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.
november 2018
13nov7:00 pm- 9:00 pmLoft Series 3: TwineAuckland Tuesday performance
Concert Details
Twine GLASS • SCHUMANN • HINDSON
Concert Details
Twine
GLASS • SCHUMANN • HINDSON • ORAM • BRAHMS
Ashley Brown (cello) with guest musicians Amalia Hall (violin) and Somi Kim (piano)In the finale of the series, Twine knits together the linear sway from Philip Glass(USA) and the refreshing new pluck and spin from Matthew Hindson (AUS), with a new commission from Celeste Oram (NZ). Robert Schumann (GER) and Johannes Brahms (GER) deliver lashings of romantic sentimentality, outpourings from their lives entwined.
Programme 90 minutes plus interval:
Philip Glass (USA): Mishima
Robert Schumann (GER): Piano Trio No.2 in F Major
Matthew Hindson (AUS): Rush
~
Celeste Oram (NZ): the naming of waters (new commission)
Johannes Brahms (GER): Piano Trio No.1 in B Major, Op 8
TICKETS: $50 Adults / $25 Students
Time
(Tuesday) 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Loft at Q
305 Queen St Auckland 1011
Philip Glass (USA; b. 1937): String Quartet No.3 (Mishima), c. 3’
vi. Mishima/Closing
Arranged for piano trio, this 6th and final movement from Glass’s String Quartet No. 3 is a tribute to Yukio Mishima – a deeply loved figure in his native Japan, and an important figure in the world. Poet, playwright, actor, director and author of over 30 novels, he was also a militant nationalist who on 25 November, 1970, plunged a dagger into his abdomen in a ritual act of Seppuku, despairing at the loss of Japan’s dignity in the Second World War and having failed in his attempt at a coup d’etat. This music comes from the Paul Schrader movie Mishima, A Life in Four Chapters: “The value of a man appears in the moment in which life confronts death”.
Born and raised in Baltimore, Glass studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud before heading to Europe in search of new sounds. He joins ranks with Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones as understudies of the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and worked closely with composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 where he formed the Philip Glass Ensemble. Glass prefers ‘repetitive structures’ over the often-used term ‘minimalism’ when describing his musical style. His vast body of work encompasses ensemble work, ten symphonies, more than twenty operas, two piano concertos, a wide range of film soundtracks and animation (Fantasia), popular music, and a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with artists such as Twyla Tharp, Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, Paul Simon and David Bowie.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Robert Schumann (GER; 1810 – 1856): Piano Trio No.2 in F Major, c. 25’
i. Sehr lebhaft
ii. Mit innigem Ausdruck – Lebhaft “With earnestly affectionate expression.”
iii. In mässiger Bewegung
iv. Nicht zu rasch
The summer of 1847 was one of the happiest of Schumann’s life. The whole year had begun well, with an extensive concert tour for Clara, the pianist, and they had a wonderful spring in Prague before Schumann himself was received rapturously in Berlin – momentous for him, as for the first time, he was possibly even more famous than his wife. Then, for his birthday in the summer, they decided to holiday in the place where he grew up and spent his whole childhood – Zwickau, the ancient capital of the south west of Saxony, surrounded by the silver mines which made the town’s fortune and the forests and castles and the river. They took a house not far from where he had been born – Clara, Robert and their (so-far) three daughters – and he immediately, freed from the demons that had been plaguing him for years (tinnitus, phobias, nervous fits, apprehension of death), began to compose.
He chose piano trios, possibly as a rejoinder to Clara herself, who had had a great success with her own Piano Trio in G minor the previous year. The first, Schumann wrote, was born of “a time of gloomy moods,” while this F-major was “of a completely different character – it makes a breezier and more ingratiating impression.” It’s also, beautifully, entirely inspired by love. They had been married seven years by this stage, Robert was 37, Clara was just turning 28: they had (after their first son died age just one) three daughters; and despite Robert’s troubles – his demons had always been present in their marriage – it was just as passionate as when they first were courting. The first movement is vigorously bustling forth and reaches a climax when suddenly the piano drops into quiet arpeggios and the violin sings the second song from his Liederkreiscycle, written just at the time (May 1840) when they were struggling to be allowed to get married. The (Eichendorff) words go “I bear your beautiful likeness in the depths of my heart”: and just to make sure, he quotes another song for Clara from Frauenliebe und Leben, also from 1840, in the third movement.
Clara played for the premiere, and she later wrote of it, “It is one of the pieces of Robert’s that delights and warms the depths of my soul from beginning to end. I love it passionately, and would like to go on playing it again and again.”
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Matthew Hindson AM (AUS; b. 1968): Rush, c. 9’
Rush displays its own style unique to the composer, but inspired by Felix Mendelssohn. The fast and technically challenging passages found in the final movement of the Mendelssohn String Octet influenced Hindson’s decision to compose a work that is highly virtuosic in nature. The composer remarks, “it is much more the spirit of Mendelssohn’s string writing that was influential, particularly the last movements of his string quartets and the String Octet, rather than any sort of harmony or melodic invention.”
In addition to Mendelssohn, Hindson has also found inspiration in the popular music idiom. Popular and, in particular, ‘techno’ music and culture have played a large role in the development of Hindson’s musical style (with his other works displaying such titles as SPEED and Homage to Metallica), and Rush is no exception. The playful, up-beat and repetitive rhythms found in popular music are a prominent feature of this work making the work accessible to a wide audience. The playful nature of the music can also be considered as a reflection of the hedonistic nature of modern society, where a large emphasis is placed on the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment.
Hindson is one of the most frequently performed and commissioned Australian composers of his generation. His works have been featured at national and international festivals, with orchestras, and Musica Viva and by dance by companies such as the Birmingham Royal Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Ballett Schindowski and the Sydney Dance Company.
As well as composer, Matthew Hindson is Chair of the Composition Unit and associate professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music; he is Chair of the Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts; he has co-authored a book entitled Music Composition Toolbox, published by Science Press; and in 2006 was made a member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his contributions to music composition and music education.
His music often displays influences of popular music styles within a classical music context, and, as a result, directness and immediacy are common features in much of his music.
Programme note by Michelle Kennedy, abridged.
Celeste Oram (NZ; b. 1990): the naming of waters(new commission), c. 10’
the naming of waters is a genre-busting newly commissioned work more akin to performance art than chamber music. Using props and prompts by both musicians and audience, Celeste sets the tone with the following words:
SCENE: A burial. North Sea.
Three colours of a flag clattering.
Boat heaving and pitching. Ashes fly in
faces and cling to clothes. Flowers tossed
overboard and bruised by churning.
Trio of hired musicians on deck. Despite
best solemnities, losing battle with wind to
keep bows on strings or fingers on keys. All
things wooden prone to creaking in sympathy
with the hull. Voices are swallowed.
Indelicate seagulls.
Engine cuts. Flag droops. Bells toll for the
dead. Boat turns and follows its wake home.
The ghost boat continues course toward open
sea. Music drifts, grows fainter, until it
can no longer be heard on the wind from
shore.
Celeste was born in Manhattan, learned to walk and talk in London, grew up in Auckland, and is presently based in Southern California. Her work investigates new media and strategies for musical notation: namely, video and audio scores and has been performed and recorded by numerous notable ensembles across the USA, New Zealand and Australia. Celeste was the Auckland Philharmonia’s Rising Star young composer-in-residence (2013/14); her commissioned orchestral work macropsiawas selected as a finalist in the 2014 SOUNZ Contemporary Award for excellence in New Zealand contemporary composition; she performed her non-instrumental solo piece O I at the 2016 Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in Germany and was awarded the Kranichstein Prize for composition.
An ongoing project is the renovation of histories of New Zealand music and sonic cultures. At present, this revolves around research into early 20th-century ham radio activity, and the figure of Vera Wyse Munro (1897-1966). This project is rapidly snowballing into an obsession with building re-creations of early radio circuits. She is currently pursuing a PhD in music composition at the University of California San Diego, where she completed an MA in 2016. She completed a BMusBA with first-class Honours at the University of Auckland in 2012, studying with Eve de Castro-Robinson, John Elmsly, and Leonie Holmes.
Johannes Brahms (GER; 1833 – 1897): Piano Trio No.1 in B Major, Op. 8, c. 29’
i. Allegro con brio
ii. Scherzo: Allegro molto – Meno allegro – Tempo primo
iii. Adagio
iv. Finale: Allegro
In April 1853, Johannes Brahms set out on a concert tour of Germany with one of his friends. He was just about to turn 20, on May 7, and little did he know that he was about to get the best birthday present ever. When the two of them got to Hanover, Joseph Joachim was in the audience – Joachim the great violinist – and he was so impressed, that he offered to play a concert with Brahms to fundraise for the next part of his trip. But that was not all. Joachim also gave Brahms letters of introduction to Robert and Clara Schumann, who would go on to play such a massive part in his life. He arrived at their door on the last day of September, in Düsseldorf, and was immediately invited in and pressed to stay. Clara wrote in her diary that night: ‘Here is one of those who comes as if sent straight from God.’
1854 began in Hanover, celebrating the new year with Joachim again, and that’s when Brahms began this trio. It’s one of the few of his early works to escape being thrown in the fire (he was relentlessly self-critical). Yet the story does not end there. Over 30 years later, in 1889, Brahms had a complete edition of his works coming out and decided to revise the trio to tighten it up and temper its youthful extravagance. He was on summer vacation at the time, at the beautiful spa town of Bad Ischl in Austria, and he wrote to Clara: ‘With what childish amusement I whiled away the beautiful summer days you will never guess. I have rewritten my B major Trio…. It will not be as wild as before – but will it be better?’ Most people agree that it is – it is the most common version performed today. And yet, interestingly, Brahms never withdrew the original. Perhaps it’s because it’s the first work he ever showed Clara. The mystery over what exactly was the nature of their relationship endures to this day.
It begins softly and mysteriously on the piano before the cello enters with a beautiful singing theme that migrates to the other instruments and unfolds like the first movement of a symphony, incredibly rich in ideas. The impish scherzo bursts exuberantly through into the major in the middle, building in intensity and drama before the imps come back to bring the movement to a close. The adagio, preminiscent of his piano concertos, is one of the most serene and beautiful things that Brahms ever wrote: and the piano leads the finale to a magnificent minor climax, epic in scope.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
11nov5:00 pm- 7:00 pmLoft Series 3: TwineAuckland Sunday performance
Concert Details
Twine GLASS • SCHUMANN • HINDSON
Concert Details
Twine
GLASS • SCHUMANN • HINDSON • ORAM • BRAHMS
Ashley Brown (cello) with guest musicians Amalia Hall (violin) and Somi Kim (piano)In the finale of the series, Twine knits together the linear sway from Philip Glass(USA) and the refreshing new pluck and spin from Matthew Hindson (AUS), with a new commission from Celeste Oram (NZ). Robert Schumann (GER) and Johannes Brahms (GER) deliver lashings of romantic sentimentality, outpourings from their lives entwined.
Programme 90 mins plus interval:
Philip Glass (USA): Mishima
Robert Schumann (GER): Piano Trio No.2 in F Major (movement)
Matthew Hindson (AUS): Rush
~
Celeste Oram (NZ): the naming of waters (new commission)
Johannes Brahms (GER): Piano Trio No.1 in B Major, Op 8
TICKETS: $50 Adults / $25 Students
Time
(Sunday) 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Loft at Q
305 Queen St Auckland 1011
Philip Glass (USA; b. 1937): String Quartet No.3 (Mishima), c. 3’
vi. Mishima/Closing
Arranged for piano trio, this 6th and final movement from Glass’s String Quartet No. 3 is a tribute to Yukio Mishima – a deeply loved figure in his native Japan, and an important figure in the world. Poet, playwright, actor, director and author of over 30 novels, he was also a militant nationalist who on 25 November, 1970, plunged a dagger into his abdomen in a ritual act of Seppuku, despairing at the loss of Japan’s dignity in the Second World War and having failed in his attempt at a coup d’etat. This music comes from the Paul Schrader movie Mishima, A Life in Four Chapters: “The value of a man appears in the moment in which life confronts death”.
Born and raised in Baltimore, Glass studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud before heading to Europe in search of new sounds. He joins ranks with Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones as understudies of the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and worked closely with composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 where he formed the Philip Glass Ensemble. Glass prefers ‘repetitive structures’ over the often-used term ‘minimalism’ when describing his musical style. His vast body of work encompasses ensemble work, ten symphonies, more than twenty operas, two piano concertos, a wide range of film soundtracks and animation (Fantasia), popular music, and a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with artists such as Twyla Tharp, Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, Paul Simon and David Bowie.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Robert Schumann (GER; 1810 – 1856): Piano Trio No.2 in F Major, c. 25’
i. Sehr lebhaft
ii. Mit innigem Ausdruck – Lebhaft “With earnestly affectionate expression.”
iii. In mässiger Bewegung
iv. Nicht zu rasch
The summer of 1847 was one of the happiest of Schumann’s life. The whole year had begun well, with an extensive concert tour for Clara, the pianist, and they had a wonderful spring in Prague before Schumann himself was received rapturously in Berlin – momentous for him, as for the first time, he was possibly even more famous than his wife. Then, for his birthday in the summer, they decided to holiday in the place where he grew up and spent his whole childhood – Zwickau, the ancient capital of the south west of Saxony, surrounded by the silver mines which made the town’s fortune and the forests and castles and the river. They took a house not far from where he had been born – Clara, Robert and their (so-far) three daughters – and he immediately, freed from the demons that had been plaguing him for years (tinnitus, phobias, nervous fits, apprehension of death), began to compose.
He chose piano trios, possibly as a rejoinder to Clara herself, who had had a great success with her own Piano Trio in G minor the previous year. The first, Schumann wrote, was born of “a time of gloomy moods,” while this F-major was “of a completely different character – it makes a breezier and more ingratiating impression.” It’s also, beautifully, entirely inspired by love. They had been married seven years by this stage, Robert was 37, Clara was just turning 28: they had (after their first son died age just one) three daughters; and despite Robert’s troubles – his demons had always been present in their marriage – it was just as passionate as when they first were courting. The first movement is vigorously bustling forth and reaches a climax when suddenly the piano drops into quiet arpeggios and the violin sings the second song from his Liederkreiscycle, written just at the time (May 1840) when they were struggling to be allowed to get married. The (Eichendorff) words go “I bear your beautiful likeness in the depths of my heart”: and just to make sure, he quotes another song for Clara from Frauenliebe und Leben, also from 1840, in the third movement.
Clara played for the premiere, and she later wrote of it, “It is one of the pieces of Robert’s that delights and warms the depths of my soul from beginning to end. I love it passionately, and would like to go on playing it again and again.”
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Matthew Hindson AM (AUS; b. 1968): Rush, c. 9’
Rush displays its own style unique to the composer, but inspired by Felix Mendelssohn. The fast and technically challenging passages found in the final movement of the Mendelssohn String Octet influenced Hindson’s decision to compose a work that is highly virtuosic in nature. The composer remarks, “it is much more the spirit of Mendelssohn’s string writing that was influential, particularly the last movements of his string quartets and the String Octet, rather than any sort of harmony or melodic invention.”
In addition to Mendelssohn, Hindson has also found inspiration in the popular music idiom. Popular and, in particular, ‘techno’ music and culture have played a large role in the development of Hindson’s musical style (with his other works displaying such titles as SPEED and Homage to Metallica), and Rush is no exception. The playful, up-beat and repetitive rhythms found in popular music are a prominent feature of this work making the work accessible to a wide audience. The playful nature of the music can also be considered as a reflection of the hedonistic nature of modern society, where a large emphasis is placed on the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment.
Hindson is one of the most frequently performed and commissioned Australian composers of his generation. His works have been featured at national and international festivals, with orchestras, and Musica Viva and by dance by companies such as the Birmingham Royal Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Ballett Schindowski and the Sydney Dance Company.
As well as composer, Matthew Hindson is Chair of the Composition Unit and associate professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music; he is Chair of the Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts; he has co-authored a book entitled Music Composition Toolbox, published by Science Press; and in 2006 was made a member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his contributions to music composition and music education.
His music often displays influences of popular music styles within a classical music context, and, as a result, directness and immediacy are common features in much of his music.
Programme note by Michelle Kennedy, abridged.
Celeste Oram (NZ; b. 1990): the naming of waters(new commission), c. 10’
the naming of waters is a genre-busting newly commissioned work more akin to performance art than chamber music. Using props and prompts by both musicians and audience, Celeste sets the tone with the following words:
SCENE: A burial. North Sea.
Three colours of a flag clattering.
Boat heaving and pitching. Ashes fly in
faces and cling to clothes. Flowers tossed
overboard and bruised by churning.
Trio of hired musicians on deck. Despite
best solemnities, losing battle with wind to
keep bows on strings or fingers on keys. All
things wooden prone to creaking in sympathy
with the hull. Voices are swallowed.
Indelicate seagulls.
Engine cuts. Flag droops. Bells toll for the
dead. Boat turns and follows its wake home.
The ghost boat continues course toward open
sea. Music drifts, grows fainter, until it
can no longer be heard on the wind from
shore.
Celeste was born in Manhattan, learned to walk and talk in London, grew up in Auckland, and is presently based in Southern California. Her work investigates new media and strategies for musical notation: namely, video and audio scores and has been performed and recorded by numerous notable ensembles across the USA, New Zealand and Australia. Celeste was the Auckland Philharmonia’s Rising Star young composer-in-residence (2013/14); her commissioned orchestral work macropsiawas selected as a finalist in the 2014 SOUNZ Contemporary Award for excellence in New Zealand contemporary composition; she performed her non-instrumental solo piece O I at the 2016 Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in Germany and was awarded the Kranichstein Prize for composition.
