuses funky jazz riffs with Indian tabla-like dance rhythms, tonal clusters, extended instrumental techniques, native North American and Middle Eastern influences, all bristling with the energy of a coiled spring … and it keeps winning awards, including a Juno award and a Nova Scotia Masterworks nomination for this very trio.
The composer says about this piece: “This music evolved rather rhapsodically from two distinctive features: the Middle Eastern-inspired melody heard in the strings at the outset, and the underlying rhythmic pattern inspired by a seven-beat Indian Classical ‘time cycle’. It also attempts to integrate a Western Classical sense of structure with three very improvisatory cadenzas from each instrument – the musicians and I are aiming for an effect akin to that glorious ‘out-of-time’-ness that occurs when an Arabic Oud solos over the unyielding fixed groove of the band.”
Maurice Ravel (FRA; 1875 – 1937): Piano Trio in A minor (1914), c. 26’
- Modéré
- Pantoum (Assez vif)
- Passacaille (Très large)
- Final (Animé)
“They say I’m dry at heart. That’s wrong. I am Basque! Basques feel things violently but they say little about it and only to a few.”
This mysterious, elusive, passionate, trio is the work that Ravel was writing when Europe plunged into war. August 1914: he had in fact been working on it for some time – six years, in fact, with his usual fastidiousness – and in earnest since March, taking it with him to St Jean de Luz in Basque country and telling his teacher, Gédalge, “I’ve written my trio. Now all I need are the themes.” What happened instead was the German invasion of France, which gave him all the impetus he needed. He rushed to finish it, “working on the Trio with the sureness and lucidity of a madman”, and immediately tried to enlist as a bomber in the French Air Force. He was rejected: his age (39), and something minor to do with his heart. But he continued applying, went through his training, until finally he was accepted as a truck driver into the 13th Artillery Regiment, driving munitions at night right on the front, under constant German bombardment, until the end of the war. Corresponding with Vaughan Williams throughout this period, he writes in June 1915: “It seems years since I left Paris: I have had moving, painful, and dangerous enough times to find it astonishing to come out of here still alive.”
One fancies that you hear some of the threat facing Europe – and Ravel personally – in the largely dark, elusive colours of this trio. But for him it was also a celebration of life, a tribute to his Basque heritage of which he was tremendously proud: his mother was Basque, and her own great love of the Basque language and folk songs had a tremendous influence on his life and music. You can hear the rhythm of the zortziko, a very distinctive Basque folk dance, in the first movement – rhythm is key to this whole work, the second movement Pantoum being based on a traditional Malaysian verse form in which the second and fourth lines of a stanza become the first and third lines of the next. The third movement is a passacaglia on the piano’s opening eight-bar theme in the bass: and the final animé, constantly alternating between time signatures over magical harmonics and trills drives towards a brilliant coda. And that, of course, is only part of Ravel’s genius. The inexorable weaving together of melodies and harmony: the shimmering atosmphere; the classically perfect form. At first, it attracted little notice – France was in chaos – but that didn’t last for long. Jean Marnold writes, on its publication in November 1915, “There is little in the musical repertoire that one can compare it with… No matter whether in writing technique, harmony, polyphony, rhythm or inspiration, everything is new, personal, totally original, and simple – of the simplicity which we are born with, which is our secret, and which constitutes the perfection of our masterworks.”
Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson
september 2020
27sep3:00 pmInterfusionsCMNZ Tour - Wellington
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful
Concert Details
InterFusions begins with Beethoven’s powerful and foreboding C minor trio, an impressive affidavit to his masterful talents. Then we teleport far from Europe into works that are steeped in the diverse cultural backgrounds of their composers. Works by Greek-Canadian Christos Hatzis and Sri Lanka-Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne embrace a brand new work by New Zealander Salina Fisher. Her piece draws inspiration from the Japanese art of “Kintsugi”, where broken ceramic pieces are carefully reassembled, enhancing their inherent strength and beauty. We finish with Ravel’s famous Trio, bearing witness to the clear infusion of his French, Spanish, Basque and Roman Catholic influences.
Beethoven: Piano Trio in C minor, Op 1, No 3
Christos Hatzis: Old Photographs
Salina Fisher: Kintsugi (new commission)
Dinuk Wijeratne: Love Triangle
Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor
DATES & LOCATIONS
Wellington: Sunday, September 27, 3pm – St. Andrew’s on the Terrace – TICKETS
Rotorua: Thursday, October 1, 7:30pm – The Harvest Centre (door sales only)
Waikanae: Sunday, October 4, 2:30pm – Waikanae Memorial Hall (door sales only)
Christchurch: Wednesday, October 7, 7:30pm – The Piano – TICKETS
Lower Hutt: Thursday, October 8, 7:30pm – St. Marks Church, Woburn Road (door sales only)
Whangarei: Saturday, October 10, 7:00pm – Old Library Building Arts Centre (door sales only)
Warkworth: Sunday, October 11, 4:00pm – Warkworth Town Hall – TICKETS
Presented by CMNZ in association with Aroha Music Society, Chamber Music Wanganui, Expressions Whirinaki, Motueka Music Group, Rotorua Music Federation, Waikanae Music Society Inc., Wellington Chamber Music Trust, Whangarei Music Society.
Duration approx. 2 hours, including interval
Ticket prices vary, please contact venue
Time
(Sunday) 3:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
St Andrew's on the Terrace
30 The Terrace Wellington 6011
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (GER; 1770-1827): PIANO TRIO NO. 3 IN C MINOR. OP.1 NO 3 (1794), C. 28’
- Allegro con brio
- Andante cantabile con variazione
- Menuetto quasi Allegro
- Finale. Prestissimo
“Though I had some instruction from Haydn, I never learned anything from him.”
So Beethoven claimed!
He was 24 years old when he decided he was finally ready to unleash his opus 1 onto the world. Three piano trios which were by no means the first things he had written, but which he was finally happy enough with to announce himself not just as a pianist, but as a composer, ready to astonish the world.
He had been in Vienna for two years then, having just missed Mozart but armed with a letter of introduction to Haydn, who had been teaching him counterpoint. Haydn found Beethoven bewildering. He was so wayward, refused to do anything by the book: his other teachers had the same complaint. Albrechtsberger remarked “He will never do anything in a proper decent style”. As for Beethoven, he found Haydn hopelessly old fashioned, a creature of the court, a composer of a different century. But he was still Joseph Haydn, the greatest composer in Vienna. So you can imagine Beethoven’s hurt when it came to the concert. Haydn was there, of course, and when everybody rushed for his opinion “he said many pretty things about them”, apparently, in the words of someone who was there: but he also advised Beethoven to withdraw this one, the third and last, from publication. But this was the best! Beethoven was outraged. He even wondered if Haydn was being malicious in saying so – if in fact he was jealous. It soured their relations for a while.
In fact, Haydn simply feared that the public would not like it. It was so newfangled, so audacious, which is the astonishing thing about this very first opus. All those genius quirks that we associate with Beethoven are there already. There’s that brow-furrowed opening before the sun breaks out, contrasting emotional and dynamic extremes – pushing the instruments to their limits and sonata form to its limits, as well. He develops that first movement way beyond what Haydn would have considered polite. Variations follow, sweetly introduced by the piano, brilliantly exploiting the textures of the instruments: fancy one whole variation where the strings play nothing but pizzicato. And the totally virtuosic piano writing, and that snappy wrap-up, and those divinely lyrical tunes. Then a minuet that’s suddenly not a minuet. Those accents! You can’t dance to that. And it all ends in a stormy finale that makes countless unnerving turns before dying in a whisper – no wonder Haydn was alarmed. He needn’t have been: all three trios were instantly taken up by amateurs and professionals alike. Beethoven was on his way.
CHRISTOS HATZIS (GRC/CAN; B. 1953): CONSTANTINOPLE: OLD PHOTOGRAPHS (2000), C. 5’
“Staggeringly beautiful … one of the most talked about compositions of the decade… possibly the most talked about classical composition in Toronto’s history”… the composer, Christos Hatzis, was born in Greece but settled in Canada as a professor at the University of Toronto, and has won many awards for music which has its roots in his Byzantine heritage but casts widely among traditions that range from the Canadian Inuit to 20th century modernism, jazz, tango…. all of which you’ll hear in here. It’s the seventh and penultimate movement of a multi-media work for middle eastern singer, electronics and piano trio that took the world by storm – Constantinople.
SALINA FISHER (NZ; B. 1993): KINTSUGI (2020 NEW COMMISSION), C. 5’
Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. All of the broken pieces are carefully joined back together with gold-dusted urushi (lacquer). Rather than hiding the damage, kintsugi celebrates all the cracks or ‘scars’ for the unique history that they represent. The object is more beautiful for having been broken.
The composer writes: “I am personally drawn to kintsugi as a metaphor for embracing ‘brokenness’ and imperfection as a source of strength. This piece for piano trio is my expression and exploration of kintsugi, and involves musical fragmentation, fragility, mending, and finding beauty in the cracks. While writing this piece, I was very fortunate to meet Wellington-based Japanese ceramicist and kintsugi practitioner Kumiko Jacolin. I am grateful to Kumiko for her work and our discussions on Japanese philosophy in ceramics that have been influential in my creative process.”
Since recently graduating with a Master of Music in Composition from Manhattan School of Music, New York, Salina has been appointed Composer-in-Residence at New Zealand School of Music – Te Kōkī, Victoria University of Wellington, 2019-2020.
DINUK WIJERATNE (LKA/CAN; B. 1978): LOVE TRIANGLE (2013), C. 16’
Classic genre-bending deliciousness from a composer who is very much a product of cross cultures himself. Born in Sri Lanka, growing up in Dubai, trained in England and the USA and now based in Toronto, Dinuk Wijeratne made his debut at Carnegie Hall with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and has performed all over the world as a conductor-pianist-composer, bewitching audiences with his particular brand of fusion and equally at home in collaborations with symphony orchestras and string quartets, tabla players and DJs, in places as diverse as the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Berlin Philharmonie. It’s a style that fuses funky jazz riffs with Indian tabla-like dance rhythms, tonal clusters, extended instrumental techniques, native North American and Middle Eastern influences, all bristling with the energy of a coiled spring … and it keeps winning awards, including a Juno award and a Nova Scotia Masterworks nomination for this very trio.
The composer says about this piece: “This music evolved rather rhapsodically from two distinctive features: the Middle Eastern-inspired melody heard in the strings at the outset, and the underlying rhythmic pattern inspired by a seven-beat Indian Classical ‘time cycle’. It also attempts to integrate a Western Classical sense of structure with three very improvisatory cadenzas from each instrument – the musicians and I are aiming for an effect akin to that glorious ‘out-of-time’-ness that occurs when an Arabic Oud solos over the unyielding fixed groove of the band.”
MAURICE RAVEL (FRA; 1875 – 1937): PIANO TRIO IN A MINOR (1914), C. 26’
- Modéré
- Pantoum (Assez vif)
- Passacaille (Très large)
- Final (Animé)
“They say I’m dry at heart. That’s wrong. I am Basque! Basques feel things violently but they say little about it and only to a few.”
This mysterious, elusive, passionate, trio is the work that Ravel was writing when Europe plunged into war. August 1914: he had in fact been working on it for some time – six years, in fact, with his usual fastidiousness – and in earnest since March, taking it with him to St Jean de Luz in Basque country and telling his teacher, Gédalge, “I’ve written my trio. Now all I need are the themes.” What happened instead was the German invasion of France, which gave him all the impetus he needed. He rushed to finish it, “working on the Trio with the sureness and lucidity of a madman”, and immediately tried to enlist as a bomber in the French Air Force. He was rejected: his age (39), and something minor to do with his heart. But he continued applying, went through his training, until finally he was accepted as a truck driver into the 13th Artillery Regiment, driving munitions at night right on the front, under constant German bombardment, until the end of the war. Corresponding with Vaughan Williams throughout this period, he writes in June 1915: “It seems years since I left Paris: I have had moving, painful, and dangerous enough times to find it astonishing to come out of here still alive.”
One fancies that you hear some of the threat facing Europe – and Ravel personally – in the largely dark, elusive colours of this trio. But for him it was also a celebration of life, a tribute to his Basque heritage of which he was tremendously proud: his mother was Basque, and her own great love of the Basque language and folk songs had a tremendous influence on his life and music. You can hear the rhythm of the zortziko, a very distinctive Basque folk dance, in the first movement – rhythm is key to this whole work, the second movement Pantoum being based on a traditional Malaysian verse form in which the second and fourth lines of a stanza become the first and third lines of the next. The third movement is a passacaglia on the piano’s opening eight-bar theme in the bass: and the final animé, constantly alternating between time signatures over magical harmonics and trills drives towards a brilliant coda. And that, of course, is only part of Ravel’s genius. The inexorable weaving together of melodies and harmony: the shimmering atosmphere; the classically perfect form. At first, it attracted little notice – France was in chaos – but that didn’t last for long. Jean Marnold writes, on its publication in November 1915, “There is little in the musical repertoire that one can compare it with… No matter whether in writing technique, harmony, polyphony, rhythm or inspiration, everything is new, personal, totally original, and simple – of the simplicity which we are born with, which is our secret, and which constitutes the perfection of our masterworks.”
Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson
july 2020
5jul5:00 pmHome Series 1: OriginsConcert Chamber - Auckland Town Hall
Concert Details
Due to the temporary closure
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
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
may 2020
21may4:00 pmTectonic Echoes IISOUNZ Virtual Concert Series
Concert Details
We are pleased to be
Concert Details
We are pleased to be able to revisit our 2019 Tectonic Series via the SOUNZ Virtual Concerts series, recorded live in the beautiful North Atrium of Auckland Art Gallery by RNZ Concert.
The concerts are free and will remain on the SOUNZ concerts page for one week. After this we will provide a link for archival viewing indefinitely.
TECTONIC ECHOES II
Thursday 21st May, 4pmGillian Whitehead
Alfred Schnittke
Jeremy Mayall
Daniel Schnyder
TECTONIC ECHOES I – viewable via SOUNZ website archives after May 14th (link pending)
Time
(Thursday) 4:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Online
7may4:00 pmTectonic Echoes ISOUNZ Virtual Concert Series
Concert Details
We are pleased to be
Concert Details
We are pleased to be able to revisit our 2019 Tectonic Series via the SOUNZ Virtual Concerts series, recorded live in the beautiful North Atrium of Auckland Art Gallery by RNZ Concert.
The concerts are free and will remain on the SOUNZ concerts page for one week. After this we will provide a link for archival viewing indefinitely.
TECTONIC ECHOES I
Thursday 7th May, 4pmFrank Bridge
Martin Lodge
Ross Harris
Rebecca Clarke
See also:
TECTONIC ECHOES II
Thursday 21st May, 4pmGillian Whitehead
Alfred Schnittke
Jeremy Mayall
Daniel SchnyderTime
(Thursday) 4:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Online
april 2020
30apr7:00 pmAsian composers league festivalCANCELLED
Concert Details
Due to Coronavirus
Concert Details
Due to Coronavirus restrictions, this event has been cancelled until 2022.
The Composers Association of New Zealand (CANZ) will proudly host the ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music) World New Music Days in Auckland and Christchurch in April 2020.
Composers, performers and music presenters from around the world will join New Zealand audiences at the World New Music Days: ISCM 2020. The festival will include concerts by local and international professional performing orchestras and ensembles, soloists, Māori performers, informal ensembles and collaborations, presenting a diverse range of contemporary music by New Zealand composers alongside new works contributed by the international members of the ISCM. An Asian Composers League (ACL) festival will run concurrently with the latter part of the ISCM event, and have a particular focus on the music of the Asia-Pacific region.
This will be the first time since the ISCM was established in 1922 that these annual events will occur in New Zealand, and only the second time it has been held in the southern hemisphere.
NZTrio performances:
‘Microcosm’ – 23 April 5:30pm, Q Theatre Loft, Auckland
‘Te Ihutai’ – 30 April 7:00pm, The Great Hall (Arts Centre), Christchurch
See full calendar of events here
Festival Passes will be available from 6 March 2020, single tickets will go on sale shortly after.
Time
(Thursday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Arts Centre of Christchurch
23apr5:30 pmNew World Music Days FestivalCANCELLED
Concert Details
Due to Coronavirus
Concert Details
Due to Coronavirus restrictions, this event has been cancelled until 2022.
The Composers Association of New Zealand (CANZ) will proudly host the ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music) World New Music Days in Auckland and Christchurch in April 2020.
Composers, performers and music presenters from around the world will join New Zealand audiences at the World New Music Days: ISCM 2020. The festival will include concerts by local and international professional performing orchestras and ensembles, soloists, Māori performers, informal ensembles and collaborations, presenting a diverse range of contemporary music by New Zealand composers alongside new works contributed by the international members of the ISCM. An Asian Composers League (ACL) festival will run concurrently with the latter part of the ISCM event, and have a particular focus on the music of the Asia-Pacific region.
This will be the first time since the ISCM was established in 1922 that these annual events will occur in New Zealand, and only the second time it has been held in the southern hemisphere.
NZTrio performances:
‘Microcosm’ – 23 April 5:30pm, Q Theatre Loft, Auckland
‘Te Ihutai’ – 30 April 7:00pm, The Great Hall (Arts Centre), Christchurch
See full calendar of events here
Festival Passes will be available from 6 March 2020, single tickets will go on sale shortly after.