An ongoing project is the renovation of histories of New Zealand music and sonic cultures. At present, this revolves around research into early 20th-century ham radio activity, and the figure of Vera Wyse Munro (1897-1966). This project is rapidly snowballing into an obsession with building re-creations of early radio circuits. She is currently pursuing a PhD in music composition at the University of California San Diego, where she completed an MA in 2016. She completed a BMusBA with first-class Honours at the University of Auckland in 2012, studying with Eve de Castro-Robinson, John Elmsly, and Leonie Holmes.
Johannes Brahms (GER; 1833 – 1897): Piano Trio No.1 in B Major, Op. 8, c. 29’
i. Allegro con brio
ii. Scherzo: Allegro molto – Meno allegro – Tempo primo
iii. Adagio
iv. Finale: Allegro
In April 1853, Johannes Brahms set out on a concert tour of Germany with one of his friends. He was just about to turn 20, on May 7, and little did he know that he was about to get the best birthday present ever. When the two of them got to Hanover, Joseph Joachim was in the audience – Joachim the great violinist – and he was so impressed, that he offered to play a concert with Brahms to fundraise for the next part of his trip. But that was not all. Joachim also gave Brahms letters of introduction to Robert and Clara Schumann, who would go on to play such a massive part in his life. He arrived at their door on the last day of September, in Düsseldorf, and was immediately invited in and pressed to stay. Clara wrote in her diary that night: ‘Here is one of those who comes as if sent straight from God.’
1854 began in Hanover, celebrating the new year with Joachim again, and that’s when Brahms began this trio. It’s one of the few of his early works to escape being thrown in the fire (he was relentlessly self-critical). Yet the story does not end there. Over 30 years later, in 1889, Brahms had a complete edition of his works coming out and decided to revise the trio to tighten it up and temper its youthful extravagance. He was on summer vacation at the time, at the beautiful spa town of Bad Ischl in Austria, and he wrote to Clara: ‘With what childish amusement I whiled away the beautiful summer days you will never guess. I have rewritten my B major Trio…. It will not be as wild as before – but will it be better?’ Most people agree that it is – it is the most common version performed today. And yet, interestingly, Brahms never withdrew the original. Perhaps it’s because it’s the first work he ever showed Clara. The mystery over what exactly was the nature of their relationship endures to this day.
It begins softly and mysteriously on the piano before the cello enters with a beautiful singing theme that migrates to the other instruments and unfolds like the first movement of a symphony, incredibly rich in ideas. The impish scherzo bursts exuberantly through into the major in the middle, building in intensity and drama before the imps come back to bring the movement to a close. The adagio, preminiscent of his piano concertos, is one of the most serene and beautiful things that Brahms ever wrote: and the piano leads the finale to a magnificent minor climax, epic in scope.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
10nov2:30 pm- 4:30 pmMERCURY BAY PRESENTS: TWINECooks Beach, Coromandel
Concert Details
Join NZTrio in beautiful Cooks
Concert Details
Join NZTrio in beautiful Cooks Beach, Coromandel on November 10th at the Morcom residence for an afternoon performance of Twine.
GLASS • SCHUMANN • HINDSON • ORAM • BRAHMS
Ashley Brown (cello) with guest musicians Amalia Hall (violin) and Somi Kim (piano)Twine knits together the linear sway from Philip Glass(USA) and the refreshing new pluck and spin from Matthew Hindson (AUS), with a new commission from Celeste Oram (NZ). Robert Schumann (GER) and Johannes Brahms (GER) deliver lashings of romantic sentimentality, outpourings from their lives entwined.
Programme approx. 90 mins hours plus interval:
Philip Glass (USA): Mishima
Robert Schumann (GER): Piano Trio No.2 in F Major
Matthew Hindson (AUS): Rush
~
Celeste Oram (NZ): the naming of waters (new commission)
Johannes Brahms (GER): Piano Trio No.1 in B Major, Op 8
TICKETS: $45 each
Bookings via Paper Plus Whitianga, 71 Albert St, Whitianga
Phone: 07 866 5698
Time
(Saturday) 2:30 pm - 4:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Morcom Residence
705 Purangi Road, Cooks Beach
Philip Glass (USA; b. 1937): String Quartet No.3 (Mishima), c. 3’
vi. Mishima/Closing
Arranged for piano trio, this 6th and final movement from Glass’s String Quartet No. 3 is a tribute to Yukio Mishima – a deeply loved figure in his native Japan, and an important figure in the world. Poet, playwright, actor, director and author of over 30 novels, he was also a militant nationalist who on 25 November, 1970, plunged a dagger into his abdomen in a ritual act of Seppuku, despairing at the loss of Japan’s dignity in the Second World War and having failed in his attempt at a coup d’etat. This music comes from the Paul Schrader movie Mishima, A Life in Four Chapters: “The value of a man appears in the moment in which life confronts death”.
Born and raised in Baltimore, Glass studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud before heading to Europe in search of new sounds. He joins ranks with Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones as understudies of the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and worked closely with composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 where he formed the Philip Glass Ensemble. Glass prefers ‘repetitive structures’ over the often-used term ‘minimalism’ when describing his musical style. His vast body of work encompasses ensemble work, ten symphonies, more than twenty operas, two piano concertos, a wide range of film soundtracks and animation (Fantasia), popular music, and a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with artists such as Twyla Tharp, Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, Paul Simon and David Bowie.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Robert Schumann (GER; 1810 – 1856): Piano Trio No.2 in F Major, c. 25’
i. Sehr lebhaft
ii. Mit innigem Ausdruck – Lebhaft “With earnestly affectionate expression.”
iii. In mässiger Bewegung
iv. Nicht zu rasch
The summer of 1847 was one of the happiest of Schumann’s life. The whole year had begun well, with an extensive concert tour for Clara, the pianist, and they had a wonderful spring in Prague before Schumann himself was received rapturously in Berlin – momentous for him, as for the first time, he was possibly even more famous than his wife. Then, for his birthday in the summer, they decided to holiday in the place where he grew up and spent his whole childhood – Zwickau, the ancient capital of the south west of Saxony, surrounded by the silver mines which made the town’s fortune and the forests and castles and the river. They took a house not far from where he had been born – Clara, Robert and their (so-far) three daughters – and he immediately, freed from the demons that had been plaguing him for years (tinnitus, phobias, nervous fits, apprehension of death), began to compose.
He chose piano trios, possibly as a rejoinder to Clara herself, who had had a great success with her own Piano Trio in G minor the previous year. The first, Schumann wrote, was born of “a time of gloomy moods,” while this F-major was “of a completely different character – it makes a breezier and more ingratiating impression.” It’s also, beautifully, entirely inspired by love. They had been married seven years by this stage, Robert was 37, Clara was just turning 28: they had (after their first son died age just one) three daughters; and despite Robert’s troubles – his demons had always been present in their marriage – it was just as passionate as when they first were courting. The first movement is vigorously bustling forth and reaches a climax when suddenly the piano drops into quiet arpeggios and the violin sings the second song from his Liederkreiscycle, written just at the time (May 1840) when they were struggling to be allowed to get married. The (Eichendorff) words go “I bear your beautiful likeness in the depths of my heart”: and just to make sure, he quotes another song for Clara from Frauenliebe und Leben, also from 1840, in the third movement.
Clara played for the premiere, and she later wrote of it, “It is one of the pieces of Robert’s that delights and warms the depths of my soul from beginning to end. I love it passionately, and would like to go on playing it again and again.”
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Matthew Hindson AM (AUS; b. 1968): Rush, c. 9’
Rush displays its own style unique to the composer, but inspired by Felix Mendelssohn. The fast and technically challenging passages found in the final movement of the Mendelssohn String Octet influenced Hindson’s decision to compose a work that is highly virtuosic in nature. The composer remarks, “it is much more the spirit of Mendelssohn’s string writing that was influential, particularly the last movements of his string quartets and the String Octet, rather than any sort of harmony or melodic invention.”
In addition to Mendelssohn, Hindson has also found inspiration in the popular music idiom. Popular and, in particular, ‘techno’ music and culture have played a large role in the development of Hindson’s musical style (with his other works displaying such titles as SPEED and Homage to Metallica), and Rush is no exception. The playful, up-beat and repetitive rhythms found in popular music are a prominent feature of this work making the work accessible to a wide audience. The playful nature of the music can also be considered as a reflection of the hedonistic nature of modern society, where a large emphasis is placed on the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment.
Hindson is one of the most frequently performed and commissioned Australian composers of his generation. His works have been featured at national and international festivals, with orchestras, and Musica Viva and by dance by companies such as the Birmingham Royal Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Ballett Schindowski and the Sydney Dance Company.
As well as composer, Matthew Hindson is Chair of the Composition Unit and associate professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music; he is Chair of the Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts; he has co-authored a book entitled Music Composition Toolbox, published by Science Press; and in 2006 was made a member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his contributions to music composition and music education.
His music often displays influences of popular music styles within a classical music context, and, as a result, directness and immediacy are common features in much of his music.
Programme note by Michelle Kennedy, abridged.
Celeste Oram (NZ; b. 1990): the naming of waters(new commission), c. 10’
the naming of waters is a genre-busting newly commissioned work more akin to performance art than chamber music. Using props and prompts by both musicians and audience, Celeste sets the tone with the following words:
SCENE: A burial. North Sea.
Three colours of a flag clattering.
Boat heaving and pitching. Ashes fly in
faces and cling to clothes. Flowers tossed
overboard and bruised by churning.
Trio of hired musicians on deck. Despite
best solemnities, losing battle with wind to
keep bows on strings or fingers on keys. All
things wooden prone to creaking in sympathy
with the hull. Voices are swallowed.
Indelicate seagulls.
Engine cuts. Flag droops. Bells toll for the
dead. Boat turns and follows its wake home.
The ghost boat continues course toward open
sea. Music drifts, grows fainter, until it
can no longer be heard on the wind from
shore.
Celeste was born in Manhattan, learned to walk and talk in London, grew up in Auckland, and is presently based in Southern California. Her work investigates new media and strategies for musical notation: namely, video and audio scores and has been performed and recorded by numerous notable ensembles across the USA, New Zealand and Australia. Celeste was the Auckland Philharmonia’s Rising Star young composer-in-residence (2013/14); her commissioned orchestral work macropsiawas selected as a finalist in the 2014 SOUNZ Contemporary Award for excellence in New Zealand contemporary composition; she performed her non-instrumental solo piece O I at the 2016 Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in Germany and was awarded the Kranichstein Prize for composition.
An ongoing project is the renovation of histories of New Zealand music and sonic cultures. At present, this revolves around research into early 20th-century ham radio activity, and the figure of Vera Wyse Munro (1897-1966). This project is rapidly snowballing into an obsession with building re-creations of early radio circuits. She is currently pursuing a PhD in music composition at the University of California San Diego, where she completed an MA in 2016. She completed a BMusBA with first-class Honours at the University of Auckland in 2012, studying with Eve de Castro-Robinson, John Elmsly, and Leonie Holmes.
Johannes Brahms (GER; 1833 – 1897): Piano Trio No.1 in B Major, Op. 8, c. 29’
i. Allegro con brio
ii. Scherzo: Allegro molto – Meno allegro – Tempo primo
iii. Adagio
iv. Finale: Allegro
In April 1853, Johannes Brahms set out on a concert tour of Germany with one of his friends. He was just about to turn 20, on May 7, and little did he know that he was about to get the best birthday present ever. When the two of them got to Hanover, Joseph Joachim was in the audience – Joachim the great violinist – and he was so impressed, that he offered to play a concert with Brahms to fundraise for the next part of his trip. But that was not all. Joachim also gave Brahms letters of introduction to Robert and Clara Schumann, who would go on to play such a massive part in his life. He arrived at their door on the last day of September, in Düsseldorf, and was immediately invited in and pressed to stay. Clara wrote in her diary that night: ‘Here is one of those who comes as if sent straight from God.’
1854 began in Hanover, celebrating the new year with Joachim again, and that’s when Brahms began this trio. It’s one of the few of his early works to escape being thrown in the fire (he was relentlessly self-critical). Yet the story does not end there. Over 30 years later, in 1889, Brahms had a complete edition of his works coming out and decided to revise the trio to tighten it up and temper its youthful extravagance. He was on summer vacation at the time, at the beautiful spa town of Bad Ischl in Austria, and he wrote to Clara: ‘With what childish amusement I whiled away the beautiful summer days you will never guess. I have rewritten my B major Trio…. It will not be as wild as before – but will it be better?’ Most people agree that it is – it is the most common version performed today. And yet, interestingly, Brahms never withdrew the original. Perhaps it’s because it’s the first work he ever showed Clara. The mystery over what exactly was the nature of their relationship endures to this day.
It begins softly and mysteriously on the piano before the cello enters with a beautiful singing theme that migrates to the other instruments and unfolds like the first movement of a symphony, incredibly rich in ideas. The impish scherzo bursts exuberantly through into the major in the middle, building in intensity and drama before the imps come back to bring the movement to a close. The adagio, preminiscent of his piano concertos, is one of the most serene and beautiful things that Brahms ever wrote: and the piano leads the finale to a magnificent minor climax, epic in scope.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
8nov7:30 pm- 9:30 pmGreytown Music Group presents: TwineGreytown
Concert Details
Join NZTrio in the intimate
Concert Details
Join NZTrio in the intimate setting of Ed & Juliette Cooke’s home in Greytown for an evening of chamber music like the old days, presented by Greytown Music Group.
Thursday, 8th November 7:30pm
57 Wood Street, Greytown
$25 Adults / $10 Students
Tickets by phone reservation (evenings): Ed & Juliette 06 304 9497
Advance booking highly recommended!
PROGRAMME:
Approx. 90 minutes plus interval
Twine
Philip Glass: Mishima
Robert Schumann: Piano Trio No.2 in F Major
Matthew Hindson: Rush
~
Celeste Oram: the naming of waters (new commission)
Johannes Brahms: Piano Trio No.1 in B Major, Op 8Time
(Thursday) 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
House concert - Ed & Juliette Cooke
57 Wood Street, Greytown NZ
Philip Glass (USA; b. 1937): String Quartet No.3 (Mishima), c. 3’
vi. Mishima/Closing
Arranged for piano trio, this 6th and final movement from Glass’s String Quartet No. 3 is a tribute to Yukio Mishima – a deeply loved figure in his native Japan, and an important figure in the world. Poet, playwright, actor, director and author of over 30 novels, he was also a militant nationalist who on 25 November, 1970, plunged a dagger into his abdomen in a ritual act of Seppuku, despairing at the loss of Japan’s dignity in the Second World War and having failed in his attempt at a coup d’etat. This music comes from the Paul Schrader movie Mishima, A Life in Four Chapters: “The value of a man appears in the moment in which life confronts death”.
Born and raised in Baltimore, Glass studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud before heading to Europe in search of new sounds. He joins ranks with Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones as understudies of the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and worked closely with composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 where he formed the Philip Glass Ensemble. Glass prefers ‘repetitive structures’ over the often-used term ‘minimalism’ when describing his musical style. His vast body of work encompasses ensemble work, ten symphonies, more than twenty operas, two piano concertos, a wide range of film soundtracks and animation (Fantasia), popular music, and a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with artists such as Twyla Tharp, Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, Paul Simon and David Bowie.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Robert Schumann (GER; 1810 – 1856): Piano Trio No.2 in F Major, c. 25’
i. Sehr lebhaft
ii. Mit innigem Ausdruck – Lebhaft “With earnestly affectionate expression.”
iii. In mässiger Bewegung
iv. Nicht zu rasch
The summer of 1847 was one of the happiest of Schumann’s life. The whole year had begun well, with an extensive concert tour for Clara, the pianist, and they had a wonderful spring in Prague before Schumann himself was received rapturously in Berlin – momentous for him, as for the first time, he was possibly even more famous than his wife. Then, for his birthday in the summer, they decided to holiday in the place where he grew up and spent his whole childhood – Zwickau, the ancient capital of the south west of Saxony, surrounded by the silver mines which made the town’s fortune and the forests and castles and the river. They took a house not far from where he had been born – Clara, Robert and their (so-far) three daughters – and he immediately, freed from the demons that had been plaguing him for years (tinnitus, phobias, nervous fits, apprehension of death), began to compose.
He chose piano trios, possibly as a rejoinder to Clara herself, who had had a great success with her own Piano Trio in G minor the previous year. The first, Schumann wrote, was born of “a time of gloomy moods,” while this F-major was “of a completely different character – it makes a breezier and more ingratiating impression.” It’s also, beautifully, entirely inspired by love. They had been married seven years by this stage, Robert was 37, Clara was just turning 28: they had (after their first son died age just one) three daughters; and despite Robert’s troubles – his demons had always been present in their marriage – it was just as passionate as when they first were courting. The first movement is vigorously bustling forth and reaches a climax when suddenly the piano drops into quiet arpeggios and the violin sings the second song from his Liederkreiscycle, written just at the time (May 1840) when they were struggling to be allowed to get married. The (Eichendorff) words go “I bear your beautiful likeness in the depths of my heart”: and just to make sure, he quotes another song for Clara from Frauenliebe und Leben, also from 1840, in the third movement.