Time
(Thursday) 5:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Loft at Q
305 Queen St Auckland 1011
18apr7:30 pmNCMA Celebration Series: OriginsCANCELLED
Concert Details
Due to Coronavirus
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
5apr7:30 pmHome Series 1: OriginsCANCELLED
Concert Details
Due to Coronavirus
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
2apr7:30 pmCowra Festival of UnderstandingCANCELLED
Concert Details
Due to Coronavirus
Concert Details
Due to Coronavirus restrictions, this concert has now been cancelled.
The NSW Central West town of Cowra holds an annual festival called the Cowra Festival of International Understanding.
Each year a guest nation is chosen and the town, in collaboration with local representatives of that nation, plans a program of events. This year’s guest nation is New Zealand.
We’re proud to musically represent Aotearoa with a programme full of NZ works representing diversity, love and understanding:
Cowan: Subtle Dances
Beethoven: Ghost
Psathas: Tarantismo
Ballard: Prema Lahari (world premiere)
Zemlinsky: Piano Trio
Click here for more information
Time
(Thursday) 7:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Cowra Civic Centre
Darling St., NSW, Australia
december 2019
15dec6:00 pmTectonic UprisingSunday Performance at AAG
Concert Details
NZTrio’s 2019 Tectonic series is
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
Time
(Sunday) 6:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Auckland Art Gallery
Wellesley Street East, Auckland, 1010
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
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
Time
(Wednesday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Mairangi Arts Centre
20 Hastings Rd, Mairangi Bay, Auckland
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
october 2019
21oct7:00 pmNZTrio Winners Concert: ImpetusImpetus: Auckland
Concert Details
What would you choose to
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
Ewan Collins (NZ; b. 1999)
University of Auckland / 3rd year
Tinnitus of a CityNoise 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 MicrobiomeMatakite 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
CaillteA 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 WhisperOne 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)rationalitySociety’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 HousingRetorts 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
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.
Time
(Tuesday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
ASB Theatre Marlborough
ASB Theatre Marlborough, 2 Hutcheson Street, Blenheim
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 sonThat’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 vigorosoOne 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
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
Time
(Sunday) 6:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Auckland Art Gallery
Wellesley Street East, Auckland, 1010
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 sonThat’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 vigorosoOne 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
11oct7:00 pmTectonic ImpactThe Sculptureum, Matakana
Concert Details
Frank Bridge (UK) Ross Harris (NZ) Rebecca
Concert Details
Frank Bridge (UK)
Ross Harris (NZ)
Rebecca Clarke (UK)
Alfred Schnittke (USSR)
Daniel Schnyder (USA)
Join NZTrio in the beautifully acoustic Miro Room at Matakana’s Sculptureum for an evening of live music, great wine and stunning artworks. Tectonic Impact is the second in a series examining the fundamental forces that shape environments and communities, focussing on Aotearoa New Zealand’s turbulent relationship with the UK, and the struggle between Cold War superpowers Russia and America.
In this episode, the English sounds of Frank Bridge and Rebecca Clarke are contrasted with a time-twisting work by NZ composer Ross Harris followed by 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.
Ticket includes a house beverage on arrival and complimentary refreshments with the musicians following the performance.
Ask about a special NZTrio concert dinner package special at Rothko’s 09 422 7375.
Approx. 75 mins, no interval
Time
(Friday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
The Scultpureum
40 Omaha Flats Rd, Matakana
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 Rebecca Clarke below)
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 sonThat’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. 9’
i. Moderato ma appassionato
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. Tonight we feature only the first movement, engaging as it is, in perfect classical sonata form.
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.
Frank BRIDGE (UK; 1879 – 1941): 3 Miniatures for Piano Trio, Set 2
ii. Intermezzo, c. 2’
Alfred SCHNITTKE (RUS; 1934 – 1998): Trio, c. 24’
i. Moderato
“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.
Tonight we hear the first of two movements, which is described as something 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.
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
july 2019
28jul4:00 pmToru Whā, Ka Rewa a MatarikiChristchurch Arts Festival
Concert Details
NZTrio in collaboration with Horomona
Concert Details
NZTrio in collaboration with Horomona Horo will perform Toru Whā, Ka Rewa a Matariki at the 2019 Christchurch Arts Festival. Toru Whā (for short) is a beautifully curated one-hour performance of works written especially for NZTrio by kiwi composers, celebrating and exploring the meaning of Matariki in modern day Aotearoa.
Captain Cook arrived on the shores of Aotearoa in 1769, marking this year the 250th anniversary of those first encounters between Māori and European. It presents an engagement between the two cultures illustrated by the combination of instrumentation (taonga pūoro and piano trio – firstly heard distinctly in dialogue and finally coming together as a unified ensemble), composers (Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead, Victoria Kelly, Martin Lodge, Richard Nunns, Jeremy Mayall, and Gareth Farr) performers (Amalia Hall, Somi Kim, Ashley Brown and Horomona Horo), music, culture, presentation and approach. This performance contemplates and invites discussion on those first encounters and the resulting effects on our culture, and also the significance of Matariki in our Aotearoa/New Zealand today.
Book tickets here
Concession $36 /Full $40
Time
(Sunday) 4:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
The Piano
156 Armagh Street, Christchurch, NZ
“Toru Whā, Ka Rewa a Matariki (Three Four, The Rise of Matariki) sees three of New Zealand’s most internationally renowned musicians — Amalia Hall (violin), Ashley Brown (cello), and Somi Kim (piano) — joined on-stage by taonga puoro master and composer, Horomona Horo.
The quartet will use instrumentation to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the arrival of Captain Cook, showing the engagement between two cultures. The exchange will start as a dialogue between taonga pūoro and piano trio, and end as a unified ensemble.
This beautifully curated collection of works features compositions from Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead, Victoria Kelly, Martin Lodge, Richard Nunns, Jeremy Mayall, and Gareth Farr.
NZTrio is renowned for its outstanding skill, diverse repertoire and vibrant Kiwi stage presence. In 2017, the group received the Vodafone NZ Music Award for Classical Artist of the Year.”
21jul3:30 pmToru Whā, Ka Rewa a MatarikiNapier
Concert Details
Chamber Music NZ presents NZTrio
Concert Details
Chamber Music NZ presents NZTrio in collaboration with Horomona Horo in Toru Whā, Ka Rewa a Matariki – a beautifully curated one-hour performance of works written especially for NZTrio by kiwi composers, celebrating and exploring the meaning of Matariki in modern day Aotearoa.
Captain Cook arrived on the shores of Aotearoa in 1769, marking this year the 250th anniversary of those first encounters between Māori and European. It presents an engagement between the two cultures illustrated by the combination of instrumentation (taonga pūoro and piano trio – firstly heard distinctly in dialogue and finally coming together as a unified ensemble), composers (Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead, Victoria Kelly, Martin Lodge, Richard Nunns, Jeremy Mayall, and Gareth Farr) performers (Amalia Hall, Somi Kim, Ashley Brown and Horomona Horo), music, culture, presentation and approach. This performance contemplates and invites discussion on those first encounters and the resulting effects on our culture, and also the significance of Matariki in our Aotearoa/New Zealand today.
FREE event
Time
(Sunday) 3:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
MTG Century Theatre
1 Tennyson Street Napier Hawkes Bay
20jul2:00 pmToru Whā, Ka Rewa a MatarikiPalmerston North
Concert Details
Chamber Music NZ presents NZTrio
Concert Details
Chamber Music NZ presents NZTrio in collaboration with Horomona Horo in Toru Whā, Ka Rewa a Matariki – a beautifully curated one-hour performance of works written especially for NZTrio by kiwi composers, celebrating and exploring the meaning of Matariki in modern day Aotearoa.
Captain Cook arrived on the shores of Aotearoa in 1769, marking this year the 250th anniversary of those first encounters between Māori and European. It presents an engagement between the two cultures illustrated by the combination of instrumentation (taonga pūoro and piano trio – firstly heard distinctly in dialogue and finally coming together as a unified ensemble), composers (Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead, Victoria Kelly, Martin Lodge, Richard Nunns, Jeremy Mayall, and Gareth Farr) performers (Amalia Hall, Somi Kim, Ashley Brown and Horomona Horo), music, culture, presentation and approach. This performance contemplates and invites discussion on those first encounters and the resulting effects on our culture, and also the significance of Matariki in our Aotearoa/New Zealand today.
FREE event
Time
(Saturday) 2:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Te Manawa Museum
326 Main St, Palmerston North
19jul7:00 pmToru Whā, Ka Rewa a MatarikiNew Plymouth
Concert Details
Chamber Music NZ presents NZTrio
Concert Details
Chamber Music NZ presents NZTrio in collaboration with Horomona Horo in Toru Whā, Ka Rewa a Matariki – a beautifully curated one-hour performance of works written especially for NZTrio by kiwi composers, celebrating and exploring the meaning of Matariki in modern day Aotearoa.
Captain Cook arrived on the shores of Aotearoa in 1769, marking this year the 250th anniversary of those first encounters between Māori and European. It presents an engagement between the two cultures illustrated by the combination of instrumentation (taonga pūoro and piano trio – firstly heard distinctly in dialogue and finally coming together as a unified ensemble), composers (Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead, Victoria Kelly, Martin Lodge, Richard Nunns, Jeremy Mayall, and Gareth Farr) performers (Amalia Hall, Somi Kim, Ashley Brown and Horomona Horo), music, culture, presentation and approach. This performance contemplates and invites discussion on those first encounters and the resulting effects on our culture, and also the significance of Matariki in our Aotearoa/New Zealand today.
FREE event
Time
(Friday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Puke Ariki
1 Ariki St, New Plymouth
16jul7:00 pmTectonic ShiftTuesday Performance at Q Theatre
Concert Details
Frank Bridge (UK) Allegretto Gillian Whitehead
Concert Details
Frank Bridge (UK) Allegretto
Gillian Whitehead (NZ) Te waka o te rangi (new commission)
Frank Bridge (UK) Gavotte
Michael Norris (NZ) dirty pixels
James MacMillan (UK) Piano Trio No.2
Jennifer Higdon (USA) Pale Yellow and Fiery Red
Anton Arensky (Russia) Piano Trio No.1 in d minor
Tectonic Shift sets sail aboard the Endeavour embarking on a huge journey across oceans with the sounds of English parlour music in our ears – Bridge’s Allegretto – and arrive on these shores to the startling sounds of taonga pūoro. The music that follows is NZTrio’s very latest commission, from Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead and is a melding of cultures that contemplates those first encounters between Māori and European through the lens of music – European instruments responding with open understanding and consideration to the uniquely Māori sounds that prevailed earlier. It’s a contemplation of worlds colliding.
The brief jaunt back into a very British sound of Cook’s homeland – a second miniature from Bridge, this time his Gavotte – is comically jarring. We immediately return home to Aotearoa/New Zealand to experience a culmination of historical musical development in this country by way of NZTrio’s first ever commission, Michael Norris’ dirty pixels, all skittering murmurs and bongo beats.
Then, for dynamic perspective, we cross back to the UK to compare with a jaunty new work from those shores by Scottish composer James MacMillan.
The interval gives us time to catch our collective breath from that busy musical migration, contemplate the quantum shift we’ve just experienced, and summon our strength for the arm wrestle that lies ahead: two cold war superpowers struggling for dominance. USA’s ambassador Jennifer Higdon presents a colourful argument – calm and reason giving way to determined energy and unstoppable momentum. Russia’s emissary Anton Arensky summons up a famously impassioned speech – intense, heart-wrenching, darkly romantic. There is no winner.
Tickets $50 Adults / $25 Students
Time
(Tuesday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Loft at Q
305 Queen St Auckland 1011
Frank BRIDGE (UK; 1879 – 1941): 3 Miniatures for Piano Trio, Set 1
2. Gavotte
3. Allegretto con moto
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 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.
Dame Gillian WHITEHEAD (NZ; b.1941): Te waka o te rangi (new commission)
Te waka o te rangiis a waka in the sky, whose prow is the constellation matariki, and whose stern is Tautoru, the belt of Orion. Every night the captain, the star Taramainuku, trawls with his net to collect the souls of the people who had died that day, and, when Matariki sets in May, takes them to the underworld. When Matariki rises again, the souls are released to the heavens as stars.
This is one of the stories that was in my mind when I was writing this piece, but there are others. For instance, Tawhirimatea, the god of winds, was so upset by the separation of his parents, Ranginui and Papatuanuku, that he tore out his eyes and threw them into the sky where they became the constellation Matariki, while Tawhirimatea thrashed blindly round the sky, unable to see.
The clarity or otherwise of the nine stars of Matariki predicts the quality of the forthcoming harvest. My piece responds to Horomona Horo’s waiata, for koauau ponga iho (gourd nose flute) which precedes it, and I have also quoted the refrain of a piece for solo voice (Matariki) which I wrote some time ago. the text roughly translates as:
‘People gather to prepare the land, preparing mounds for kumara planting. It’s winter, the rainy season, pools lie everywhere. The small eyes of Matariki’.
Michael NORRIS (NZ; b. 1973): dirty pixels
In 1999 the Auckland artist Stella Brennan curated an exhibition of seven international artists at Victoria University’s Adam Art Gallery that “interrogated the anatomy of the pixel”, exploring the impact of digital culture on artistic practice. Michael, Head of Composition at the NZSM, has frequent occasion to visit: and he was inspired to write this partly by what he calls the “certain rough-hewn, gritty” nature of the New Zealand art featured, and by the music that he was listening to at the time – Wolfgang Rihm’s Jagden und Formen, that he describes as “an unremittingly wild and preposterous discourse of extremes.”
He called the work dirty pixels, after the exhibition, and continues:
“These two stimuli caused something of an aesthetic dilemma: leaving behind my rather French fondness for euphonious washes of sound, I became interested in the characteristics of roughness and raggedness, and in how a ‘pure’ conceptual scheme, such as the quite systematic construction I had formulated just prior to starting this piece, became ‘dirtied’ by intuition, by the exigencies of the material and by the reality of having it performed.
dirty pixelswas commissioned in 2003 by NZTrio, with funding from Creative New Zealand.
James MACMILLAN (UK; b. 1959): Piano Trio No.2
When James MacMillan shot to fame in the 1990s it was thanks to a pair of virtuoso show-stoppers, The Confessions of Isobel Gowdie and the piano concerto The Berserking, that cemented his reputation as a large-scale composer who could be relied upon to entertain audiences with massive orchestras at the Proms. Large sacred works followed, right up to his recent mass for the Pope: he’s a devout Catholic and lay Dominican, fiercely protective of the history of Catholicism in Scotland, and often speaks of the subliminal associations for him between music and faith and his life-long sense of the numinous. He’s a conductor, conducting the NZSO and the youth orchestra when he’s here in NZ and spending almost 10 years as Principal Conductor with the BBC Philharmonic: he’s a festival director; and in August 2019 he’s conducting a whole series of concerts at the Edinburgh International Festival for his 60th birthday.
It’s easy to forget that he also has a large body of chamber music. Over 40 works in total, including three string quartets, four piano quintets, and all sorts of things for mixed-ensemble inspired by the tumult of Scottish history or folk music. The two piano trios are almost twenty years apart, completely different in character: the first is sombre and intense, depicting the fourteen stations of the cross, where this one is playful and high-energy, inspired (as the composer describes it) by “a very fast, rollicking music-hall idea, quite clownish in character, alternating back and forth with a stately, lilting waltz theme.”
Jennifer HIGDON (USA; b. 1962): Pale Yellow and Fiery Red
“Can colours actually convey mood?”
That is the question that Higdon posed herself with these two works – part of a whole series of colour-inspired pieces that range from small piano trios like these (inspired by her favourite impressionist painters, Monet and Seurat) to her mammoth and enormously popular work for orchestra, Blue Cathedral. She loves colour: she grew up on a farm in the Appalachian mountains, with hippy parents and a father who was a commercial artist, surrounded by paintings, experimental film and 1960s rock music and folk – The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel – only coming to classical music quite late when her mother bought her a flute from a pawn shop when she was 15. She didn’t begin composing until she was 21.
Now, she is one of America’s most prolific and popular composers, a professor at Curtis, and winner of a number of awards including the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for music, two Grammies and Best World Premiere for her very first opera. It’s a style that is unabashedly accessible, as she says: “I believe wholeheartedly in melody. I believe in a clear pulse and a clear rhythm. You don’t need a PhD to understand my pieces.”
Anton ARENSKY (RUS; 1861 – 1906): Piano Trio No.1 in D minor, Op.32
I Allegro moderato
II Scherzo: Allegro molto
III Elegia: Adagio
IV Finale: Allegro non troppo
This lovely piano trio, Arensky’s best known work, is by no means the only lovely thing he ever wrote. Concertos, symphonies, three operas and a vast amount of chamber music, he would have earned the same place in history that he enjoyed in society – had it not been for his own teacher, Rimsky Korsakov, who was so powerful that his is still the last word on Wikipedia today. “In his youth Arensky did not escape some influence from me; later the influence came from Tchaikovsky. He will quickly be forgotten.”
Look into that further, though, and you will find that young Arensky was awarded the gold medal at the St Petersburg Conservatory, with top marks from Rimsky Korsakov every single year. We see him become the youngest professor ever hired in Moscow (he was 21): he was Rachmaninov’s teacher, and one of the finest pianists and conductors in the country; and one year after he wrote this trio, at the age of only 34, he was headhunted for the richest and most prestigious position in all Russia, Director of the Imperial Chapel, back in St Petersburg. Balakirev was retiring. And who, for the last 12 years, had his long-suffering assistant been? Rimsky Korsakov. But Balakirev chose Arensky. It seems that he was never forgiven.