Clara played for the premiere, and she later wrote of it, “It is one of the pieces of Robert’s that delights and warms the depths of my soul from beginning to end. I love it passionately, and would like to go on playing it again and again.”
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Matthew Hindson AM (AUS; b. 1968): Rush, c. 9’
Rush displays its own style unique to the composer, but inspired by Felix Mendelssohn. The fast and technically challenging passages found in the final movement of the Mendelssohn String Octet influenced Hindson’s decision to compose a work that is highly virtuosic in nature. The composer remarks, “it is much more the spirit of Mendelssohn’s string writing that was influential, particularly the last movements of his string quartets and the String Octet, rather than any sort of harmony or melodic invention.”
In addition to Mendelssohn, Hindson has also found inspiration in the popular music idiom. Popular and, in particular, ‘techno’ music and culture have played a large role in the development of Hindson’s musical style (with his other works displaying such titles as SPEED and Homage to Metallica), and Rush is no exception. The playful, up-beat and repetitive rhythms found in popular music are a prominent feature of this work making the work accessible to a wide audience. The playful nature of the music can also be considered as a reflection of the hedonistic nature of modern society, where a large emphasis is placed on the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment.
Hindson is one of the most frequently performed and commissioned Australian composers of his generation. His works have been featured at national and international festivals, with orchestras, and Musica Viva and by dance by companies such as the Birmingham Royal Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Ballett Schindowski and the Sydney Dance Company.
As well as composer, Matthew Hindson is Chair of the Composition Unit and associate professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music; he is Chair of the Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts; he has co-authored a book entitled Music Composition Toolbox, published by Science Press; and in 2006 was made a member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his contributions to music composition and music education.
His music often displays influences of popular music styles within a classical music context, and, as a result, directness and immediacy are common features in much of his music.
Programme note by Michelle Kennedy, abridged.
Celeste Oram (NZ; b. 1990): the naming of waters(new commission), c. 10’
the naming of waters is a genre-busting newly commissioned work more akin to performance art than chamber music. Using props and prompts by both musicians and audience, Celeste sets the tone with the following words:
SCENE: A burial. North Sea.
Three colours of a flag clattering.
Boat heaving and pitching. Ashes fly in
faces and cling to clothes. Flowers tossed
overboard and bruised by churning.
Trio of hired musicians on deck. Despite
best solemnities, losing battle with wind to
keep bows on strings or fingers on keys. All
things wooden prone to creaking in sympathy
with the hull. Voices are swallowed.
Indelicate seagulls.
Engine cuts. Flag droops. Bells toll for the
dead. Boat turns and follows its wake home.
The ghost boat continues course toward open
sea. Music drifts, grows fainter, until it
can no longer be heard on the wind from
shore.
Celeste was born in Manhattan, learned to walk and talk in London, grew up in Auckland, and is presently based in Southern California. Her work investigates new media and strategies for musical notation: namely, video and audio scores and has been performed and recorded by numerous notable ensembles across the USA, New Zealand and Australia. Celeste was the Auckland Philharmonia’s Rising Star young composer-in-residence (2013/14); her commissioned orchestral work macropsiawas selected as a finalist in the 2014 SOUNZ Contemporary Award for excellence in New Zealand contemporary composition; she performed her non-instrumental solo piece O I at the 2016 Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in Germany and was awarded the Kranichstein Prize for composition.
An ongoing project is the renovation of histories of New Zealand music and sonic cultures. At present, this revolves around research into early 20th-century ham radio activity, and the figure of Vera Wyse Munro (1897-1966). This project is rapidly snowballing into an obsession with building re-creations of early radio circuits. She is currently pursuing a PhD in music composition at the University of California San Diego, where she completed an MA in 2016. She completed a BMusBA with first-class Honours at the University of Auckland in 2012, studying with Eve de Castro-Robinson, John Elmsly, and Leonie Holmes.
Johannes Brahms (GER; 1833 – 1897): Piano Trio No.1 in B Major, Op. 8, c. 29’
i. Allegro con brio
ii. Scherzo: Allegro molto – Meno allegro – Tempo primo
iii. Adagio
iv. Finale: Allegro
In April 1853, Johannes Brahms set out on a concert tour of Germany with one of his friends. He was just about to turn 20, on May 7, and little did he know that he was about to get the best birthday present ever. When the two of them got to Hanover, Joseph Joachim was in the audience – Joachim the great violinist – and he was so impressed, that he offered to play a concert with Brahms to fundraise for the next part of his trip. But that was not all. Joachim also gave Brahms letters of introduction to Robert and Clara Schumann, who would go on to play such a massive part in his life. He arrived at their door on the last day of September, in Düsseldorf, and was immediately invited in and pressed to stay. Clara wrote in her diary that night: ‘Here is one of those who comes as if sent straight from God.’
1854 began in Hanover, celebrating the new year with Joachim again, and that’s when Brahms began this trio. It’s one of the few of his early works to escape being thrown in the fire (he was relentlessly self-critical). Yet the story does not end there. Over 30 years later, in 1889, Brahms had a complete edition of his works coming out and decided to revise the trio to tighten it up and temper its youthful extravagance. He was on summer vacation at the time, at the beautiful spa town of Bad Ischl in Austria, and he wrote to Clara: ‘With what childish amusement I whiled away the beautiful summer days you will never guess. I have rewritten my B major Trio…. It will not be as wild as before – but will it be better?’ Most people agree that it is – it is the most common version performed today. And yet, interestingly, Brahms never withdrew the original. Perhaps it’s because it’s the first work he ever showed Clara. The mystery over what exactly was the nature of their relationship endures to this day.
It begins softly and mysteriously on the piano before the cello enters with a beautiful singing theme that migrates to the other instruments and unfolds like the first movement of a symphony, incredibly rich in ideas. The impish scherzo bursts exuberantly through into the major in the middle, building in intensity and drama before the imps come back to bring the movement to a close. The adagio, preminiscent of his piano concertos, is one of the most serene and beautiful things that Brahms ever wrote: and the piano leads the finale to a magnificent minor climax, epic in scope.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
7nov7:00 pm- 9:00 pmArt3: TwinePiecesNew Plymouth
Concert Details
TwinePieces GLASS • SCHUMANN • HINDSON
Concert Details
TwinePieces
GLASS • SCHUMANN • HINDSON • ORAM • BRAHMS
Ashley Brown (cello) with guest musicians Amalia Hall (violin) and Somi Kim (piano)
We’re heading to New Plymouth! TwinePieces (a condensed version of the full Twine programme) knits together the linear sway from Philip Glass and the refreshing new pluck and spin from Matthew Hindson, including an exciting new commission from New Zealand composer Celeste Oram. Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms deliver lashings of romantic sentimentality, outpourings from their lives entwined.
Performing in architecturally stunning Len Lye Gallery, it will be an arts experience ‘to the power of 3’ (Art3). Join us for complimentary wine and nibbles following the performance.
Programme approx. 80 mins including interval
Philip Glass (USA): Mishima
Robert Schumann (GER): Piano Trio No. 2 in F Major (movement)
Matthew Hindson (AUS): Rush
Celeste Oram (NZ): the naming of waters (new commission)~
Johannes Brahms (GER): Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major, Op 8
TICKETS: $35 Adults / $15 Students and Friends of the Gallery
Time
(Wednesday) 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre
42 Queen Street, New Plymouth 4310
Philip Glass (USA; b. 1937): String Quartet No.3 (Mishima), c. 3’
vi. Mishima/Closing
Arranged for piano trio, this 6th and final movement from Glass’s String Quartet No. 3 is a tribute to Yukio Mishima – a deeply loved figure in his native Japan, and an important figure in the world. Poet, playwright, actor, director and author of over 30 novels, he was also a militant nationalist who on 25 November, 1970, plunged a dagger into his abdomen in a ritual act of Seppuku, despairing at the loss of Japan’s dignity in the Second World War and having failed in his attempt at a coup d’etat. This music comes from the Paul Schrader movie Mishima, A Life in Four Chapters: “The value of a man appears in the moment in which life confronts death”.
Born and raised in Baltimore, Glass studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud before heading to Europe in search of new sounds. He joins ranks with Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones as understudies of the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and worked closely with composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 where he formed the Philip Glass Ensemble. Glass prefers ‘repetitive structures’ over the often-used term ‘minimalism’ when describing his musical style. His vast body of work encompasses ensemble work, ten symphonies, more than twenty operas, two piano concertos, a wide range of film soundtracks and animation (Fantasia), popular music, and a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with artists such as Twyla Tharp, Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, Paul Simon and David Bowie.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Robert Schumann (GER; 1810 – 1856): Piano Trio No.2 in F Major, c. 25’
i. Sehr lebhaft
ii. Mit innigem Ausdruck – Lebhaft “With earnestly affectionate expression.”
iii. In mässiger Bewegung
iv. Nicht zu rasch
The summer of 1847 was one of the happiest of Schumann’s life. The whole year had begun well, with an extensive concert tour for Clara, the pianist, and they had a wonderful spring in Prague before Schumann himself was received rapturously in Berlin – momentous for him, as for the first time, he was possibly even more famous than his wife. Then, for his birthday in the summer, they decided to holiday in the place where he grew up and spent his whole childhood – Zwickau, the ancient capital of the south west of Saxony, surrounded by the silver mines which made the town’s fortune and the forests and castles and the river. They took a house not far from where he had been born – Clara, Robert and their (so-far) three daughters – and he immediately, freed from the demons that had been plaguing him for years (tinnitus, phobias, nervous fits, apprehension of death), began to compose.
He chose piano trios, possibly as a rejoinder to Clara herself, who had had a great success with her own Piano Trio in G minor the previous year. The first, Schumann wrote, was born of “a time of gloomy moods,” while this F-major was “of a completely different character – it makes a breezier and more ingratiating impression.” It’s also, beautifully, entirely inspired by love. They had been married seven years by this stage, Robert was 37, Clara was just turning 28: they had (after their first son died age just one) three daughters; and despite Robert’s troubles – his demons had always been present in their marriage – it was just as passionate as when they first were courting. The first movement is vigorously bustling forth and reaches a climax when suddenly the piano drops into quiet arpeggios and the violin sings the second song from his Liederkreiscycle, written just at the time (May 1840) when they were struggling to be allowed to get married. The (Eichendorff) words go “I bear your beautiful likeness in the depths of my heart”: and just to make sure, he quotes another song for Clara from Frauenliebe und Leben, also from 1840, in the third movement.
Clara played for the premiere, and she later wrote of it, “It is one of the pieces of Robert’s that delights and warms the depths of my soul from beginning to end. I love it passionately, and would like to go on playing it again and again.”
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Matthew Hindson AM (AUS; b. 1968): Rush, c. 9’
Rush displays its own style unique to the composer, but inspired by Felix Mendelssohn. The fast and technically challenging passages found in the final movement of the Mendelssohn String Octet influenced Hindson’s decision to compose a work that is highly virtuosic in nature. The composer remarks, “it is much more the spirit of Mendelssohn’s string writing that was influential, particularly the last movements of his string quartets and the String Octet, rather than any sort of harmony or melodic invention.”
In addition to Mendelssohn, Hindson has also found inspiration in the popular music idiom. Popular and, in particular, ‘techno’ music and culture have played a large role in the development of Hindson’s musical style (with his other works displaying such titles as SPEED and Homage to Metallica), and Rush is no exception. The playful, up-beat and repetitive rhythms found in popular music are a prominent feature of this work making the work accessible to a wide audience. The playful nature of the music can also be considered as a reflection of the hedonistic nature of modern society, where a large emphasis is placed on the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment.
Hindson is one of the most frequently performed and commissioned Australian composers of his generation. His works have been featured at national and international festivals, with orchestras, and Musica Viva and by dance by companies such as the Birmingham Royal Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Ballett Schindowski and the Sydney Dance Company.
As well as composer, Matthew Hindson is Chair of the Composition Unit and associate professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music; he is Chair of the Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts; he has co-authored a book entitled Music Composition Toolbox, published by Science Press; and in 2006 was made a member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his contributions to music composition and music education.
His music often displays influences of popular music styles within a classical music context, and, as a result, directness and immediacy are common features in much of his music.
Programme note by Michelle Kennedy, abridged.
Celeste Oram (NZ; b. 1990): the naming of waters(new commission), c. 10’
the naming of waters is a genre-busting newly commissioned work more akin to performance art than chamber music. Using props and prompts by both musicians and audience, Celeste sets the tone with the following words:
SCENE: A burial. North Sea.
Three colours of a flag clattering.
Boat heaving and pitching. Ashes fly in
faces and cling to clothes. Flowers tossed
overboard and bruised by churning.
Trio of hired musicians on deck. Despite
best solemnities, losing battle with wind to
keep bows on strings or fingers on keys. All
things wooden prone to creaking in sympathy
with the hull. Voices are swallowed.
Indelicate seagulls.
Engine cuts. Flag droops. Bells toll for the
dead. Boat turns and follows its wake home.
The ghost boat continues course toward open
sea. Music drifts, grows fainter, until it
can no longer be heard on the wind from
shore.
Celeste was born in Manhattan, learned to walk and talk in London, grew up in Auckland, and is presently based in Southern California. Her work investigates new media and strategies for musical notation: namely, video and audio scores and has been performed and recorded by numerous notable ensembles across the USA, New Zealand and Australia. Celeste was the Auckland Philharmonia’s Rising Star young composer-in-residence (2013/14); her commissioned orchestral work macropsiawas selected as a finalist in the 2014 SOUNZ Contemporary Award for excellence in New Zealand contemporary composition; she performed her non-instrumental solo piece O I at the 2016 Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in Germany and was awarded the Kranichstein Prize for composition.
An ongoing project is the renovation of histories of New Zealand music and sonic cultures. At present, this revolves around research into early 20th-century ham radio activity, and the figure of Vera Wyse Munro (1897-1966). This project is rapidly snowballing into an obsession with building re-creations of early radio circuits. She is currently pursuing a PhD in music composition at the University of California San Diego, where she completed an MA in 2016. She completed a BMusBA with first-class Honours at the University of Auckland in 2012, studying with Eve de Castro-Robinson, John Elmsly, and Leonie Holmes.
Johannes Brahms (GER; 1833 – 1897): Piano Trio No.1 in B Major, Op. 8, c. 29’
i. Allegro con brio
ii. Scherzo: Allegro molto – Meno allegro – Tempo primo
iii. Adagio
iv. Finale: Allegro
In April 1853, Johannes Brahms set out on a concert tour of Germany with one of his friends. He was just about to turn 20, on May 7, and little did he know that he was about to get the best birthday present ever. When the two of them got to Hanover, Joseph Joachim was in the audience – Joachim the great violinist – and he was so impressed, that he offered to play a concert with Brahms to fundraise for the next part of his trip. But that was not all. Joachim also gave Brahms letters of introduction to Robert and Clara Schumann, who would go on to play such a massive part in his life. He arrived at their door on the last day of September, in Düsseldorf, and was immediately invited in and pressed to stay. Clara wrote in her diary that night: ‘Here is one of those who comes as if sent straight from God.’
1854 began in Hanover, celebrating the new year with Joachim again, and that’s when Brahms began this trio. It’s one of the few of his early works to escape being thrown in the fire (he was relentlessly self-critical). Yet the story does not end there. Over 30 years later, in 1889, Brahms had a complete edition of his works coming out and decided to revise the trio to tighten it up and temper its youthful extravagance. He was on summer vacation at the time, at the beautiful spa town of Bad Ischl in Austria, and he wrote to Clara: ‘With what childish amusement I whiled away the beautiful summer days you will never guess. I have rewritten my B major Trio…. It will not be as wild as before – but will it be better?’ Most people agree that it is – it is the most common version performed today. And yet, interestingly, Brahms never withdrew the original. Perhaps it’s because it’s the first work he ever showed Clara. The mystery over what exactly was the nature of their relationship endures to this day.
It begins softly and mysteriously on the piano before the cello enters with a beautiful singing theme that migrates to the other instruments and unfolds like the first movement of a symphony, incredibly rich in ideas. The impish scherzo bursts exuberantly through into the major in the middle, building in intensity and drama before the imps come back to bring the movement to a close. The adagio, preminiscent of his piano concertos, is one of the most serene and beautiful things that Brahms ever wrote: and the piano leads the finale to a magnificent minor climax, epic in scope.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
4nov5:00 pm- 6:30 pmArt3: TwinePiecesManurewa, Auckland
Concert Details
TwinePieces GLASS • SCHUMANN • HINDSON
Concert Details
TwinePieces
GLASS • SCHUMANN • HINDSON • ORAM • BRAHMS
Ashley Brown (cello) with guest musicians Amalia Hall (violin) and Somi Kim (piano)
TwinePieces (a condensed version of the full Twine programme) knits together the linear sway from Philip Glass and the refreshing new pluck and spin from Matthew Hindson, including an exciting new commission from New Zealand composer Celeste Oram. Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms deliver lashings of romantic sentimentality, outpourings from their lives entwined.
Performing in the beautiful Nathan Homestead, it is a musical experience rich in timeless ambience. Join the musicians for complimentary wine and nibbles following the performance.