Arensky composed this trio in the memory of Karl Davidov, who had recently died – the “Csar of cellists”, as he was known, and Director of the conservatory when Arensky was a student. But Arensky’s own father had been a cellist: impossible not to hear a tribute to them both in the utterly profound and nostalgic elegy, the heart of the piece. But of course, it opens with a flourish, and that sense of energy continues throughout, even through the lyrical passages (and there are lots of them, Arensky was wonderful at songs), before a totally drama-filled and brilliant finale.
Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson.
14jul5:00 pmTectonic ShiftSunday performance at Q Theatre
Concert Details
Frank Bridge (UK) Allegretto Gillian Whitehead
Concert Details
Frank Bridge (UK) Allegretto
Gillian Whitehead (NZ) Te waka o te rangi (new commission)
Frank Bridge (UK) Gavotte
Michael Norris (NZ) dirty pixels
James MacMillan (UK) Piano Trio No.2
Jennifer Higdon (USA) Pale Yellow and Fiery Red
Anton Arensky (Russia) Piano Trio No.1 in d minor
Tectonic Shift sets sail aboard the Endeavour embarking on a huge journey across oceans with the sounds of English parlour music in our ears – Bridge’s Allegretto – and arrive on these shores to the startling sounds of taonga pūoro. The music that follows is NZTrio’s very latest commission, from Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead and is a melding of cultures that contemplates those first encounters between Māori and European through the lens of music – European instruments responding with open understanding and consideration to the uniquely Māori sounds that prevailed earlier. It’s a contemplation of worlds colliding.
The brief jaunt back into a very British sound of Cook’s homeland – a second miniature from Bridge, this time his Gavotte – is comically jarring. We immediately return home to Aotearoa/New Zealand to experience a culmination of historical musical development in this country by way of NZTrio’s first ever commission, Michael Norris’ dirty pixels, all skittering murmurs and bongo beats.
Then, for dynamic perspective, we cross back to the UK to compare with a jaunty new work from those shores by Scottish composer James MacMillan.
The interval gives us time to catch our collective breath from that busy musical migration, contemplate the quantum shift we’ve just experienced, and summon our strength for the arm wrestle that lies ahead: two cold war superpowers struggling for dominance. USA’s ambassador Jennifer Higdon presents a colourful argument – calm and reason giving way to determined energy and unstoppable momentum. Russia’s emissary Anton Arensky summons up a famously impassioned speech – intense, heart-wrenching, darkly romantic. There is no winner.
Tickets $50 Adults / $25 Students
Time
(Sunday) 5:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Loft at Q
305 Queen St Auckland 1011
Frank BRIDGE (UK; 1879 – 1941): 3 Miniatures for Piano Trio, Set 1
2. Gavotte
3. Allegretto con moto
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 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.
Dame Gillian WHITEHEAD (NZ; b.1941): Te waka o te rangi (new commission)
Te waka o te rangiis a waka in the sky, whose prow is the constellation matariki, and whose stern is Tautoru, the belt of Orion. Every night the captain, the star Taramainuku, trawls with his net to collect the souls of the people who had died that day, and, when Matariki sets in May, takes them to the underworld. When Matariki rises again, the souls are released to the heavens as stars.
This is one of the stories that was in my mind when I was writing this piece, but there are others. For instance, Tawhirimatea, the god of winds, was so upset by the separation of his parents, Ranginui and Papatuanuku, that he tore out his eyes and threw them into the sky where they became the constellation Matariki, while Tawhirimatea thrashed blindly round the sky, unable to see.
The clarity or otherwise of the nine stars of Matariki predicts the quality of the forthcoming harvest. My piece responds to Horomona Horo’s waiata, for koauau ponga iho (gourd nose flute) which precedes it, and I have also quoted the refrain of a piece for solo voice (Matariki) which I wrote some time ago. the text roughly translates as:
‘People gather to prepare the land, preparing mounds for kumara planting. It’s winter, the rainy season, pools lie everywhere. The small eyes of Matariki’.
Michael NORRIS (NZ; b. 1973): dirty pixels
In 1999 the Auckland artist Stella Brennan curated an exhibition of seven international artists at Victoria University’s Adam Art Gallery that “interrogated the anatomy of the pixel”, exploring the impact of digital culture on artistic practice. Michael, Head of Composition at the NZSM, has frequent occasion to visit: and he was inspired to write this partly by what he calls the “certain rough-hewn, gritty” nature of the New Zealand art featured, and by the music that he was listening to at the time – Wolfgang Rihm’s Jagden und Formen, that he describes as “an unremittingly wild and preposterous discourse of extremes.”
He called the work dirty pixels, after the exhibition, and continues:
“These two stimuli caused something of an aesthetic dilemma: leaving behind my rather French fondness for euphonious washes of sound, I became interested in the characteristics of roughness and raggedness, and in how a ‘pure’ conceptual scheme, such as the quite systematic construction I had formulated just prior to starting this piece, became ‘dirtied’ by intuition, by the exigencies of the material and by the reality of having it performed.
dirty pixelswas commissioned in 2003 by NZTrio, with funding from Creative New Zealand.
James MACMILLAN (UK; b. 1959): Piano Trio No.2
When James MacMillan shot to fame in the 1990s it was thanks to a pair of virtuoso show-stoppers, The Confessions of Isobel Gowdie and the piano concerto The Berserking, that cemented his reputation as a large-scale composer who could be relied upon to entertain audiences with massive orchestras at the Proms. Large sacred works followed, right up to his recent mass for the Pope: he’s a devout Catholic and lay Dominican, fiercely protective of the history of Catholicism in Scotland, and often speaks of the subliminal associations for him between music and faith and his life-long sense of the numinous. He’s a conductor, conducting the NZSO and the youth orchestra when he’s here in NZ and spending almost 10 years as Principal Conductor with the BBC Philharmonic: he’s a festival director; and in August 2019 he’s conducting a whole series of concerts at the Edinburgh International Festival for his 60th birthday.
It’s easy to forget that he also has a large body of chamber music. Over 40 works in total, including three string quartets, four piano quintets, and all sorts of things for mixed-ensemble inspired by the tumult of Scottish history or folk music. The two piano trios are almost twenty years apart, completely different in character: the first is sombre and intense, depicting the fourteen stations of the cross, where this one is playful and high-energy, inspired (as the composer describes it) by “a very fast, rollicking music-hall idea, quite clownish in character, alternating back and forth with a stately, lilting waltz theme.”
Jennifer HIGDON (USA; b. 1962): Pale Yellow and Fiery Red
“Can colours actually convey mood?”
That is the question that Higdon posed herself with these two works – part of a whole series of colour-inspired pieces that range from small piano trios like these (inspired by her favourite impressionist painters, Monet and Seurat) to her mammoth and enormously popular work for orchestra, Blue Cathedral. She loves colour: she grew up on a farm in the Appalachian mountains, with hippy parents and a father who was a commercial artist, surrounded by paintings, experimental film and 1960s rock music and folk – The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel – only coming to classical music quite late when her mother bought her a flute from a pawn shop when she was 15. She didn’t begin composing until she was 21.
Now, she is one of America’s most prolific and popular composers, a professor at Curtis, and winner of a number of awards including the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for music, two Grammies and Best World Premiere for her very first opera. It’s a style that is unabashedly accessible, as she says: “I believe wholeheartedly in melody. I believe in a clear pulse and a clear rhythm. You don’t need a PhD to understand my pieces.”
Anton ARENSKY (RUS; 1861 – 1906): Piano Trio No.1 in D minor, Op.32
I Allegro moderato
II Scherzo: Allegro molto
III Elegia: Adagio
IV Finale: Allegro non troppo
This lovely piano trio, Arensky’s best known work, is by no means the only lovely thing he ever wrote. Concertos, symphonies, three operas and a vast amount of chamber music, he would have earned the same place in history that he enjoyed in society – had it not been for his own teacher, Rimsky Korsakov, who was so powerful that his is still the last word on Wikipedia today. “In his youth Arensky did not escape some influence from me; later the influence came from Tchaikovsky. He will quickly be forgotten.”
Look into that further, though, and you will find that young Arensky was awarded the gold medal at the St Petersburg Conservatory, with top marks from Rimsky Korsakov every single year. We see him become the youngest professor ever hired in Moscow (he was 21): he was Rachmaninov’s teacher, and one of the finest pianists and conductors in the country; and one year after he wrote this trio, at the age of only 34, he was headhunted for the richest and most prestigious position in all Russia, Director of the Imperial Chapel, back in St Petersburg. Balakirev was retiring. And who, for the last 12 years, had his long-suffering assistant been? Rimsky Korsakov. But Balakirev chose Arensky. It seems that he was never forgiven.