Programme approx. 80 mins including interval
Philip Glass (USA): Mishima
Robert Schumann (GER): Piano Trio No. 2 in F Major (movement)
Matthew Hindson (AUS): Rush
Celeste Oram (NZ): the naming of waters (new commission)~
Johannes Brahms (GER): Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major, Op 8
TICKETS: $40 Adults / $25 Locals / $20 Students
Time
(Sunday) 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Nathan Homestead
70 Hill Road, Manurewa, Auckland
Philip Glass (USA; b. 1937): String Quartet No.3 (Mishima), c. 3’
vi. Mishima/Closing
Arranged for piano trio, this 6th and final movement from Glass’s String Quartet No. 3 is a tribute to Yukio Mishima – a deeply loved figure in his native Japan, and an important figure in the world. Poet, playwright, actor, director and author of over 30 novels, he was also a militant nationalist who on 25 November, 1970, plunged a dagger into his abdomen in a ritual act of Seppuku, despairing at the loss of Japan’s dignity in the Second World War and having failed in his attempt at a coup d’etat. This music comes from the Paul Schrader movie Mishima, A Life in Four Chapters: “The value of a man appears in the moment in which life confronts death”.
Born and raised in Baltimore, Glass studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud before heading to Europe in search of new sounds. He joins ranks with Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones as understudies of the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and worked closely with composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 where he formed the Philip Glass Ensemble. Glass prefers ‘repetitive structures’ over the often-used term ‘minimalism’ when describing his musical style. His vast body of work encompasses ensemble work, ten symphonies, more than twenty operas, two piano concertos, a wide range of film soundtracks and animation (Fantasia), popular music, and a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with artists such as Twyla Tharp, Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, Paul Simon and David Bowie.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Robert Schumann (GER; 1810 – 1856): Piano Trio No.2 in F Major, c. 25’
i. Sehr lebhaft
ii. Mit innigem Ausdruck – Lebhaft “With earnestly affectionate expression.”
iii. In mässiger Bewegung
iv. Nicht zu rasch
The summer of 1847 was one of the happiest of Schumann’s life. The whole year had begun well, with an extensive concert tour for Clara, the pianist, and they had a wonderful spring in Prague before Schumann himself was received rapturously in Berlin – momentous for him, as for the first time, he was possibly even more famous than his wife. Then, for his birthday in the summer, they decided to holiday in the place where he grew up and spent his whole childhood – Zwickau, the ancient capital of the south west of Saxony, surrounded by the silver mines which made the town’s fortune and the forests and castles and the river. They took a house not far from where he had been born – Clara, Robert and their (so-far) three daughters – and he immediately, freed from the demons that had been plaguing him for years (tinnitus, phobias, nervous fits, apprehension of death), began to compose.
He chose piano trios, possibly as a rejoinder to Clara herself, who had had a great success with her own Piano Trio in G minor the previous year. The first, Schumann wrote, was born of “a time of gloomy moods,” while this F-major was “of a completely different character – it makes a breezier and more ingratiating impression.” It’s also, beautifully, entirely inspired by love. They had been married seven years by this stage, Robert was 37, Clara was just turning 28: they had (after their first son died age just one) three daughters; and despite Robert’s troubles – his demons had always been present in their marriage – it was just as passionate as when they first were courting. The first movement is vigorously bustling forth and reaches a climax when suddenly the piano drops into quiet arpeggios and the violin sings the second song from his Liederkreiscycle, written just at the time (May 1840) when they were struggling to be allowed to get married. The (Eichendorff) words go “I bear your beautiful likeness in the depths of my heart”: and just to make sure, he quotes another song for Clara from Frauenliebe und Leben, also from 1840, in the third movement.
Clara played for the premiere, and she later wrote of it, “It is one of the pieces of Robert’s that delights and warms the depths of my soul from beginning to end. I love it passionately, and would like to go on playing it again and again.”
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Matthew Hindson AM (AUS; b. 1968): Rush, c. 9’
Rush displays its own style unique to the composer, but inspired by Felix Mendelssohn. The fast and technically challenging passages found in the final movement of the Mendelssohn String Octet influenced Hindson’s decision to compose a work that is highly virtuosic in nature. The composer remarks, “it is much more the spirit of Mendelssohn’s string writing that was influential, particularly the last movements of his string quartets and the String Octet, rather than any sort of harmony or melodic invention.”
In addition to Mendelssohn, Hindson has also found inspiration in the popular music idiom. Popular and, in particular, ‘techno’ music and culture have played a large role in the development of Hindson’s musical style (with his other works displaying such titles as SPEED and Homage to Metallica), and Rush is no exception. The playful, up-beat and repetitive rhythms found in popular music are a prominent feature of this work making the work accessible to a wide audience. The playful nature of the music can also be considered as a reflection of the hedonistic nature of modern society, where a large emphasis is placed on the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment.
Hindson is one of the most frequently performed and commissioned Australian composers of his generation. His works have been featured at national and international festivals, with orchestras, and Musica Viva and by dance by companies such as the Birmingham Royal Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Ballett Schindowski and the Sydney Dance Company.
As well as composer, Matthew Hindson is Chair of the Composition Unit and associate professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music; he is Chair of the Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts; he has co-authored a book entitled Music Composition Toolbox, published by Science Press; and in 2006 was made a member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his contributions to music composition and music education.
His music often displays influences of popular music styles within a classical music context, and, as a result, directness and immediacy are common features in much of his music.
Programme note by Michelle Kennedy, abridged.
Celeste Oram (NZ; b. 1990): the naming of waters(new commission), c. 10’
the naming of waters is a genre-busting newly commissioned work more akin to performance art than chamber music. Using props and prompts by both musicians and audience, Celeste sets the tone with the following words:
SCENE: A burial. North Sea.
Three colours of a flag clattering.
Boat heaving and pitching. Ashes fly in
faces and cling to clothes. Flowers tossed
overboard and bruised by churning.
Trio of hired musicians on deck. Despite
best solemnities, losing battle with wind to
keep bows on strings or fingers on keys. All
things wooden prone to creaking in sympathy
with the hull. Voices are swallowed.
Indelicate seagulls.
Engine cuts. Flag droops. Bells toll for the
dead. Boat turns and follows its wake home.
The ghost boat continues course toward open
sea. Music drifts, grows fainter, until it
can no longer be heard on the wind from
shore.
Celeste was born in Manhattan, learned to walk and talk in London, grew up in Auckland, and is presently based in Southern California. Her work investigates new media and strategies for musical notation: namely, video and audio scores and has been performed and recorded by numerous notable ensembles across the USA, New Zealand and Australia. Celeste was the Auckland Philharmonia’s Rising Star young composer-in-residence (2013/14); her commissioned orchestral work macropsiawas selected as a finalist in the 2014 SOUNZ Contemporary Award for excellence in New Zealand contemporary composition; she performed her non-instrumental solo piece O I at the 2016 Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in Germany and was awarded the Kranichstein Prize for composition.
An ongoing project is the renovation of histories of New Zealand music and sonic cultures. At present, this revolves around research into early 20th-century ham radio activity, and the figure of Vera Wyse Munro (1897-1966). This project is rapidly snowballing into an obsession with building re-creations of early radio circuits. She is currently pursuing a PhD in music composition at the University of California San Diego, where she completed an MA in 2016. She completed a BMusBA with first-class Honours at the University of Auckland in 2012, studying with Eve de Castro-Robinson, John Elmsly, and Leonie Holmes.
Johannes Brahms (GER; 1833 – 1897): Piano Trio No.1 in B Major, Op. 8, c. 29’
i. Allegro con brio
ii. Scherzo: Allegro molto – Meno allegro – Tempo primo
iii. Adagio
iv. Finale: Allegro
In April 1853, Johannes Brahms set out on a concert tour of Germany with one of his friends. He was just about to turn 20, on May 7, and little did he know that he was about to get the best birthday present ever. When the two of them got to Hanover, Joseph Joachim was in the audience – Joachim the great violinist – and he was so impressed, that he offered to play a concert with Brahms to fundraise for the next part of his trip. But that was not all. Joachim also gave Brahms letters of introduction to Robert and Clara Schumann, who would go on to play such a massive part in his life. He arrived at their door on the last day of September, in Düsseldorf, and was immediately invited in and pressed to stay. Clara wrote in her diary that night: ‘Here is one of those who comes as if sent straight from God.’
1854 began in Hanover, celebrating the new year with Joachim again, and that’s when Brahms began this trio. It’s one of the few of his early works to escape being thrown in the fire (he was relentlessly self-critical). Yet the story does not end there. Over 30 years later, in 1889, Brahms had a complete edition of his works coming out and decided to revise the trio to tighten it up and temper its youthful extravagance. He was on summer vacation at the time, at the beautiful spa town of Bad Ischl in Austria, and he wrote to Clara: ‘With what childish amusement I whiled away the beautiful summer days you will never guess. I have rewritten my B major Trio…. It will not be as wild as before – but will it be better?’ Most people agree that it is – it is the most common version performed today. And yet, interestingly, Brahms never withdrew the original. Perhaps it’s because it’s the first work he ever showed Clara. The mystery over what exactly was the nature of their relationship endures to this day.
It begins softly and mysteriously on the piano before the cello enters with a beautiful singing theme that migrates to the other instruments and unfolds like the first movement of a symphony, incredibly rich in ideas. The impish scherzo bursts exuberantly through into the major in the middle, building in intensity and drama before the imps come back to bring the movement to a close. The adagio, preminiscent of his piano concertos, is one of the most serene and beautiful things that Brahms ever wrote: and the piano leads the finale to a magnificent minor climax, epic in scope.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
3nov7:00 pm- 8:30 pmArt3: TwinePiecesAuckland North Shore
Concert Details
TwinePieces GLASS • SCHUMANN • HINDSON
Concert Details
TwinePieces
GLASS • SCHUMANN • HINDSON • ORAM • BRAHMS
Ashley Brown (cello) with guest musicians Amalia Hall (violin) and Somi Kim (piano)
TwinePieces (a condensed version of the full Twine programme) knits together the linear sway from Philip Glass and the refreshing new pluck and spin from Matthew Hindson, including an exciting new commission from New Zealand composer Celeste Oram. Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms deliver lashings of romantic sentimentality, outpourings from their lives entwined.
Performing amidst beautiful carved calligraphy artworks at Mairangi Arts Centre, it promises to be an arts experience ‘to the power of 3’ (Art3). Join the musicians for complimentary wine and nibbles following the performance.
Programme approx. 80 mins including interval
Philip Glass (USA): Mishima
Robert Schumann (GER): Piano Trio No. 2 in F Major (movement)
Matthew Hindson (AUS): Rush
Celeste Oram (NZ): the naming of waters (new commission)~
Johannes Brahms (GER): Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major, Op 8
*Online sales close 4pm Nov 3rd – cash door sales from 6:30pm
Time
(Saturday) 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Mairangi Arts Centre
20 Hastings Rd, Mairangi Bay, Auckland
Philip Glass (USA; b. 1937): String Quartet No.3 (Mishima), c. 3’
vi. Mishima/Closing
Arranged for piano trio, this 6th and final movement from Glass’s String Quartet No. 3 is a tribute to Yukio Mishima – a deeply loved figure in his native Japan, and an important figure in the world. Poet, playwright, actor, director and author of over 30 novels, he was also a militant nationalist who on 25 November, 1970, plunged a dagger into his abdomen in a ritual act of Seppuku, despairing at the loss of Japan’s dignity in the Second World War and having failed in his attempt at a coup d’etat. This music comes from the Paul Schrader movie Mishima, A Life in Four Chapters: “The value of a man appears in the moment in which life confronts death”.
Born and raised in Baltimore, Glass studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud before heading to Europe in search of new sounds. He joins ranks with Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones as understudies of the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and worked closely with composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 where he formed the Philip Glass Ensemble. Glass prefers ‘repetitive structures’ over the often-used term ‘minimalism’ when describing his musical style. His vast body of work encompasses ensemble work, ten symphonies, more than twenty operas, two piano concertos, a wide range of film soundtracks and animation (Fantasia), popular music, and a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with artists such as Twyla Tharp, Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, Paul Simon and David Bowie.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Robert Schumann (GER; 1810 – 1856): Piano Trio No.2 in F Major, c. 25’
i. Sehr lebhaft
ii. Mit innigem Ausdruck – Lebhaft “With earnestly affectionate expression.”
iii. In mässiger Bewegung
iv. Nicht zu rasch
The summer of 1847 was one of the happiest of Schumann’s life. The whole year had begun well, with an extensive concert tour for Clara, the pianist, and they had a wonderful spring in Prague before Schumann himself was received rapturously in Berlin – momentous for him, as for the first time, he was possibly even more famous than his wife. Then, for his birthday in the summer, they decided to holiday in the place where he grew up and spent his whole childhood – Zwickau, the ancient capital of the south west of Saxony, surrounded by the silver mines which made the town’s fortune and the forests and castles and the river. They took a house not far from where he had been born – Clara, Robert and their (so-far) three daughters – and he immediately, freed from the demons that had been plaguing him for years (tinnitus, phobias, nervous fits, apprehension of death), began to compose.
He chose piano trios, possibly as a rejoinder to Clara herself, who had had a great success with her own Piano Trio in G minor the previous year. The first, Schumann wrote, was born of “a time of gloomy moods,” while this F-major was “of a completely different character – it makes a breezier and more ingratiating impression.” It’s also, beautifully, entirely inspired by love. They had been married seven years by this stage, Robert was 37, Clara was just turning 28: they had (after their first son died age just one) three daughters; and despite Robert’s troubles – his demons had always been present in their marriage – it was just as passionate as when they first were courting. The first movement is vigorously bustling forth and reaches a climax when suddenly the piano drops into quiet arpeggios and the violin sings the second song from his Liederkreiscycle, written just at the time (May 1840) when they were struggling to be allowed to get married. The (Eichendorff) words go “I bear your beautiful likeness in the depths of my heart”: and just to make sure, he quotes another song for Clara from Frauenliebe und Leben, also from 1840, in the third movement.
Clara played for the premiere, and she later wrote of it, “It is one of the pieces of Robert’s that delights and warms the depths of my soul from beginning to end. I love it passionately, and would like to go on playing it again and again.”
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Matthew Hindson AM (AUS; b. 1968): Rush, c. 9’
Rush displays its own style unique to the composer, but inspired by Felix Mendelssohn. The fast and technically challenging passages found in the final movement of the Mendelssohn String Octet influenced Hindson’s decision to compose a work that is highly virtuosic in nature. The composer remarks, “it is much more the spirit of Mendelssohn’s string writing that was influential, particularly the last movements of his string quartets and the String Octet, rather than any sort of harmony or melodic invention.”
In addition to Mendelssohn, Hindson has also found inspiration in the popular music idiom. Popular and, in particular, ‘techno’ music and culture have played a large role in the development of Hindson’s musical style (with his other works displaying such titles as SPEED and Homage to Metallica), and Rush is no exception. The playful, up-beat and repetitive rhythms found in popular music are a prominent feature of this work making the work accessible to a wide audience. The playful nature of the music can also be considered as a reflection of the hedonistic nature of modern society, where a large emphasis is placed on the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment.
Hindson is one of the most frequently performed and commissioned Australian composers of his generation. His works have been featured at national and international festivals, with orchestras, and Musica Viva and by dance by companies such as the Birmingham Royal Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Ballett Schindowski and the Sydney Dance Company.
As well as composer, Matthew Hindson is Chair of the Composition Unit and associate professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music; he is Chair of the Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts; he has co-authored a book entitled Music Composition Toolbox, published by Science Press; and in 2006 was made a member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his contributions to music composition and music education.
His music often displays influences of popular music styles within a classical music context, and, as a result, directness and immediacy are common features in much of his music.
Programme note by Michelle Kennedy, abridged.
Celeste Oram (NZ; b. 1990): the naming of waters(new commission), c. 10’
the naming of waters is a genre-busting newly commissioned work more akin to performance art than chamber music. Using props and prompts by both musicians and audience, Celeste sets the tone with the following words:
SCENE: A burial. North Sea.
Three colours of a flag clattering.
Boat heaving and pitching. Ashes fly in
faces and cling to clothes. Flowers tossed
overboard and bruised by churning.
Trio of hired musicians on deck. Despite
best solemnities, losing battle with wind to
keep bows on strings or fingers on keys. All
things wooden prone to creaking in sympathy
with the hull. Voices are swallowed.
Indelicate seagulls.
Engine cuts. Flag droops. Bells toll for the
dead. Boat turns and follows its wake home.
The ghost boat continues course toward open
sea. Music drifts, grows fainter, until it
can no longer be heard on the wind from
shore.
Celeste was born in Manhattan, learned to walk and talk in London, grew up in Auckland, and is presently based in Southern California. Her work investigates new media and strategies for musical notation: namely, video and audio scores and has been performed and recorded by numerous notable ensembles across the USA, New Zealand and Australia. Celeste was the Auckland Philharmonia’s Rising Star young composer-in-residence (2013/14); her commissioned orchestral work macropsiawas selected as a finalist in the 2014 SOUNZ Contemporary Award for excellence in New Zealand contemporary composition; she performed her non-instrumental solo piece O I at the 2016 Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in Germany and was awarded the Kranichstein Prize for composition.
An ongoing project is the renovation of histories of New Zealand music and sonic cultures. At present, this revolves around research into early 20th-century ham radio activity, and the figure of Vera Wyse Munro (1897-1966). This project is rapidly snowballing into an obsession with building re-creations of early radio circuits. She is currently pursuing a PhD in music composition at the University of California San Diego, where she completed an MA in 2016. She completed a BMusBA with first-class Honours at the University of Auckland in 2012, studying with Eve de Castro-Robinson, John Elmsly, and Leonie Holmes.