Arensky composed this trio in the memory of Karl Davidov, who had recently died – the “Csar of cellists”, as he was known, and Director of the conservatory when Arensky was a student. But Arensky’s own father had been a cellist: impossible not to hear a tribute to them both in the utterly profound and nostalgic elegy, the heart of the piece. But of course, it opens with a flourish, and that sense of energy continues throughout, even through the lyrical passages (and there are lots of them, Arensky was wonderful at songs), before a totally drama-filled and brilliant finale.
Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson.
12jul7:30 pmTectonic ShiftNelson Centre of Musical Arts
Concert Details
Tectonic Shift sets sail aboard
Concert Details
Tectonic Shift sets sail aboard the Endeavour embarking on a huge voyage across oceans with the sounds of English parlour music in our ears – Bridge’s Allegretto- and arrive on these shores to the startling sounds of taonga pūoro. The music that follows is NZTrio’s very latest commission, from Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead and is a melding of cultures that contemplates those first encounters between Māori and European through the lens of music – European instruments responding with open understanding and consideration to the uniquely Māori sounds that prevailed earlier. It’s a contemplation of worlds colliding.
Frank Bridge (UK) Allegretto
Gillian Whitehead (NZ) Te waka o te rangi (new commission)
Frank Bridge (UK) Gavotte
Michael Norris (NZ) dirty pixels
James MacMillan (UK) Piano Trio No.2
Jennifer Higdon (USA) Pale Yellow and Fiery Red
Anton Arensky (Russia) Piano Trio No.1 in d minor
Tickets $40 Adults / $30 Community Card Holders / $20 Students
Time
(Friday) 7:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Nelson Centre of Musical Arts
48 Nile St, Nelson
Frank BRIDGE (UK; 1879 – 1941): 3 Miniatures for Piano Trio, Set 1
2. Gavotte
3. Allegretto con moto
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 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.
Dame Gillian WHITEHEAD (NZ; b.1941): Te waka o te rangi (new commission)
Te waka o te rangiis a waka in the sky, whose prow is the constellation matariki, and whose stern is Tautoru, the belt of Orion. Every night the captain, the star Taramainuku, trawls with his net to collect the souls of the people who had died that day, and, when Matariki sets in May, takes them to the underworld. When Matariki rises again, the souls are released to the heavens as stars.
This is one of the stories that was in my mind when I was writing this piece, but there are others. For instance, Tawhirimatea, the god of winds, was so upset by the separation of his parents, Ranginui and Papatuanuku, that he tore out his eyes and threw them into the sky where they became the constellation Matariki, while Tawhirimatea thrashed blindly round the sky, unable to see.
The clarity or otherwise of the nine stars of Matariki predicts the quality of the forthcoming harvest. My piece responds to Horomona Horo’s waiata, for koauau ponga iho (gourd nose flute) which precedes it, and I have also quoted the refrain of a piece for solo voice (Matariki) which I wrote some time ago. the text roughly translates as:
‘People gather to prepare the land, preparing mounds for kumara planting. It’s winter, the rainy season, pools lie everywhere. The small eyes of Matariki’.
Michael NORRIS (NZ; b. 1973): dirty pixels
In 1999 the Auckland artist Stella Brennan curated an exhibition of seven international artists at Victoria University’s Adam Art Gallery that “interrogated the anatomy of the pixel”, exploring the impact of digital culture on artistic practice. Michael, Head of Composition at the NZSM, has frequent occasion to visit: and he was inspired to write this partly by what he calls the “certain rough-hewn, gritty” nature of the New Zealand art featured, and by the music that he was listening to at the time – Wolfgang Rihm’s Jagden und Formen, that he describes as “an unremittingly wild and preposterous discourse of extremes.”
He called the work dirty pixels, after the exhibition, and continues:
“These two stimuli caused something of an aesthetic dilemma: leaving behind my rather French fondness for euphonious washes of sound, I became interested in the characteristics of roughness and raggedness, and in how a ‘pure’ conceptual scheme, such as the quite systematic construction I had formulated just prior to starting this piece, became ‘dirtied’ by intuition, by the exigencies of the material and by the reality of having it performed.
dirty pixelswas commissioned in 2003 by NZTrio, with funding from Creative New Zealand.
James MACMILLAN (UK; b. 1959): Piano Trio No.2
When James MacMillan shot to fame in the 1990s it was thanks to a pair of virtuoso show-stoppers, The Confessions of Isobel Gowdie and the piano concerto The Berserking, that cemented his reputation as a large-scale composer who could be relied upon to entertain audiences with massive orchestras at the Proms. Large sacred works followed, right up to his recent mass for the Pope: he’s a devout Catholic and lay Dominican, fiercely protective of the history of Catholicism in Scotland, and often speaks of the subliminal associations for him between music and faith and his life-long sense of the numinous. He’s a conductor, conducting the NZSO and the youth orchestra when he’s here in NZ and spending almost 10 years as Principal Conductor with the BBC Philharmonic: he’s a festival director; and in August 2019 he’s conducting a whole series of concerts at the Edinburgh International Festival for his 60th birthday.
It’s easy to forget that he also has a large body of chamber music. Over 40 works in total, including three string quartets, four piano quintets, and all sorts of things for mixed-ensemble inspired by the tumult of Scottish history or folk music. The two piano trios are almost twenty years apart, completely different in character: the first is sombre and intense, depicting the fourteen stations of the cross, where this one is playful and high-energy, inspired (as the composer describes it) by “a very fast, rollicking music-hall idea, quite clownish in character, alternating back and forth with a stately, lilting waltz theme.”
Jennifer HIGDON (USA; b. 1962): Pale Yellow and Fiery Red
“Can colours actually convey mood?”
That is the question that Higdon posed herself with these two works – part of a whole series of colour-inspired pieces that range from small piano trios like these (inspired by her favourite impressionist painters, Monet and Seurat) to her mammoth and enormously popular work for orchestra, Blue Cathedral. She loves colour: she grew up on a farm in the Appalachian mountains, with hippy parents and a father who was a commercial artist, surrounded by paintings, experimental film and 1960s rock music and folk – The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel – only coming to classical music quite late when her mother bought her a flute from a pawn shop when she was 15. She didn’t begin composing until she was 21.
Now, she is one of America’s most prolific and popular composers, a professor at Curtis, and winner of a number of awards including the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for music, two Grammies and Best World Premiere for her very first opera. It’s a style that is unabashedly accessible, as she says: “I believe wholeheartedly in melody. I believe in a clear pulse and a clear rhythm. You don’t need a PhD to understand my pieces.”
Anton ARENSKY (RUS; 1861 – 1906): Piano Trio No.1 in D minor, Op.32
I Allegro moderato
II Scherzo: Allegro molto
III Elegia: Adagio
IV Finale: Allegro non troppo
This lovely piano trio, Arensky’s best known work, is by no means the only lovely thing he ever wrote. Concertos, symphonies, three operas and a vast amount of chamber music, he would have earned the same place in history that he enjoyed in society – had it not been for his own teacher, Rimsky Korsakov, who was so powerful that his is still the last word on Wikipedia today. “In his youth Arensky did not escape some influence from me; later the influence came from Tchaikovsky. He will quickly be forgotten.”
Look into that further, though, and you will find that young Arensky was awarded the gold medal at the St Petersburg Conservatory, with top marks from Rimsky Korsakov every single year. We see him become the youngest professor ever hired in Moscow (he was 21): he was Rachmaninov’s teacher, and one of the finest pianists and conductors in the country; and one year after he wrote this trio, at the age of only 34, he was headhunted for the richest and most prestigious position in all Russia, Director of the Imperial Chapel, back in St Petersburg. Balakirev was retiring. And who, for the last 12 years, had his long-suffering assistant been? Rimsky Korsakov. But Balakirev chose Arensky. It seems that he was never forgiven.
Arensky composed this trio in the memory of Karl Davidov, who had recently died – the “Csar of cellists”, as he was known, and Director of the conservatory when Arensky was a student. But Arensky’s own father had been a cellist: impossible not to hear a tribute to them both in the utterly profound and nostalgic elegy, the heart of the piece. But of course, it opens with a flourish, and that sense of energy continues throughout, even through the lyrical passages (and there are lots of them, Arensky was wonderful at songs), before a totally drama-filled and brilliant finale.
Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson.
11jul7:00 pmTectonic ShiftThe Arts Centre CHCH
Concert Details
Tectonic Shift sets sail aboard
Concert Details
Tectonic Shift sets sail aboard the Endeavour embarking on a huge voyage across oceans with the sounds of English parlour music in our ears – Bridge’s Allegretto- and arrive on these shores to the startling sounds of taonga pūoro. The music that follows is NZTrio’s very latest commission, from Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead and is a melding of cultures that contemplates those first encounters between Māori and European through the lens of music – European instruments responding with open understanding and consideration to the uniquely Māori sounds that prevailed earlier. It’s a contemplation of worlds colliding.