Johannes Brahms (GER; 1833 – 1897): Piano Trio No.1 in B Major, Op. 8, c. 29’
i. Allegro con brio
ii. Scherzo: Allegro molto – Meno allegro – Tempo primo
iii. Adagio
iv. Finale: Allegro
In April 1853, Johannes Brahms set out on a concert tour of Germany with one of his friends. He was just about to turn 20, on May 7, and little did he know that he was about to get the best birthday present ever. When the two of them got to Hanover, Joseph Joachim was in the audience – Joachim the great violinist – and he was so impressed, that he offered to play a concert with Brahms to fundraise for the next part of his trip. But that was not all. Joachim also gave Brahms letters of introduction to Robert and Clara Schumann, who would go on to play such a massive part in his life. He arrived at their door on the last day of September, in Düsseldorf, and was immediately invited in and pressed to stay. Clara wrote in her diary that night: ‘Here is one of those who comes as if sent straight from God.’
1854 began in Hanover, celebrating the new year with Joachim again, and that’s when Brahms began this trio. It’s one of the few of his early works to escape being thrown in the fire (he was relentlessly self-critical). Yet the story does not end there. Over 30 years later, in 1889, Brahms had a complete edition of his works coming out and decided to revise the trio to tighten it up and temper its youthful extravagance. He was on summer vacation at the time, at the beautiful spa town of Bad Ischl in Austria, and he wrote to Clara: ‘With what childish amusement I whiled away the beautiful summer days you will never guess. I have rewritten my B major Trio…. It will not be as wild as before – but will it be better?’ Most people agree that it is – it is the most common version performed today. And yet, interestingly, Brahms never withdrew the original. Perhaps it’s because it’s the first work he ever showed Clara. The mystery over what exactly was the nature of their relationship endures to this day.
It begins softly and mysteriously on the piano before the cello enters with a beautiful singing theme that migrates to the other instruments and unfolds like the first movement of a symphony, incredibly rich in ideas. The impish scherzo bursts exuberantly through into the major in the middle, building in intensity and drama before the imps come back to bring the movement to a close. The adagio, preminiscent of his piano concertos, is one of the most serene and beautiful things that Brahms ever wrote: and the piano leads the finale to a magnificent minor climax, epic in scope.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
october 2018
13oct7:00 pmNZTrio at Nelson Arts FestivalExotica
Concert Details
This masterfully curated, tapas style
Concert Details
This masterfully curated, tapas style menu of music has been a festival highlight for two years running. Enjoy a programme of single movements, like a vibrant, piquant tasting platter of music from Spain, Argentina, Brazil, and beyond. Works by Ravel, Piazzolla, and Cassadó will be ‘served’ alongside fresh toe-tapping local delicacies by kiwis Claire Cowan and Alex Taylor.
Here are some audience responses from last year’s debut of Exotica:
‘Absolutely wonderful … riveting … intimate … joyful … brilliant … inspired’
Joining Ashley are violinist Andrew Beer (APO Concertmaster) and pianist Stephen De Pledge. This powerhouse ensemble of New Zealand’s best have each played extensively throughout North America,
Europe, Asia and Australasia, with performances broadcast on TV and radio networks worldwide, and have multiple recordings and accolades to their names.
Duration approx. 80 minutes, no interval
11oct7:00 pm- 8:30 pmNZTrio: ExoticaGisborne International Music Competition
Concert Details
Presented in support of the
Concert Details
Presented in support of the Gisborne International Music Competition. A function to launch the 30th anniversary of the GIMC will follow the concert performance.
This masterfully curated, tapas style menu of music has been a festival highlight for two years running. Enjoy a programme of single movements, like a vibrant, piquant tasting platter of music from Spain, Argentina, Brazil, and beyond. Works by Ravel, Piazzolla, and Cassadó will be ‘served’ alongside fresh toe-tapping local delicacies by kiwis Claire Cowan and Alex Taylor.
Here are some audience responses from last year’s debut of Exotica:
‘Absolutely wonderful … riveting … intimate … joyful … brilliant … inspired’
Joining Ashley are violinist Andrew Beer (APO Concertmaster) and pianist Stephen De Pledge. This powerhouse ensemble of New Zealand’s best have each played extensively throughout North America,
Europe, Asia and Australasia, with performances broadcast on TV and radio networks worldwide, and have multiple recordings and accolades to their names.
Duration approx. 80 minutes, no interval
Tickets $30 ea – General Admission
Piazzolla (ARG) – Primavera Porteña
Cassadó (SP) – piano trio, 2nd mvt
Penaforte (BR) – Capiba
Ravel (FR) – piece en forme de habanera
Taylor (NZ) – a spanner
Ravel (FR) – Tempo di blues
Penaforte (BR) – Maurice
Piazzolla (ARG) – Grand Tango
Gerhard (SP) – tres calme
Cowan (NZ) – Subtle Dances
Cassadó (SP) – Piano trio, 3rd mvtTime
(Thursday) 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
Gisborne War Memorial Theatre
159 Bright Street, Gisborne 4010
There are no programme notes for this performance, the musicians will introduce each work verbally from the stage.
september 2018
29sep7:00 pmNZTrio at Arts Festival DunedinEvening performance of Exotica
Concert Details
Join NZTrio at the Dunedin
Concert Details
Join NZTrio at the Dunedin Festival for an evening performance of Exotica on Saturday September 29th, with guest musicians Andrew Beer (violin) and Stephen De Pledge (piano).
TICKETS VIA THE DUNEDIN ARTS FESTIVAL HERE
Exotica Programme:
Raimundo Penaforte (BR) – Capiba 5’
Gaspar Cassadó (SP) – piano trio, 2nd mvt 5’
Claire Cowan (NZ) – Subtle Dances 5’
Maurice Ravel (FR) – piece en forme de habanera (vlc/pno or vln/pno) 3 ½’
Alex Taylor (NZ) – a spanner 2’
Roberto Gerhard (SP) – très calme 8 ½’
Astor Piazzolla (ARG) – Grand Tango (vlc/pno) 11’
Maurice Ravel (FR) – Tempo di blues (vln/pno) 5 ½’
Raimundo Penaforte (BR) – Maurice 8 ½’
Isaac Albéniz (ARG) – Tango 3’
Gaspar Cassadó (SP) – Piano trio, 3rd mvt 5’
Nikolai Kapustin (UKR) – Allegro 5’
28sep12:00 pmNZTrio at Arts Festival DunedinLunchtime performance of Braid
Concert Details
Join NZTrio at the Dunedin
Concert Details
Join NZTrio at the Dunedin Festival for a lunchtime performance of Braid, Friday September 28th with guest musicians Benjamin Baker (violin) and Stephen De Pledge (piano) .
Tickets via the Arts Festival Dunedin website here
Braid programme:
Rachel Clement (NZ): Shifting States – Sabbia (Sand)
Fanny Mendelssohn (GER): Allegro molto vivace from Piano Trio in d Minor
Elena Kats-Chernin (AUS): Spirit and the Maiden
~
Victoria Kelly (NZ): Sono
Clara Schumann (GER): Allegretto from Piano Trio in g Minor
Programme notes coming soon…
26sep7:00 pm- 8:30 pmNZTrio Art3: BraidCity Gallery Wellington
Concert Details
Braid CLEMENT • MENDELSSOHN • KATS-CHERNIN
Concert Details
Braid
CLEMENT • MENDELSSOHN • KATS-CHERNIN • KELLY • SCHUMANN
Ashley Brown (cello) with guest musicians Benjamin Baker (violin) and Stephen De Pledge (piano)In recognition of the 125th anniversary celebration for women’s suffrage in New Zealand, Braid unleashes an all-female cast of composers. These remarkable women are represented in this powerful tribute by a perfect tangle of traits – enigma in the Clement (NZ), protective embrace in the Kelly (NZ), enduring strength in the Kats-Chernin (AUS), compassion in the Schumann (GER) and emotional wisdom in the Mendelssohn (GER).
Complimentary drinks and nibbles with the musicians following the performance.
Programme:
Rachel Clement (NZ): Shifting States – Sabbia (Sand)
Fanny Mendelssohn (GER): Piano Trio in D Minor
Elena Kats-Chernin (AUS): Spirit and the Maiden
~
Victoria Kelly (NZ): Sono
Clara Schumann (GER): Piano Trio in G Minor
TICKETS $40 Adults / $20 Students and Friends of CGW
Time
(Wednesday) 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
City Gallery Wellington
101 Wakefield St, Wellington
Rachel Clement (NZ; b. 1972): Shifting States
1. sabbia (sand)
Rachel Clement studied composition with John Rimmer and John Elmsly at the University of Auckland, graduating with a Bachelor of Music (Hons.) in 1995 and a Master of Music (composition) with distinction in 1997. She has composed for a range of contemporary performers and groups, including 175 East and Stroma, lectured part-time in Composition at the University of Canterbury, managed the library of the Christchurch Symphony, and worked as the National Secondary Schools Arts Co-ordinator for Music (on behalf of the Music Educators of NZ, Aotearoa) under contract to the Ministry of Education. In 2005 and 2006 she held the position of Mozart Fellow at the University of Otago.
Sabbia (sand) is from a set of five short pieces inspired by an interest in mid-Twentieth Century art glass. Clement explores the process of changing state, or changing phase (freezing, melting, vaporization, condensation and sublimation) essential to the production of the many types of art glass. Each piece expresses a style of finished effect (e.g. bubbles, flowers, submerged colour) with sand being the first step, and most essential ingredient.
Shifting states was commissioned by NZTrio with funding from Creative New Zealand.
Fanny Mendelssohn (GER; 1805 – 1847): Piano Trio in D Minor, Op.11
i. Allegro molto vivace
ii. Andante espressivo
iii. Lied (Allegretto)
iv. Allegro moderato
“Music will perhaps become Felix’s profession, while for youit can and must be only an ornament” (Abraham Mendelssohn, father, 1820)
In the mid 1980s, in Berlin, a researcher by the name of Marcia Citron finally gained access to the papers of Fanny Mendelssohn. She had to get past the curator, a fervent admirer of Felix, who called his older sister “just a housewife” and had blocked access to the archives for his entire tenure. She wore him down eventually. And what she found was astonishing – letters and diaries, all written in anOld German that she had to enlist the help of her landlady to decode, some 500 compositions that included a Cholera Cantata, dozens of songs and piano Songs Without Words, and her own wedding music (written while the rest of the family were celebrating the night before). Like Felix she turned out to have been a formidable pianist, so much so (“she plays like a man”) that even the best musicians were terrified of playing for her: like Felix she had been composing since the age of ten; like Felix she was also a fine conductor; and it was not unusual for visitors, apparently, to find her actually the more talented of the pair. Felix saw this very well – they discussed all of their music together, they were inseparable – and he published many of her songs under his own name. Indeed, when he was invited to Buckingham Palace and Queen Victoria announced that she would sing, he had the embarrassment of having to confess that this favourite song of Her Majesty’s was actually by his sister, and not his own.
And yet, Felix was sent off on a Grand Tour of the capitals of Europe to gain musical experience, and Fanny stayed at home to prepare her trousseau. Her husband (Wilhelm Hensel, the court painter) was supportive, luckily, and actually refused to marry her unless she promised to continue to compose: she did, but she never published much, or imagined anything but a private audience at home. This is her last published opus, written for her sister’s birthday on April 11, only a month before her death.
The first movement was called a masterpiece even at the time, with rumbling piano ushering in her gorgeous gift for melody. Two song-like movements follow – she quotes an aria from Felix’s Elijahin the third – and the finale, opening with a stately Bach-like flourish, quickly turns passionately romantic before wrapping up the whole with perfection.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Elena Kats-Chernin (AUS; b. 1957): Spirit and the Maiden
Born in 1957 in Uzbekistan, Elena Kats-Chernin received training at the Gnessin Musical College before immigrating to Australia in 1975. She graduated from the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music in 1980 and was awarded a DAAD (German academic exchange) grant to study with Helmut Lachenmann in Hanover. She remained in Germany for 13 years, returning in 1994 to Australia where she now lives in Sydney.
Elena has created works in nearly every genre. Among her many commissions are pieces for Ensemble Modern, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Australian World Orchestra, the Adelaide, Tasmanian, Melbourne and Sydney Symphony Orchestras, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, Swedish Chamber Orchestra and the North Carolina Symphony. In 2000 she collaborated with leading Australian choreographer Meryl Tankard on Deep Sea Dreaming which was broadcast to an audience of millions worldwide as part of the opening ceremonies of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
Elena’s music continues to be heard on TV and at the cinema in the UK with the long-running Lloyds TSB advertising campaign ‘For the journey…’, Meryl Tankard’s Wild Swans, and the theme in claymation film Max & Mary by Adam Elliott. She is one of the subjects of a Creative Minds 6-episode series of artist portraits by Robin Hughes. In 2017 she was composer in residence with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Her music is published exclusively by Boosey & Hawkes.
A work of 3 movements, Spirit and the Maiden is based on a Russian fairy-tale about a young girl whose job it was to carry water back and forth between her village and the well. One summer’s afternoon, as she put down her buckets and rested for a moment on the wall of the well, her turquoise shawl, a gift from her grandmother, rumoured to be a witch, slid from her shoulders and sank into the dark cold waters. When she reached down to grasp it, to her surprise what she felt was not her shawl but a hand.
As she pulled it out, she gasped at the sight of a beautiful young man emerging from the water – the water spirit. She was transfixed with wonder at his pale beauty, his voice deep like a resounding waterfall, and her heart beat so loudly, she thought her chest would burst.
The second movement describes a momentary love affair, dancing, teasing, and twirling in the sunlight which glistened on his steaming skin, his hands running through her hair making it wet and curly as she flirted with him. But soon he began to evaporate in the noon-day sun, until suddenly he was a mere pearlescent drop left on her palm.
The third movement laments as she cautiously placed him back in the water, the heaviness dragging her down into the depths. As she floats down into his embrace, blissfully falling to the deepest place, her lips turn blue and she drowns in his arms. When he realises what he’s done, his grief is so great, he wraps her in the turquoise shawl and swims back to the light, laying her body on the surface and, summoning all his magic, changes her into a water lilac where she has bloomed ever since.
Victoria Kelly (NZ; b. 1973): Sono
Victoria is a composer, performer, producer and director of music. Having focused on music for the screen for most of her 30-year long career, she now concentrates on contemporary classical music, as well as creative projects with a small group of artists, including a longstanding collaboration with Neil Finn. She is currently the Director of NZ Member Services at APRA AMCOS.
Victoria has enjoyed a hugely diverse career, working with musicians and artists across the worlds of cinema, dance, theatre, popular and classical music. She’s worked with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Auckland Philharmonia, the New Zealand String Quartet, NZTrio, Stroma, Michael Houstoun, Stephen De Pledge, Neil & Liam Finn, Don McGlashan, Anika Moa, SJD, Shapeshifter, Okareka Dance Company, Jonathan King, Robert Sarkies, Fran Walsh and Sir Peter Jackson, among many others. In 2011 she was the Music Director and principal composer for the Opening Ceremony of the Rugby World Cup at Eden Park.
“The idea for this piece began with the Portuguese word ‘sono’ which describes the desire to sleep in order to rejoin a dream. In my experience, it’s impossible to do this once you have woken.
The trio begins with an impassioned event which soon disappears, leaving the piano alone to dream about it. A repeating piano note emerges and remains, representing the real world lingering in the background. Around this note, the dreams wander in chords and gestures, deep breaths and ascending melodies.”
Sono was commissioned by the Turnovsky Trio in 1999.
Clara Schumann (GER; 1819 – 1896):Piano Trio in G Minor, Op.17
i. Allegro moderato
ii. Scherzo and Trio
iii. Andante
iv. Allegretto
“Composing gives me great pleasure… there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound.”
Clara Schumann was one of the great forces of nature. The most famous pianist in Europe, far more famous than her composer husband, she had been touring the great capital cities since the age of 11 and was received with a sort of mania wherever she went – besought by Chopin and Liszt and Paganini, gifted jewels and fifty gold ducats by the Empress for her Beethoven recitals in Vienna, awarded Austria’s highest musical honour despite being only 18, and a foreigner, and female – all without precedent. The Emperor himself had to make an exception.
She was already engaged to Robert, by that stage, having met him at the age of only 8 – at one of her concerts, of course – and they had begun the arduous process of defying her manager-father’s wishes in order to get married, which they finally accomplished one day before she came of age. Not that she scaled back her career: she always remained the breadwinner for the family, continuing to tour and to teach. She acted as concert agent for herself and for Robert: she single-handedly invented the concept of the modern concert pianist, being the first to perform from memory, and her expressive new style influenced schools as far as Britain and the States; she shaped the tastes of a generation with her preferences, making the careers of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms: she managed Robert’s terrible illnesses, and his musical legacy after he died; and all this time she shepherded a family of seven children (surviving children, she was almost always pregnant). Even that she excelled at. She later took on her grandchildren when her son died and famously, when the children were trapped in the centre of Dresden during the Dresden Uprising of 1849, she calmly walked into the city through the gunfire, straight through the front lines, defied a pack of armed men who confronted her, fetched her children, and walked hand-in-hand straight back out again.
And not only that, she composed. Her works – 23 published opuses, which is only half of her output – include songs, pieces for piano and violin, vocal pieces, and a piano concerto which she performed at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Mendelssohn conducting, at the age of only 14. She never had time to write more, as it might well be imagined; her works suddenly tail off when Robert tried to kill himself and shortly after was committed to the asylum, when she was 36. But at least we have this, her only piano trio, composed when she was 27. It’s a masterpiece by any standards.
A lyrical, passionate, perfectly structured first movement leads into a gutsy, individual, humorous scherzo and trio. The andante is full of a heartfelt love and the allegretto, quickly becoming intensely dramatic, leads to a perfectly paced and confident finale. Many think she was actually a better more natural composer than her husband. If only she’d had more time.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
25sep7:00 pmLoft Series 2: BraidAuckland Tuesday performance
Concert Details
Braid CLEMENT • MENDELSSOHN • KATS-CHERNIN
Concert Details
Braid
CLEMENT • MENDELSSOHN • KATS-CHERNIN • KELLY • SCHUMANN
Ashley Brown (cello) with guest musicians Benjamin Baker (violin) and Stephen De Pledge (piano)In recognition of the 125th anniversary celebration for women’s suffrage in New Zealand, Braid unleashes an all-female cast of composers. These remarkable women are represented in this powerful tribute by a perfect tangle of traits – enigma in the Clement (NZ), protective embrace in the Kelly (NZ), enduring strength in the Kats-Chernin (AUS), compassion in the Schumann (GER) and emotional wisdom in the Mendelssohn (GER).
Programme:
Rachel Clement (NZ): Shifting States – Sabbia (Sand)
Fanny Mendelssohn (GER): Piano Trio in D Minor
Elena Kats-Chernin (AUS): Spirit and the Maiden
~
Victoria Kelly (NZ): Sono
Clara Schumann (GER): Piano Trio in G Minor
TICKETS: $50 Adults / $25 Students
Rachel Clement (NZ; b. 1972): Shifting States
1. sabbia (sand)
Rachel Clement studied composition with John Rimmer and John Elmsly at the University of Auckland, graduating with a Bachelor of Music (Hons.) in 1995 and a Master of Music (composition) with distinction in 1997. She has composed for a range of contemporary performers and groups, including 175 East and Stroma, lectured part-time in Composition at the University of Canterbury, managed the library of the Christchurch Symphony, and worked as the National Secondary Schools Arts Co-ordinator for Music (on behalf of the Music Educators of NZ, Aotearoa) under contract to the Ministry of Education. In 2005 and 2006 she held the position of Mozart Fellow at the University of Otago.
Sabbia (sand) is from a set of five short pieces inspired by an interest in mid-Twentieth Century art glass. Clement explores the process of changing state, or changing phase (freezing, melting, vaporization, condensation and sublimation) essential to the production of the many types of art glass. Each piece expresses a style of finished effect (e.g. bubbles, flowers, submerged colour) with sand being the first step, and most essential ingredient.
Shifting states was commissioned by NZTrio with funding from Creative New Zealand.
Fanny Mendelssohn (GER; 1805 – 1847): Piano Trio in D Minor, Op.11
i. Allegro molto vivace
ii. Andante espressivo
iii. Lied (Allegretto)
iv. Allegro moderato
“Music will perhaps become Felix’s profession, while for youit can and must be only an ornament” (Abraham Mendelssohn, father, 1820)
In the mid 1980s, in Berlin, a researcher by the name of Marcia Citron finally gained access to the papers of Fanny Mendelssohn. She had to get past the curator, a fervent admirer of Felix, who called his older sister “just a housewife” and had blocked access to the archives for his entire tenure. She wore him down eventually. And what she found was astonishing – letters and diaries, all written in anOld German that she had to enlist the help of her landlady to decode, some 500 compositions that included a Cholera Cantata, dozens of songs and piano Songs Without Words, and her own wedding music (written while the rest of the family were celebrating the night before). Like Felix she turned out to have been a formidable pianist, so much so (“she plays like a man”) that even the best musicians were terrified of playing for her: like Felix she had been composing since the age of ten; like Felix she was also a fine conductor; and it was not unusual for visitors, apparently, to find her actually the more talented of the pair. Felix saw this very well – they discussed all of their music together, they were inseparable – and he published many of her songs under his own name. Indeed, when he was invited to Buckingham Palace and Queen Victoria announced that she would sing, he had the embarrassment of having to confess that this favourite song of Her Majesty’s was actually by his sister, and not his own.
And yet, Felix was sent off on a Grand Tour of the capitals of Europe to gain musical experience, and Fanny stayed at home to prepare her trousseau. Her husband (Wilhelm Hensel, the court painter) was supportive, luckily, and actually refused to marry her unless she promised to continue to compose: she did, but she never published much, or imagined anything but a private audience at home. This is her last published opus, written for her sister’s birthday on April 11, only a month before her death.
The first movement was called a masterpiece even at the time, with rumbling piano ushering in her gorgeous gift for melody. Two song-like movements follow – she quotes an aria from Felix’s Elijahin the third – and the finale, opening with a stately Bach-like flourish, quickly turns passionately romantic before wrapping up the whole with perfection.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Elena Kats-Chernin (AUS; b. 1957): Spirit and the Maiden
Born in 1957 in Uzbekistan, Elena Kats-Chernin received training at the Gnessin Musical College before immigrating to Australia in 1975. She graduated from the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music in 1980 and was awarded a DAAD (German academic exchange) grant to study with Helmut Lachenmann in Hanover. She remained in Germany for 13 years, returning in 1994 to Australia where she now lives in Sydney.
Elena has created works in nearly every genre. Among her many commissions are pieces for Ensemble Modern, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Australian World Orchestra, the Adelaide, Tasmanian, Melbourne and Sydney Symphony Orchestras, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, Swedish Chamber Orchestra and the North Carolina Symphony. In 2000 she collaborated with leading Australian choreographer Meryl Tankard on Deep Sea Dreaming which was broadcast to an audience of millions worldwide as part of the opening ceremonies of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
Elena’s music continues to be heard on TV and at the cinema in the UK with the long-running Lloyds TSB advertising campaign ‘For the journey…’, Meryl Tankard’s Wild Swans, and the theme in claymation film Max & Mary by Adam Elliott. She is one of the subjects of a Creative Minds 6-episode series of artist portraits by Robin Hughes. In 2017 she was composer in residence with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Her music is published exclusively by Boosey & Hawkes.
A work of 3 movements, Spirit and the Maiden is based on a Russian fairy-tale about a young girl whose job it was to carry water back and forth between her village and the well. One summer’s afternoon, as she put down her buckets and rested for a moment on the wall of the well, her turquoise shawl, a gift from her grandmother, rumoured to be a witch, slid from her shoulders and sank into the dark cold waters. When she reached down to grasp it, to her surprise what she felt was not her shawl but a hand.
As she pulled it out, she gasped at the sight of a beautiful young man emerging from the water – the water spirit. She was transfixed with wonder at his pale beauty, his voice deep like a resounding waterfall, and her heart beat so loudly, she thought her chest would burst.
The second movement describes a momentary love affair, dancing, teasing, and twirling in the sunlight which glistened on his steaming skin, his hands running through her hair making it wet and curly as she flirted with him. But soon he began to evaporate in the noon-day sun, until suddenly he was a mere pearlescent drop left on her palm.
The third movement laments as she cautiously placed him back in the water, the heaviness dragging her down into the depths. As she floats down into his embrace, blissfully falling to the deepest place, her lips turn blue and she drowns in his arms. When he realises what he’s done, his grief is so great, he wraps her in the turquoise shawl and swims back to the light, laying her body on the surface and, summoning all his magic, changes her into a water lilac where she has bloomed ever since.
Victoria Kelly (NZ; b. 1973): Sono
Victoria is a composer, performer, producer and director of music. Having focused on music for the screen for most of her 30-year long career, she now concentrates on contemporary classical music, as well as creative projects with a small group of artists, including a longstanding collaboration with Neil Finn. She is currently the Director of NZ Member Services at APRA AMCOS.
Victoria has enjoyed a hugely diverse career, working with musicians and artists across the worlds of cinema, dance, theatre, popular and classical music. She’s worked with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Auckland Philharmonia, the New Zealand String Quartet, NZTrio, Stroma, Michael Houstoun, Stephen De Pledge, Neil & Liam Finn, Don McGlashan, Anika Moa, SJD, Shapeshifter, Okareka Dance Company, Jonathan King, Robert Sarkies, Fran Walsh and Sir Peter Jackson, among many others. In 2011 she was the Music Director and principal composer for the Opening Ceremony of the Rugby World Cup at Eden Park.
“The idea for this piece began with the Portuguese word ‘sono’ which describes the desire to sleep in order to rejoin a dream. In my experience, it’s impossible to do this once you have woken.
The trio begins with an impassioned event which soon disappears, leaving the piano alone to dream about it. A repeating piano note emerges and remains, representing the real world lingering in the background. Around this note, the dreams wander in chords and gestures, deep breaths and ascending melodies.”
Sono was commissioned by the Turnovsky Trio in 1999.
Clara Schumann (GER; 1819 – 1896):Piano Trio in G Minor, Op.17
i. Allegro moderato
ii. Scherzo and Trio
iii. Andante
iv. Allegretto
“Composing gives me great pleasure… there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound.”
Clara Schumann was one of the great forces of nature. The most famous pianist in Europe, far more famous than her composer husband, she had been touring the great capital cities since the age of 11 and was received with a sort of mania wherever she went – besought by Chopin and Liszt and Paganini, gifted jewels and fifty gold ducats by the Empress for her Beethoven recitals in Vienna, awarded Austria’s highest musical honour despite being only 18, and a foreigner, and female – all without precedent. The Emperor himself had to make an exception.
She was already engaged to Robert, by that stage, having met him at the age of only 8 – at one of her concerts, of course – and they had begun the arduous process of defying her manager-father’s wishes in order to get married, which they finally accomplished one day before she came of age. Not that she scaled back her career: she always remained the breadwinner for the family, continuing to tour and to teach. She acted as concert agent for herself and for Robert: she single-handedly invented the concept of the modern concert pianist, being the first to perform from memory, and her expressive new style influenced schools as far as Britain and the States; she shaped the tastes of a generation with her preferences, making the careers of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms: she managed Robert’s terrible illnesses, and his musical legacy after he died; and all this time she shepherded a family of seven children (surviving children, she was almost always pregnant). Even that she excelled at. She later took on her grandchildren when her son died and famously, when the children were trapped in the centre of Dresden during the Dresden Uprising of 1849, she calmly walked into the city through the gunfire, straight through the front lines, defied a pack of armed men who confronted her, fetched her children, and walked hand-in-hand straight back out again.
And not only that, she composed. Her works – 23 published opuses, which is only half of her output – include songs, pieces for piano and violin, vocal pieces, and a piano concerto which she performed at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Mendelssohn conducting, at the age of only 14. She never had time to write more, as it might well be imagined; her works suddenly tail off when Robert tried to kill himself and shortly after was committed to the asylum, when she was 36. But at least we have this, her only piano trio, composed when she was 27. It’s a masterpiece by any standards.
A lyrical, passionate, perfectly structured first movement leads into a gutsy, individual, humorous scherzo and trio. The andante is full of a heartfelt love and the allegretto, quickly becoming intensely dramatic, leads to a perfectly paced and confident finale. Many think she was actually a better more natural composer than her husband. If only she’d had more time.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
23sep5:00 pmLoft Series 2: BraidAuckland Sunday performance
Concert Details
Braid CLEMENT • MENDELSSOHN • KATS-CHERNIN
Concert Details
Braid
CLEMENT • MENDELSSOHN • KATS-CHERNIN • KELLY • SCHUMANN
Ashley Brown (cello) with guest musicians Benjamin Baker (violin) and Stephen De Pledge (piano)In recognition of the 125th anniversary celebration for women’s suffrage in New Zealand, Braid unleashes an all-female cast of composers. These remarkable women are represented in this powerful tribute by a perfect tangle of traits – enigma in the Clement (NZ), protective embrace in the Kelly (NZ), enduring strength in the Kats-Chernin (AUS), compassion in the Schumann (GER) and emotional wisdom in the Mendelssohn (GER).
Programme:
Rachel Clement (NZ): Shifting States – Sabbia (Sand)
Fanny Mendelssohn (GER): Piano Trio in D Minor
Elena Kats-Chernin (AUS): Spirit and the Maiden
~
Victoria Kelly (NZ): Sono
Clara Schumann (GER): Piano Trio in G Minor
TICKETS: $50 Adults / $25 Students
Rachel Clement (NZ; b. 1972): Shifting States
1. sabbia (sand)
Rachel Clement studied composition with John Rimmer and John Elmsly at the University of Auckland, graduating with a Bachelor of Music (Hons.) in 1995 and a Master of Music (composition) with distinction in 1997. She has composed for a range of contemporary performers and groups, including 175 East and Stroma, lectured part-time in Composition at the University of Canterbury, managed the library of the Christchurch Symphony, and worked as the National Secondary Schools Arts Co-ordinator for Music (on behalf of the Music Educators of NZ, Aotearoa) under contract to the Ministry of Education. In 2005 and 2006 she held the position of Mozart Fellow at the University of Otago.
Sabbia (sand) is from a set of five short pieces inspired by an interest in mid-Twentieth Century art glass. Clement explores the process of changing state, or changing phase (freezing, melting, vaporization, condensation and sublimation) essential to the production of the many types of art glass. Each piece expresses a style of finished effect (e.g. bubbles, flowers, submerged colour) with sand being the first step, and most essential ingredient.
Shifting states was commissioned by NZTrio with funding from Creative New Zealand.
Fanny Mendelssohn (GER; 1805 – 1847): Piano Trio in D Minor, Op.11
i. Allegro molto vivace
ii. Andante espressivo
iii. Lied (Allegretto)
iv. Allegro moderato
“Music will perhaps become Felix’s profession, while for youit can and must be only an ornament” (Abraham Mendelssohn, father, 1820)
In the mid 1980s, in Berlin, a researcher by the name of Marcia Citron finally gained access to the papers of Fanny Mendelssohn. She had to get past the curator, a fervent admirer of Felix, who called his older sister “just a housewife” and had blocked access to the archives for his entire tenure. She wore him down eventually. And what she found was astonishing – letters and diaries, all written in anOld German that she had to enlist the help of her landlady to decode, some 500 compositions that included a Cholera Cantata, dozens of songs and piano Songs Without Words, and her own wedding music (written while the rest of the family were celebrating the night before). Like Felix she turned out to have been a formidable pianist, so much so (“she plays like a man”) that even the best musicians were terrified of playing for her: like Felix she had been composing since the age of ten; like Felix she was also a fine conductor; and it was not unusual for visitors, apparently, to find her actually the more talented of the pair. Felix saw this very well – they discussed all of their music together, they were inseparable – and he published many of her songs under his own name. Indeed, when he was invited to Buckingham Palace and Queen Victoria announced that she would sing, he had the embarrassment of having to confess that this favourite song of Her Majesty’s was actually by his sister, and not his own.
And yet, Felix was sent off on a Grand Tour of the capitals of Europe to gain musical experience, and Fanny stayed at home to prepare her trousseau. Her husband (Wilhelm Hensel, the court painter) was supportive, luckily, and actually refused to marry her unless she promised to continue to compose: she did, but she never published much, or imagined anything but a private audience at home. This is her last published opus, written for her sister’s birthday on April 11, only a month before her death.
The first movement was called a masterpiece even at the time, with rumbling piano ushering in her gorgeous gift for melody. Two song-like movements follow – she quotes an aria from Felix’s Elijahin the third – and the finale, opening with a stately Bach-like flourish, quickly turns passionately romantic before wrapping up the whole with perfection.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Elena Kats-Chernin (AUS; b. 1957): Spirit and the Maiden
Born in 1957 in Uzbekistan, Elena Kats-Chernin received training at the Gnessin Musical College before immigrating to Australia in 1975. She graduated from the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music in 1980 and was awarded a DAAD (German academic exchange) grant to study with Helmut Lachenmann in Hanover. She remained in Germany for 13 years, returning in 1994 to Australia where she now lives in Sydney.
Elena has created works in nearly every genre. Among her many commissions are pieces for Ensemble Modern, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Australian World Orchestra, the Adelaide, Tasmanian, Melbourne and Sydney Symphony Orchestras, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, Swedish Chamber Orchestra and the North Carolina Symphony. In 2000 she collaborated with leading Australian choreographer Meryl Tankard on Deep Sea Dreaming which was broadcast to an audience of millions worldwide as part of the opening ceremonies of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
Elena’s music continues to be heard on TV and at the cinema in the UK with the long-running Lloyds TSB advertising campaign ‘For the journey…’, Meryl Tankard’s Wild Swans, and the theme in claymation film Max & Mary by Adam Elliott. She is one of the subjects of a Creative Minds 6-episode series of artist portraits by Robin Hughes. In 2017 she was composer in residence with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Her music is published exclusively by Boosey & Hawkes.
A work of 3 movements, Spirit and the Maiden is based on a Russian fairy-tale about a young girl whose job it was to carry water back and forth between her village and the well. One summer’s afternoon, as she put down her buckets and rested for a moment on the wall of the well, her turquoise shawl, a gift from her grandmother, rumoured to be a witch, slid from her shoulders and sank into the dark cold waters. When she reached down to grasp it, to her surprise what she felt was not her shawl but a hand.
As she pulled it out, she gasped at the sight of a beautiful young man emerging from the water – the water spirit. She was transfixed with wonder at his pale beauty, his voice deep like a resounding waterfall, and her heart beat so loudly, she thought her chest would burst.