Frank Bridge (UK) Allegretto
Gillian Whitehead (NZ) Te waka o te rangi (new commission)
Frank Bridge (UK) Gavotte
Michael Norris (NZ) dirty pixels
James MacMillan (UK) Piano Trio No.2
Jennifer Higdon (USA) Pale Yellow and Fiery Red
Anton Arensky (Russia) Piano Trio No.1 in d minorTickets $40 Adults / $30 Friends of The Arts Centre / $20 Students
Time
(Thursday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
The Arts Centre
Frank BRIDGE (UK; 1879 – 1941): 3 Miniatures for Piano Trio, Set 1
2. Gavotte
3. Allegretto con moto
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 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.
Dame Gillian WHITEHEAD (NZ; b.1941): Te waka o te rangi (new commission)
Te waka o te rangiis a waka in the sky, whose prow is the constellation matariki, and whose stern is Tautoru, the belt of Orion. Every night the captain, the star Taramainuku, trawls with his net to collect the souls of the people who had died that day, and, when Matariki sets in May, takes them to the underworld. When Matariki rises again, the souls are released to the heavens as stars.
This is one of the stories that was in my mind when I was writing this piece, but there are others. For instance, Tawhirimatea, the god of winds, was so upset by the separation of his parents, Ranginui and Papatuanuku, that he tore out his eyes and threw them into the sky where they became the constellation Matariki, while Tawhirimatea thrashed blindly round the sky, unable to see.
The clarity or otherwise of the nine stars of Matariki predicts the quality of the forthcoming harvest. My piece responds to Horomona Horo’s waiata, for koauau ponga iho (gourd nose flute) which precedes it, and I have also quoted the refrain of a piece for solo voice (Matariki) which I wrote some time ago. the text roughly translates as:
‘People gather to prepare the land, preparing mounds for kumara planting. It’s winter, the rainy season, pools lie everywhere. The small eyes of Matariki’.
Michael NORRIS (NZ; b. 1973): dirty pixels
In 1999 the Auckland artist Stella Brennan curated an exhibition of seven international artists at Victoria University’s Adam Art Gallery that “interrogated the anatomy of the pixel”, exploring the impact of digital culture on artistic practice. Michael, Head of Composition at the NZSM, has frequent occasion to visit: and he was inspired to write this partly by what he calls the “certain rough-hewn, gritty” nature of the New Zealand art featured, and by the music that he was listening to at the time – Wolfgang Rihm’s Jagden und Formen, that he describes as “an unremittingly wild and preposterous discourse of extremes.”
He called the work dirty pixels, after the exhibition, and continues:
“These two stimuli caused something of an aesthetic dilemma: leaving behind my rather French fondness for euphonious washes of sound, I became interested in the characteristics of roughness and raggedness, and in how a ‘pure’ conceptual scheme, such as the quite systematic construction I had formulated just prior to starting this piece, became ‘dirtied’ by intuition, by the exigencies of the material and by the reality of having it performed.
dirty pixelswas commissioned in 2003 by NZTrio, with funding from Creative New Zealand.
James MACMILLAN (UK; b. 1959): Piano Trio No.2
When James MacMillan shot to fame in the 1990s it was thanks to a pair of virtuoso show-stoppers, The Confessions of Isobel Gowdie and the piano concerto The Berserking, that cemented his reputation as a large-scale composer who could be relied upon to entertain audiences with massive orchestras at the Proms. Large sacred works followed, right up to his recent mass for the Pope: he’s a devout Catholic and lay Dominican, fiercely protective of the history of Catholicism in Scotland, and often speaks of the subliminal associations for him between music and faith and his life-long sense of the numinous. He’s a conductor, conducting the NZSO and the youth orchestra when he’s here in NZ and spending almost 10 years as Principal Conductor with the BBC Philharmonic: he’s a festival director; and in August 2019 he’s conducting a whole series of concerts at the Edinburgh International Festival for his 60th birthday.
It’s easy to forget that he also has a large body of chamber music. Over 40 works in total, including three string quartets, four piano quintets, and all sorts of things for mixed-ensemble inspired by the tumult of Scottish history or folk music. The two piano trios are almost twenty years apart, completely different in character: the first is sombre and intense, depicting the fourteen stations of the cross, where this one is playful and high-energy, inspired (as the composer describes it) by “a very fast, rollicking music-hall idea, quite clownish in character, alternating back and forth with a stately, lilting waltz theme.”
Jennifer HIGDON (USA; b. 1962): Pale Yellow and Fiery Red
“Can colours actually convey mood?”
That is the question that Higdon posed herself with these two works – part of a whole series of colour-inspired pieces that range from small piano trios like these (inspired by her favourite impressionist painters, Monet and Seurat) to her mammoth and enormously popular work for orchestra, Blue Cathedral. She loves colour: she grew up on a farm in the Appalachian mountains, with hippy parents and a father who was a commercial artist, surrounded by paintings, experimental film and 1960s rock music and folk – The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel – only coming to classical music quite late when her mother bought her a flute from a pawn shop when she was 15. She didn’t begin composing until she was 21.
Now, she is one of America’s most prolific and popular composers, a professor at Curtis, and winner of a number of awards including the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for music, two Grammies and Best World Premiere for her very first opera. It’s a style that is unabashedly accessible, as she says: “I believe wholeheartedly in melody. I believe in a clear pulse and a clear rhythm. You don’t need a PhD to understand my pieces.”
Anton ARENSKY (RUS; 1861 – 1906): Piano Trio No.1 in D minor, Op.32
I Allegro moderato
II Scherzo: Allegro molto
III Elegia: Adagio
IV Finale: Allegro non troppo
This lovely piano trio, Arensky’s best known work, is by no means the only lovely thing he ever wrote. Concertos, symphonies, three operas and a vast amount of chamber music, he would have earned the same place in history that he enjoyed in society – had it not been for his own teacher, Rimsky Korsakov, who was so powerful that his is still the last word on Wikipedia today. “In his youth Arensky did not escape some influence from me; later the influence came from Tchaikovsky. He will quickly be forgotten.”
Look into that further, though, and you will find that young Arensky was awarded the gold medal at the St Petersburg Conservatory, with top marks from Rimsky Korsakov every single year. We see him become the youngest professor ever hired in Moscow (he was 21): he was Rachmaninov’s teacher, and one of the finest pianists and conductors in the country; and one year after he wrote this trio, at the age of only 34, he was headhunted for the richest and most prestigious position in all Russia, Director of the Imperial Chapel, back in St Petersburg. Balakirev was retiring. And who, for the last 12 years, had his long-suffering assistant been? Rimsky Korsakov. But Balakirev chose Arensky. It seems that he was never forgiven.
Arensky composed this trio in the memory of Karl Davidov, who had recently died – the “Csar of cellists”, as he was known, and Director of the conservatory when Arensky was a student. But Arensky’s own father had been a cellist: impossible not to hear a tribute to them both in the utterly profound and nostalgic elegy, the heart of the piece. But of course, it opens with a flourish, and that sense of energy continues throughout, even through the lyrical passages (and there are lots of them, Arensky was wonderful at songs), before a totally drama-filled and brilliant finale.
Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson.
june 2019
30jun1:00 pmToru Whā, Ka Rewa a MatarikiUpper Hutt
Concert Details
Chamber Music NZ presents NZTrio
Concert Details
Chamber Music NZ presents NZTrio in collaboration with Horomona Horo in Toru Whā, Ka Rewa a Matariki – a beautifully curated one-hour performance of works written especially for NZTrio by kiwi composers, celebrating and exploring the meaning of Matariki in modern day Aotearoa.
Captain Cook arrived on the shores of Aotearoa in 1769, marking this year the 250th anniversary of those first encounters between Māori and European. It presents an engagement between the two cultures illustrated by the combination of instrumentation (taonga pūoro and piano trio – firstly heard distinctly in dialogue and finally coming together as a unified ensemble), composers (Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead, Victoria Kelly, Martin Lodge, Richard Nunns, Jeremy Mayall, and Gareth Farr) performers (Amalia Hall, Somi Kim, Ashley Brown and Horomona Horo), music, culture, presentation and approach. This performance contemplates and invites discussion on those first encounters and the resulting effects on our culture, and also the significance of Matariki in our Aotearoa/New Zealand today.
FREE event
Time
(Sunday) 1:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Expressions Arts & Entertainment Centre
836 Fergusson Dr, Upper Hutt
29jun4:00 pmToru Whā, Ka Rewa a MatarikiWellington
Concert Details
Chamber Music NZ presents NZTrio
Concert Details
Chamber Music NZ presents NZTrio in collaboration with Horomona Horo in Toru Whā, Ka Rewa a Matariki – a beautifully curated one-hour performance of works written especially for NZTrio by kiwi composers, celebrating and exploring the meaning of Matariki in modern day Aotearoa.