The second movement describes a momentary love affair, dancing, teasing, and twirling in the sunlight which glistened on his steaming skin, his hands running through her hair making it wet and curly as she flirted with him. But soon he began to evaporate in the noon-day sun, until suddenly he was a mere pearlescent drop left on her palm.
The third movement laments as she cautiously placed him back in the water, the heaviness dragging her down into the depths. As she floats down into his embrace, blissfully falling to the deepest place, her lips turn blue and she drowns in his arms. When he realises what he’s done, his grief is so great, he wraps her in the turquoise shawl and swims back to the light, laying her body on the surface and, summoning all his magic, changes her into a water lilac where she has bloomed ever since.
Victoria Kelly (NZ; b. 1973): Sono
Victoria is a composer, performer, producer and director of music. Having focused on music for the screen for most of her 30-year long career, she now concentrates on contemporary classical music, as well as creative projects with a small group of artists, including a longstanding collaboration with Neil Finn. She is currently the Director of NZ Member Services at APRA AMCOS.
Victoria has enjoyed a hugely diverse career, working with musicians and artists across the worlds of cinema, dance, theatre, popular and classical music. She’s worked with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Auckland Philharmonia, the New Zealand String Quartet, NZTrio, Stroma, Michael Houstoun, Stephen De Pledge, Neil & Liam Finn, Don McGlashan, Anika Moa, SJD, Shapeshifter, Okareka Dance Company, Jonathan King, Robert Sarkies, Fran Walsh and Sir Peter Jackson, among many others. In 2011 she was the Music Director and principal composer for the Opening Ceremony of the Rugby World Cup at Eden Park.
“The idea for this piece began with the Portuguese word ‘sono’ which describes the desire to sleep in order to rejoin a dream. In my experience, it’s impossible to do this once you have woken.
The trio begins with an impassioned event which soon disappears, leaving the piano alone to dream about it. A repeating piano note emerges and remains, representing the real world lingering in the background. Around this note, the dreams wander in chords and gestures, deep breaths and ascending melodies.”
Sono was commissioned by the Turnovsky Trio in 1999.
Clara Schumann (GER; 1819 – 1896):Piano Trio in G Minor, Op.17
i. Allegro moderato
ii. Scherzo and Trio
iii. Andante
iv. Allegretto
“Composing gives me great pleasure… there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound.”
Clara Schumann was one of the great forces of nature. The most famous pianist in Europe, far more famous than her composer husband, she had been touring the great capital cities since the age of 11 and was received with a sort of mania wherever she went – besought by Chopin and Liszt and Paganini, gifted jewels and fifty gold ducats by the Empress for her Beethoven recitals in Vienna, awarded Austria’s highest musical honour despite being only 18, and a foreigner, and female – all without precedent. The Emperor himself had to make an exception.
She was already engaged to Robert, by that stage, having met him at the age of only 8 – at one of her concerts, of course – and they had begun the arduous process of defying her manager-father’s wishes in order to get married, which they finally accomplished one day before she came of age. Not that she scaled back her career: she always remained the breadwinner for the family, continuing to tour and to teach. She acted as concert agent for herself and for Robert: she single-handedly invented the concept of the modern concert pianist, being the first to perform from memory, and her expressive new style influenced schools as far as Britain and the States; she shaped the tastes of a generation with her preferences, making the careers of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms: she managed Robert’s terrible illnesses, and his musical legacy after he died; and all this time she shepherded a family of seven children (surviving children, she was almost always pregnant). Even that she excelled at. She later took on her grandchildren when her son died and famously, when the children were trapped in the centre of Dresden during the Dresden Uprising of 1849, she calmly walked into the city through the gunfire, straight through the front lines, defied a pack of armed men who confronted her, fetched her children, and walked hand-in-hand straight back out again.
And not only that, she composed. Her works – 23 published opuses, which is only half of her output – include songs, pieces for piano and violin, vocal pieces, and a piano concerto which she performed at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Mendelssohn conducting, at the age of only 14. She never had time to write more, as it might well be imagined; her works suddenly tail off when Robert tried to kill himself and shortly after was committed to the asylum, when she was 36. But at least we have this, her only piano trio, composed when she was 27. It’s a masterpiece by any standards.
A lyrical, passionate, perfectly structured first movement leads into a gutsy, individual, humorous scherzo and trio. The andante is full of a heartfelt love and the allegretto, quickly becoming intensely dramatic, leads to a perfectly paced and confident finale. Many think she was actually a better more natural composer than her husband. If only she’d had more time.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
august 2018
25aug7:30 am2018 Australia Tour August 25/28Messiaen Quartet for the End of Time with Julian Bliss
Concert Details
Timelight NZTrio reunites with Julian Bliss
Concert Details
Timelight
NZTrio reunites with Julian Bliss for an Aussie remount of Messiaen’s masterpiece Quartet for the End of Time, a work full of life, wit and virtuosity – at odds with the composer’s setting at the time of writing – a German prisoner of war camp. An evocative match with John Psathas’ Island Songs and Ross Harris’ There May Be Light, bringing flavours of Australiasia to this evening of ensemble brilliance.
Ashley Brown (cell0)
Wilma Smith (violin)
Stephen De Pledge (piano)
Julian Bliss (clarinet)
August 25 – 7:30pm Riverside Parramatta – MORE INFO HERE
August 28 – 8:00pm Canberra Theatre Centre – MORE INFO HERE
june 2018
26jun7:00 pmLoft Series 1: WeaveAuckland Tuesday performance
Concert Details
Weave GLASS • MENDELSSOHN • GREENBAUM
Concert Details
Weave
GLASS • MENDELSSOHN • GREENBAUM • BUCHANAN • SCHUMANN
Ashley Brown (cello) with guest musicians Natalie Lin (violin) and Somi Kim (piano)The first in the 2018 series, Weave introduces an aural tapestry rich in colour and texture. The structuralist sensibility of Philip Glass (USA) and ordered tonality of Felix Mendelssohn (GER) provide a framework for the more fluid and silky sound worlds of Stuart Greenbaum (AUS) and Dorothy Buchanan (NZ), before the flat-out emotional turbulence of Robert Schumann (GER) closes the loop.
Programme:
Philip Glass (USA): Head On
Felix Mendelssohn (GER): Trio No.1 in D minor
Stuart Greenbaum (AUS): Year Without a Summer
~
Dorothy Buchanan (NZ): Trio Sound
Robert Schumann (GER): Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor
TICKETS: $50 Adult / $25 Student / $135 Series Subscription*
* Purchase a series subscription and go in the draw to win a $200 WORLD clothing voucher, or a 75 min. massage from Biodynamic Massage. Prizes drawn following the first performance of Weave, June 24th.
Philip GLASS (USA; b. 1937): Head On– c. 3’
It short but it’s classic! This is the first Philip Glass piece that sounds like Philip Glass. You won’t find it recorded, it wasn’t even publicly performed until 2017, and even he describes it as a ‘rarity’. He composed it for a party, specifically an old friend of his from Juilliard, Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild, who played the violin – he played the piano, another friend of theirs the cello.
“It was really obsessive music, some minutes long, which began with the players playing different melodies. With each development of the piece, the differences started to become eliminated, so that by the time we came to the end, everyone was playing together. At the very end of the piece, there was a collision of all this music—that’s why it was called “Head On”—simplifying itself until it became a single melody.”
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
Felix MENDELSSOHN (GER; 1809–1847): Trio No.1 in D Minor, c. 28’
Molto allegro ed agitato
Andante con moto tranquillo
Scherzo:Leggiero e vivace
Finale: Allegro assai appassionato
On Aug 17, 1838, Mendelssohn wrote to his friend Ferdinand Hiller: “A very important branch of piano music, of which I am particularly fond – trios, quartets, and other things with accompaniment – is quite forgotten now, and I feel greatly the want of something new in that line. I should like to do a little towards this, and I am thinking of writing a couple of trios.”
It was July, 1839. Mendelssohn was summering in Frankfurt, on leave from his incredibly busy life in Leipzig where he’d just wrapped up a season with the premiere of Schubert’s 9thsymphony. He was director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the finest orchestra in Europe, and was introducing the audience to the totally unknown Franz Schubert as well as his own special discovery, JS Bach; he conducted Bach’s choir, the Thomanchor: he directed the opera, and was basically involved in every large-scale musical institution in Leipzig. Small wonder then that he wanted to go back to his childhood love, chamber music. He hadn’t written a piano trio for almost 20 years (aged only 11, the first no longer survives) and he sent it off to Hiller for comment. Hiller’s only suggestion was to talk up the piano part, since Mendelssohn was a virtuoso pianist, after all: besides, this was the age of Chopin and Liszt and the audience expected it. Mendelssohn did, and the result was a romantic, heartfelt, ‘Song without words’ of such scintillating brilliance that it was instantly hailed as the master trio of the age.
It begins anxiously, with that great opening cello theme underpinned by an agitated, murmuring piano as if a great ocean liner is sweeping through choppy seas. The second movement is the emotional heart of the trio, with one of Mendelssohn’s loveliest tunes led by the piano, echoed by the strings. The fleet-footed scherzo, with its Hungarian gypsy overtones, is the piano showing off for Hiller – Mendelssohn was famous for his lightning fast finger-staccato and wrists! – before we get one of the most glorious finales ever written, a chorale that has been likened to several beloved Lutheran tunes but is purely Mendelssohn’s own.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
Stuart GREENBAUM (AUS; B. 1966): Year without a summer– c.15’
The eruption in 1815 of Mt Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa was over four times as big as the eruption of Krakatoa later that century but perhaps not as well known. The ash and dust thrown up in the Earth’s upper atmosphere further resulted in ‘the year without a summer’ in 1816. This was by all accounts a devastating ecological event that caused unseasonal cold temperatures and widespread famine.
The first movement of this trio is short and fast, framing a dark cloud of dust approaching from the distance. Did it seem a premonition? How long did they think it would last? The longer second movement shifts forward to 1816 and contemplates the upheaval of people’s lives – of having their world turned upside-down in one way or another and having to regroup and adjust to new circumstances.
Written for, and dedicated to NZTrio, this work was commissioned by the Trans-Tasman Composer Exchange Programme administered by the AMC and SOUNZ and supported with funding from the Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.
Dorothy BUCHANAN (NZ; b. 1945): Trio Sound – c. 17’
One of Dorothy Buchanan’s loveliest chamber works, commissioned in 1980 just after she’d become first woman president of CANZ, and indicative of her great love of New Zealand poetry – her settings range from Katherine Mansfield and Lauris Edmond to Witi Ihimaera and, as here, the future poet laureate, Ian Wedde. He spent much of the 70s travelling in the middle east: and on his return gave her one of his poems inspired by the desert, Shaduf, to set however she pleased. She describes this trio as her interpretation of the poem in musical abstraction.
Shaduf
When that star fell in the desert
the dry socket brimmed with water.
The well looked at the heaven
they entered its dark surface
they shone there.
‘Starwater.
starwater…. Our cup
brims over in the dust!’
Be what you see.
And a tender stubble of green
spread around the crater.
Now this where you pause on your journey.
This is the place you return to
in your rage: to bathe
your eyes in starlight
drink brackish tears
sit in the cool of these outlandish trees
whose names you’ll never know
seeds dropped by some caravan lost in eternity.
They waited for the water to spring here
kissing their husks open.
Hello. Good morning
It was not a dream you dreamt.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
Robert SCHUMANN (GER; 1810 – 1856):Piano Trio No. 1 in d Minor, Op.63 – c. 30’
Mit Energie und Leidenschaft
Lebhaft, doch nicht zu rasch
Langsam, mit inniger Empfindung
Mit Feuer
This is Schumann at his most romantic – the creative genius, the composing powerhouse, the Schumann that had swept Clara off her feet exactly 10 years before. He had already begun to show signs of his illness, the mental imbalance that drove him to attempt suicide in 1854 and would eventually kill him. It’s been posited that this was nothing but the mercury treatment for syphilis. But he also had it in his family: fully three of the Schumann children were to succumb to the same thing; and back in 1844, which they spent unhappily in Dresden, he had been plagued by tinnitus, phobias, nervous fits and apprehension of death. The neurasthenic symphony no 2 and piano concerto date from that period and they had cancelled his contract with the orchestra, and hurriedly turned back to Leipzig.
And there, eventually, things began to look up. 1847 began with an extensive concert tour for Clara, the pianist, and they had a wonderful spring in Prague before Schumann himself was received rapturously in Berlin – momentous for him, as for the first time, he was possibly even more famous than his wife. The summer they spent in his beloved Zwickau, where he was born and grew up until leaving for university – this is where the Schumann centre is based now – and that’s where he suddenly began composing again, completing not one but two piano trios in short succession.
No. 1 is the more mysterious of the two, inspired by Mendelssohn’s piano trio in the same key, which Schumann revered. The first movement sets the mood, a surging mix of unrest and euphoria, with mainly the piano set against the violin with wonderful effects. The dotted scherzo and flowing trio centre section drive relentlessly upward. Crises in the melody – is this a clue to Schumann’s recent experience? – lead into a beautiful third-movement duet between violin and cello; and all the uneasy parts of the whole are brilliantly wrapped up in a classic, heroic, fiery finale.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
24jun5:00 pmLoft Series 1: WeaveAuckland Sunday performance
Concert Details
Weave GLASS • MENDELSSOHN • GREENBAUM
Concert Details
Weave
GLASS • MENDELSSOHN • GREENBAUM • BUCHANAN • SCHUMANN
Ashley Brown (cello) with guest musicians Natalie Lin (violin) and Somi Kim (piano)The first in the 2018 series, Weave introduces an aural tapestry rich in colour and texture. The structuralist sensibility of Philip Glass (USA) and ordered tonality of Felix Mendelssohn (GER) provide a framework for the more fluid and silky sound worlds of Stuart Greenbaum (AUS) and Dorothy Buchanan (NZ), before the flat-out emotional turbulence of Robert Schumann (GER) closes the loop.
Programme:
Philip Glass (USA): Head On
Felix Mendelssohn (GER): Trio No.1 in D minor
Stuart Greenbaum (AUS): Year Without a Summer
~
Dorothy Buchanan (NZ): Trio Sound
Robert Schumann (GER): Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor
TICKETS: $50 Adult / $25 Student / $135 Series Subscription*
* Purchase a series subscription and go in the draw to win a $200 WORLD clothing voucher, or a 75 min. massage from Biodynamic Massage. Prizes drawn following the first performance of Weave, June 24th.
Philip GLASS (USA; b. 1937): Head On– c. 3’
It short but it’s classic! This is the first Philip Glass piece that sounds like Philip Glass. You won’t find it recorded, it wasn’t even publicly performed until 2017, and even he describes it as a ‘rarity’. He composed it for a party, specifically an old friend of his from Juilliard, Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild, who played the violin – he played the piano, another friend of theirs the cello.
“It was really obsessive music, some minutes long, which began with the players playing different melodies. With each development of the piece, the differences started to become eliminated, so that by the time we came to the end, everyone was playing together. At the very end of the piece, there was a collision of all this music—that’s why it was called “Head On”—simplifying itself until it became a single melody.”
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
Felix MENDELSSOHN (GER; 1809–1847): Trio No.1 in D Minor, c. 28’
Molto allegro ed agitato
Andante con moto tranquillo
Scherzo:Leggiero e vivace
Finale: Allegro assai appassionato
On Aug 17, 1838, Mendelssohn wrote to his friend Ferdinand Hiller: “A very important branch of piano music, of which I am particularly fond – trios, quartets, and other things with accompaniment – is quite forgotten now, and I feel greatly the want of something new in that line. I should like to do a little towards this, and I am thinking of writing a couple of trios.”
It was July, 1839. Mendelssohn was summering in Frankfurt, on leave from his incredibly busy life in Leipzig where he’d just wrapped up a season with the premiere of Schubert’s 9thsymphony. He was director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the finest orchestra in Europe, and was introducing the audience to the totally unknown Franz Schubert as well as his own special discovery, JS Bach; he conducted Bach’s choir, the Thomanchor: he directed the opera, and was basically involved in every large-scale musical institution in Leipzig. Small wonder then that he wanted to go back to his childhood love, chamber music. He hadn’t written a piano trio for almost 20 years (aged only 11, the first no longer survives) and he sent it off to Hiller for comment. Hiller’s only suggestion was to talk up the piano part, since Mendelssohn was a virtuoso pianist, after all: besides, this was the age of Chopin and Liszt and the audience expected it. Mendelssohn did, and the result was a romantic, heartfelt, ‘Song without words’ of such scintillating brilliance that it was instantly hailed as the master trio of the age.
It begins anxiously, with that great opening cello theme underpinned by an agitated, murmuring piano as if a great ocean liner is sweeping through choppy seas. The second movement is the emotional heart of the trio, with one of Mendelssohn’s loveliest tunes led by the piano, echoed by the strings. The fleet-footed scherzo, with its Hungarian gypsy overtones, is the piano showing off for Hiller – Mendelssohn was famous for his lightning fast finger-staccato and wrists! – before we get one of the most glorious finales ever written, a chorale that has been likened to several beloved Lutheran tunes but is purely Mendelssohn’s own.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
Stuart GREENBAUM (AUS; B. 1966): Year without a summer– c.15’
The eruption in 1815 of Mt Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa was over four times as big as the eruption of Krakatoa later that century but perhaps not as well known. The ash and dust thrown up in the Earth’s upper atmosphere further resulted in ‘the year without a summer’ in 1816. This was by all accounts a devastating ecological event that caused unseasonal cold temperatures and widespread famine.