Captain Cook arrived on the shores of Aotearoa in 1769, marking this year the 250th anniversary of those first encounters between Māori and European. It presents an engagement between the two cultures illustrated by the combination of instrumentation (taonga pūoro and piano trio – firstly heard distinctly in dialogue and finally coming together as a unified ensemble), composers (Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead, Victoria Kelly, Martin Lodge, Richard Nunns, Jeremy Mayall, and Gareth Farr) performers (Amalia Hall, Somi Kim, Ashley Brown and Horomona Horo), music, culture, presentation and approach. This performance contemplates and invites discussion on those first encounters and the resulting effects on our culture, and also the significance of Matariki in our Aotearoa/New Zealand today.
FREE event
Time
(Saturday) 4:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Wellington Museum
3 Jervois Quay, Wellington
9jun5:00 pmThe Americasat the Leigh Sawmill Cafe
Concert Details
Ashley welcomes back Andrew Beer
Concert Details
Ashley welcomes back Andrew Beer (violin) and Stephen De Pledge (piano) for one last 2019 outing of The Americas – this time in the cosy company of winter wood-burners, craft beer, and stone oven pizzas at the Leigh Sawmill Cafe.
With elements of New York nightlife, the wild west, jazzy blues, and a liberal dose of spice from south o’ the border, it’s classical music, but it’s wearing boots to the party so dress casual, bring a compadre, and enjoy the ride.
Music by Kenji Bunch, Jack Body, Paul Schoenfield, Gunther Schuller, Raimundo Penaforte, Astor Piazzolla and New Zealand’s own Claire Cowan. Those of you who loved Exotica will not want to miss The Americas! Approx. 60 mins, no interval.
$30 Adults/$15 Students
Ring the cafe ahead of time to book a table 09-422 6019
Door sales available
Verbal introductions replace printed programmes
Time
(Sunday) 5:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Leigh Sawmill Cafe
142 Pakiri Rd, Leigh
march 2019
31mar5:00 pmThe AmericasTe Uru Waitakere Art Gallery
Concert Details
To experience top-notch classical musicianship
Concert Details
To experience top-notch classical musicianship – minus the formalities – catch our performance of The Americas live at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery on Sunday March 31st as part of the Titirangi Festival of Music.
Ashley welcomes back Andrew Beer (violin) and Stephen De Pledge (piano) for a ripper of a programme with elements of New York nightlife, the wild west, jazzy blues, plus a liberal dose of spice from south o’ the border. It’s classical music, but it’s wearing boots to the party so dress casual, bring a compadre, and enjoy the ride.
Music by Kenji Bunch, Paul Schoenfield, Gunther Schuller, Raimundo Penaforte, Astor Piazzolla and New Zealand’s own Claire Cowan and Jack Body. Set amongst Gavin Hipkins’ The Homely II exhibition of photographic works, this is an Art3 (art to the power of 3) experience, bringing powerful sound elements to themes that explore place and time. Those of you who loved Exotica will not want to miss The Americas! Places are limited.
Complimentary wine and nibbles with the musicians following the performance.
Concert duration approximately 80 mins., no interval.
Tickets via Eventfinda – book here
$40 Adults / $25 Locals / $20 Students
(booking fees apply)
Time
(Sunday) 5:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Te Uru Waitakere Art Gallery
420 Titirangi Rd., Titirangi
There are no printed programme notes for this series. All works will be introduced verbally from the stage in keeping with the casual nature of the evening.
24mar5:00 pmThe AmericasNathan Homestead
Concert Details
To experience top-notch classical musicianship
Concert Details
To experience top-notch classical musicianship – minus the formalities – catch our performance of The Americas live in the intimate art deco salons of Nathan Homestead on Sunday March 24th. Special locals rate for Manurewa residents.
Ashley welcomes back Andrew Beer (violin) and Stephen De Pledge (piano) for a ripper of a programme with elements of New York nightlife, the wild west, jazzy blues, plus a liberal dose of spice from south o’ the border. It’s classical music, but it’s wearing boots to the party so dress casual, bring a compadre, and enjoy the ride.
Music by Kenji Bunch, Paul Schoenfield, Gunther Schuller, Raimundo Penaforte, Astor Piazzolla and New Zealand’s own Claire Cowan and Jack Body. Those of you who loved Exotica will not want to miss The Americas! Places are limited.
Complimentary wine and nibbles with the musicians following the performance.
Concert duration approx. 80 mins., no interval
Tickets via Eventfinda – click here to book
$40 Adults / $25 Locals / $20 Students
(booking fees apply)
Time
(Sunday) 5:00 pm uTC+12:00
Location
Nathan Homestead
70 Hill Road, Manurewa, Auckland
There are no printed programmes for this concert as all works will be introduced verbally from the stage in keeping with the casual format.
17mar2:00 pmThe AmericasThames Music Society
Concert Details
To experience top-notch classical musicianship
Concert Details
To experience top-notch classical musicianship – minus the formalities – catch our performance of The Americas live at the Thames Music Group’s home base – St Georges Church, March 17th.
Ashley Brown (cello) welcomes back Andrew Beer (violin) and Stephen De Pledge (piano) for a ripper of a programme with elements of New York nightlife, the wild west, jazzy blues, plus a liberal dose of spice from south o’ the border. It’s classical music, but it’s wearing boots to the party so dress casual, bring a compadre, and enjoy the ride.
Music by Kenji Bunch, Paul Schoenfield, Gunther Schuller, Raimundo Penaforte, Astor Piazzolla and New Zealand’s own Claire Cowan and Jack Body. Those of you who loved Exotica will not want to miss The Americas!
Concert duration approx. 80 mins, no interval.
Tickets $15 ($13 Thames Music Group Members) – Cash on the doorTime
(Sunday) 2:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
St Georges Church
Corner Mackay St. & Mary St.
There are no printed programmes for this concert as all works will be verbally introduced from the stage in keeping with the casual nature of the series.
16mar7:00 pmThe AmericasMairangi Arts Centre
Concert Details
To experience top-notch classical musicianship
Concert Details
To experience top-notch classical musicianship – minus the formalities – catch our performance of The Americas live in the intimate and welcoming main gallery at Mairangi Arts Centre on Saturday March 16th.
Ashley Brown (cello) welcomes back Andrew Beer (violin) and Stephen De Pledge (piano) for a ripper of a programme with elements of New York nightlife, the wild west, jazzy blues, plus a liberal dose of spice from south o’ the border. It’s classical music, but it’s wearing boots to the party so dress casual, bring a compadre, and enjoy the ride.
Music by Kenji Bunch, Paul Schoenfield, Gunther Schuller, Raimundo Penaforte, Astor Piazzolla and New Zealand’s own Claire Cowan and Jack Body. Up close and powerful, this is an Art3 (art to the power of 3) experience set amidst the Portraiture exhibition exploring diplomatic relations and the broader themes of cultural identity. Those of you who loved Exotica will not want to miss The Americas!
Places are limited.
Complimentary wine and nibbles with the musicians following the performance.
Concert duration approx. 80 mins., no interval.
Tickets via Eventfinda – click here to book
$40 Adults / $30 MAC Friends / $20 Students
(booking fees apply)
Time
(Saturday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Mairangi Arts Centre
20 Hastings Rd, Mairangi Bay, Auckland
There are no printed programme notes for this concert as all works will be introduced verbally from the stage in keeping with the casual nature of the series.
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NZTrioSunday, January 3rd, 2021 at 7:18am
Happy New Year to you! Hope you're having a wonderful summer break. In case you're missing us 😂😂😂 and need a musical fix - you can still purchase tickets (only $20) to our online Tait Tuesdays at Home concert until May 24th 2021. Enjoy! https://bit.ly/371ur1c
#Zemlinsky #Cowan #Greig #Hindson
#Zemlinsky #Cowan #Greig #Hindson
NZTrioSaturday, December 19th, 2020 at 8:44am
Check out our final broadcast of the year. Our December HighNotes has our summer plans and some 2021 dates to pop into your calendar. Happy Xmas to you all! 🎄❤️
https://mailchi.mp/b76046c8b28a/nztrio-highnotes-dec2020-3581372
https://mailchi.mp/b76046c8b28a/nztrio-highnotes-dec2020-3581372
NZTrioWednesday, December 16th, 2020 at 10:05am
Looking forward to this exciting collaboration in next year's Auckland Arts Festival. Sharing the love (of the arts!) 🥰
https://boosted.org.nz/projects/subtle-dances
https://boosted.org.nz/projects/subtle-dances

Subtle Dances
Three new, exciting homegrown ballets performed by the BalletCollective Aotearoa, alongside the fabulous NZTrio.
boosted.org.nz