The first movement of this trio is short and fast, framing a dark cloud of dust approaching from the distance. Did it seem a premonition? How long did they think it would last? The longer second movement shifts forward to 1816 and contemplates the upheaval of people’s lives – of having their world turned upside-down in one way or another and having to regroup and adjust to new circumstances.
Written for, and dedicated to NZTrio, this work was commissioned by the Trans-Tasman Composer Exchange Programme administered by the AMC and SOUNZ and supported with funding from the Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.
Dorothy BUCHANAN (NZ; b. 1945): Trio Sound – c. 17’
One of Dorothy Buchanan’s loveliest chamber works, commissioned in 1980 just after she’d become first woman president of CANZ, and indicative of her great love of New Zealand poetry – her settings range from Katherine Mansfield and Lauris Edmond to Witi Ihimaera and, as here, the future poet laureate, Ian Wedde. He spent much of the 70s travelling in the middle east: and on his return gave her one of his poems inspired by the desert, Shaduf, to set however she pleased. She describes this trio as her interpretation of the poem in musical abstraction.
Shaduf
When that star fell in the desert
the dry socket brimmed with water.
The well looked at the heaven
they entered its dark surface
they shone there.
‘Starwater.
starwater…. Our cup
brims over in the dust!’
Be what you see.
And a tender stubble of green
spread around the crater.
Now this where you pause on your journey.
This is the place you return to
in your rage: to bathe
your eyes in starlight
drink brackish tears
sit in the cool of these outlandish trees
whose names you’ll never know
seeds dropped by some caravan lost in eternity.
They waited for the water to spring here
kissing their husks open.
Hello. Good morning
It was not a dream you dreamt.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
Robert SCHUMANN (GER; 1810 – 1856):Piano Trio No. 1 in d Minor, Op.63 – c. 30’
Mit Energie und Leidenschaft
Lebhaft, doch nicht zu rasch
Langsam, mit inniger Empfindung
Mit Feuer
This is Schumann at his most romantic – the creative genius, the composing powerhouse, the Schumann that had swept Clara off her feet exactly 10 years before. He had already begun to show signs of his illness, the mental imbalance that drove him to attempt suicide in 1854 and would eventually kill him. It’s been posited that this was nothing but the mercury treatment for syphilis. But he also had it in his family: fully three of the Schumann children were to succumb to the same thing; and back in 1844, which they spent unhappily in Dresden, he had been plagued by tinnitus, phobias, nervous fits and apprehension of death. The neurasthenic symphony no 2 and piano concerto date from that period and they had cancelled his contract with the orchestra, and hurriedly turned back to Leipzig.
And there, eventually, things began to look up. 1847 began with an extensive concert tour for Clara, the pianist, and they had a wonderful spring in Prague before Schumann himself was received rapturously in Berlin – momentous for him, as for the first time, he was possibly even more famous than his wife. The summer they spent in his beloved Zwickau, where he was born and grew up until leaving for university – this is where the Schumann centre is based now – and that’s where he suddenly began composing again, completing not one but two piano trios in short succession.
No. 1 is the more mysterious of the two, inspired by Mendelssohn’s piano trio in the same key, which Schumann revered. The first movement sets the mood, a surging mix of unrest and euphoria, with mainly the piano set against the violin with wonderful effects. The dotted scherzo and flowing trio centre section drive relentlessly upward. Crises in the melody – is this a clue to Schumann’s recent experience? – lead into a beautiful third-movement duet between violin and cello; and all the uneasy parts of the whole are brilliantly wrapped up in a classic, heroic, fiery finale.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
21jun7:00 pm- 8:30 pmNZTrio Series 1: WeaveCHRISTCHURCH
Concert Details
Weave GLASS • MENDELSSOHN • GREENBAUM
Concert Details
Weave
GLASS • MENDELSSOHN • GREENBAUM • BUCHANAN • SCHUMANN
Ashley Brown (cello) with guest musicians Natalie Lin (violin) and Somi Kim (piano)The first in the 2018 series, Weave introduces an aural tapestry rich in colour and texture. The structuralist sensibility of Philip Glass (USA) and ordered tonality of Felix Mendelssohn (GER) provide a framework for the more fluid and silky sound worlds of Stuart Greenbaum (AUS) and Dorothy Buchanan (NZ), before the flat-out emotional turbulence of Robert Schumann (GER) closes the loop.
Programme:
Philip Glass (USA): Head On
Felix Mendelssohn (GER): Trio No.1 in D minor
Stuart Greenbaum (AUS): Year Without a Summer
~
Dorothy Buchanan (NZ): Trio Sound
Robert Schumann (GER): Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor 30’
TICKETS $40 Adults / $20 Students
Time
(Thursday) 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
The Piano
156 Armagh Street, Christchurch, NZ
Philip GLASS (USA; b. 1937): Head On– c. 3’
It short but it’s classic! This is the first Philip Glass piece that sounds like Philip Glass. You won’t find it recorded, it wasn’t even publicly performed until 2017, and even he describes it as a ‘rarity’. He composed it for a party, specifically an old friend of his from Juilliard, Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild, who played the violin – he played the piano, another friend of theirs the cello.
“It was really obsessive music, some minutes long, which began with the players playing different melodies. With each development of the piece, the differences started to become eliminated, so that by the time we came to the end, everyone was playing together. At the very end of the piece, there was a collision of all this music—that’s why it was called “Head On”—simplifying itself until it became a single melody.”
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
Felix MENDELSSOHN (GER; 1809–1847): Trio No.1 in D Minor, c. 28’
Molto allegro ed agitato
Andante con moto tranquillo
Scherzo:Leggiero e vivace
Finale: Allegro assai appassionato
On Aug 17, 1838, Mendelssohn wrote to his friend Ferdinand Hiller: “A very important branch of piano music, of which I am particularly fond – trios, quartets, and other things with accompaniment – is quite forgotten now, and I feel greatly the want of something new in that line. I should like to do a little towards this, and I am thinking of writing a couple of trios.”
It was July, 1839. Mendelssohn was summering in Frankfurt, on leave from his incredibly busy life in Leipzig where he’d just wrapped up a season with the premiere of Schubert’s 9thsymphony. He was director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the finest orchestra in Europe, and was introducing the audience to the totally unknown Franz Schubert as well as his own special discovery, JS Bach; he conducted Bach’s choir, the Thomanchor: he directed the opera, and was basically involved in every large-scale musical institution in Leipzig. Small wonder then that he wanted to go back to his childhood love, chamber music. He hadn’t written a piano trio for almost 20 years (aged only 11, the first no longer survives) and he sent it off to Hiller for comment. Hiller’s only suggestion was to talk up the piano part, since Mendelssohn was a virtuoso pianist, after all: besides, this was the age of Chopin and Liszt and the audience expected it. Mendelssohn did, and the result was a romantic, heartfelt, ‘Song without words’ of such scintillating brilliance that it was instantly hailed as the master trio of the age.
It begins anxiously, with that great opening cello theme underpinned by an agitated, murmuring piano as if a great ocean liner is sweeping through choppy seas. The second movement is the emotional heart of the trio, with one of Mendelssohn’s loveliest tunes led by the piano, echoed by the strings. The fleet-footed scherzo, with its Hungarian gypsy overtones, is the piano showing off for Hiller – Mendelssohn was famous for his lightning fast finger-staccato and wrists! – before we get one of the most glorious finales ever written, a chorale that has been likened to several beloved Lutheran tunes but is purely Mendelssohn’s own.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
Stuart GREENBAUM (AUS; B. 1966): Year without a summer– c.15’
The eruption in 1815 of Mt Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa was over four times as big as the eruption of Krakatoa later that century but perhaps not as well known. The ash and dust thrown up in the Earth’s upper atmosphere further resulted in ‘the year without a summer’ in 1816. This was by all accounts a devastating ecological event that caused unseasonal cold temperatures and widespread famine.
The first movement of this trio is short and fast, framing a dark cloud of dust approaching from the distance. Did it seem a premonition? How long did they think it would last? The longer second movement shifts forward to 1816 and contemplates the upheaval of people’s lives – of having their world turned upside-down in one way or another and having to regroup and adjust to new circumstances.
Written for, and dedicated to NZTrio, this work was commissioned by the Trans-Tasman Composer Exchange Programme administered by the AMC and SOUNZ and supported with funding from the Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.
Dorothy BUCHANAN (NZ; b. 1945): Trio Sound – c. 17’
One of Dorothy Buchanan’s loveliest chamber works, commissioned in 1980 just after she’d become first woman president of CANZ, and indicative of her great love of New Zealand poetry – her settings range from Katherine Mansfield and Lauris Edmond to Witi Ihimaera and, as here, the future poet laureate, Ian Wedde. He spent much of the 70s travelling in the middle east: and on his return gave her one of his poems inspired by the desert, Shaduf, to set however she pleased. She describes this trio as her interpretation of the poem in musical abstraction.
Shaduf
When that star fell in the desert
the dry socket brimmed with water.
The well looked at the heaven
they entered its dark surface
they shone there.
‘Starwater.
starwater…. Our cup
brims over in the dust!’
Be what you see.
And a tender stubble of green
spread around the crater.
Now this where you pause on your journey.
This is the place you return to
in your rage: to bathe
your eyes in starlight
drink brackish tears
sit in the cool of these outlandish trees
whose names you’ll never know
seeds dropped by some caravan lost in eternity.
They waited for the water to spring here
kissing their husks open.
Hello. Good morning
It was not a dream you dreamt.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
Robert SCHUMANN (GER; 1810 – 1856):Piano Trio No. 1 in d Minor, Op.63 – c. 30’
Mit Energie und Leidenschaft
Lebhaft, doch nicht zu rasch
Langsam, mit inniger Empfindung
Mit Feuer
This is Schumann at his most romantic – the creative genius, the composing powerhouse, the Schumann that had swept Clara off her feet exactly 10 years before. He had already begun to show signs of his illness, the mental imbalance that drove him to attempt suicide in 1854 and would eventually kill him. It’s been posited that this was nothing but the mercury treatment for syphilis. But he also had it in his family: fully three of the Schumann children were to succumb to the same thing; and back in 1844, which they spent unhappily in Dresden, he had been plagued by tinnitus, phobias, nervous fits and apprehension of death. The neurasthenic symphony no 2 and piano concerto date from that period and they had cancelled his contract with the orchestra, and hurriedly turned back to Leipzig.
And there, eventually, things began to look up. 1847 began with an extensive concert tour for Clara, the pianist, and they had a wonderful spring in Prague before Schumann himself was received rapturously in Berlin – momentous for him, as for the first time, he was possibly even more famous than his wife. The summer they spent in his beloved Zwickau, where he was born and grew up until leaving for university – this is where the Schumann centre is based now – and that’s where he suddenly began composing again, completing not one but two piano trios in short succession.
No. 1 is the more mysterious of the two, inspired by Mendelssohn’s piano trio in the same key, which Schumann revered. The first movement sets the mood, a surging mix of unrest and euphoria, with mainly the piano set against the violin with wonderful effects. The dotted scherzo and flowing trio centre section drive relentlessly upward. Crises in the melody – is this a clue to Schumann’s recent experience? – lead into a beautiful third-movement duet between violin and cello; and all the uneasy parts of the whole are brilliantly wrapped up in a classic, heroic, fiery finale.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
20jun7:00 pm- 8:30 pmNZTrio Art3: WeaveWellington
Concert Details
Weave GLASS • MENDELSSOHN • GREENBAUM
Concert Details
Weave
GLASS • MENDELSSOHN • GREENBAUM • BUCHANAN • SCHUMANN
Ashley Brown (cello) with guest musicians Natalie Lin (violin) and Somi Kim (piano)Weave introduces an aural tapestry rich in colour and texture. The structuralist sensibility of Philip Glass (USA) and ordered tonality of Felix Mendelssohn (GER) provide a framework for the more fluid and silky sound worlds of Stuart Greenbaum (AUS) and Dorothy Buchanan (NZ), before the flat-out emotional turbulence of Robert Schumann (GER) closes the loop.
Programme:
Philip Glass (USA): Head On
Felix Mendelssohn (GER): Trio No.1 in D minor
Stuart Greenbaum (AUS): Year Without a Summer
~
Dorothy Buchanan (NZ): Trio Sound
Robert Schumann (GER): Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor
TICKETS: $40 Adult / $20 Student
Time
(Wednesday) 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm UTC+12:00
Location
City Gallery
101 Wakefield St, Wellington
Philip GLASS (USA; b. 1937): Head On– c. 3’
It short but it’s classic! This is the first Philip Glass piece that sounds like Philip Glass. You won’t find it recorded, it wasn’t even publicly performed until 2017, and even he describes it as a ‘rarity’. He composed it for a party, specifically an old friend of his from Juilliard, Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild, who played the violin – he played the piano, another friend of theirs the cello.
“It was really obsessive music, some minutes long, which began with the players playing different melodies. With each development of the piece, the differences started to become eliminated, so that by the time we came to the end, everyone was playing together. At the very end of the piece, there was a collision of all this music—that’s why it was called “Head On”—simplifying itself until it became a single melody.”
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
Felix MENDELSSOHN (GER; 1809–1847): Trio No.1 in D Minor, c. 28’
Molto allegro ed agitato
Andante con moto tranquillo
Scherzo:Leggiero e vivace
Finale: Allegro assai appassionato
On Aug 17, 1838, Mendelssohn wrote to his friend Ferdinand Hiller: “A very important branch of piano music, of which I am particularly fond – trios, quartets, and other things with accompaniment – is quite forgotten now, and I feel greatly the want of something new in that line. I should like to do a little towards this, and I am thinking of writing a couple of trios.”
It was July, 1839. Mendelssohn was summering in Frankfurt, on leave from his incredibly busy life in Leipzig where he’d just wrapped up a season with the premiere of Schubert’s 9thsymphony. He was director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the finest orchestra in Europe, and was introducing the audience to the totally unknown Franz Schubert as well as his own special discovery, JS Bach; he conducted Bach’s choir, the Thomanchor: he directed the opera, and was basically involved in every large-scale musical institution in Leipzig. Small wonder then that he wanted to go back to his childhood love, chamber music. He hadn’t written a piano trio for almost 20 years (aged only 11, the first no longer survives) and he sent it off to Hiller for comment. Hiller’s only suggestion was to talk up the piano part, since Mendelssohn was a virtuoso pianist, after all: besides, this was the age of Chopin and Liszt and the audience expected it. Mendelssohn did, and the result was a romantic, heartfelt, ‘Song without words’ of such scintillating brilliance that it was instantly hailed as the master trio of the age.
It begins anxiously, with that great opening cello theme underpinned by an agitated, murmuring piano as if a great ocean liner is sweeping through choppy seas. The second movement is the emotional heart of the trio, with one of Mendelssohn’s loveliest tunes led by the piano, echoed by the strings. The fleet-footed scherzo, with its Hungarian gypsy overtones, is the piano showing off for Hiller – Mendelssohn was famous for his lightning fast finger-staccato and wrists! – before we get one of the most glorious finales ever written, a chorale that has been likened to several beloved Lutheran tunes but is purely Mendelssohn’s own.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
Stuart GREENBAUM (AUS; B. 1966): Year without a summer– c.15’
The eruption in 1815 of Mt Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa was over four times as big as the eruption of Krakatoa later that century but perhaps not as well known. The ash and dust thrown up in the Earth’s upper atmosphere further resulted in ‘the year without a summer’ in 1816. This was by all accounts a devastating ecological event that caused unseasonal cold temperatures and widespread famine.
The first movement of this trio is short and fast, framing a dark cloud of dust approaching from the distance. Did it seem a premonition? How long did they think it would last? The longer second movement shifts forward to 1816 and contemplates the upheaval of people’s lives – of having their world turned upside-down in one way or another and having to regroup and adjust to new circumstances.
Written for, and dedicated to NZTrio, this work was commissioned by the Trans-Tasman Composer Exchange Programme administered by the AMC and SOUNZ and supported with funding from the Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.
Dorothy BUCHANAN (NZ; b. 1945): Trio Sound – c. 17’
One of Dorothy Buchanan’s loveliest chamber works, commissioned in 1980 just after she’d become first woman president of CANZ, and indicative of her great love of New Zealand poetry – her settings range from Katherine Mansfield and Lauris Edmond to Witi Ihimaera and, as here, the future poet laureate, Ian Wedde. He spent much of the 70s travelling in the middle east: and on his return gave her one of his poems inspired by the desert, Shaduf, to set however she pleased. She describes this trio as her interpretation of the poem in musical abstraction.
Shaduf
When that star fell in the desert
the dry socket brimmed with water.
The well looked at the heaven
they entered its dark surface
they shone there.
‘Starwater.
starwater…. Our cup
brims over in the dust!’
Be what you see.
And a tender stubble of green
spread around the crater.
Now this where you pause on your journey.
This is the place you return to
in your rage: to bathe
your eyes in starlight
drink brackish tears
sit in the cool of these outlandish trees
whose names you’ll never know
seeds dropped by some caravan lost in eternity.
They waited for the water to spring here
kissing their husks open.
Hello. Good morning
It was not a dream you dreamt.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
Robert SCHUMANN (GER; 1810 – 1856):Piano Trio No. 1 in d Minor, Op.63 – c. 30’
Mit Energie und Leidenschaft
Lebhaft, doch nicht zu rasch
Langsam, mit inniger Empfindung
Mit Feuer
This is Schumann at his most romantic – the creative genius, the composing powerhouse, the Schumann that had swept Clara off her feet exactly 10 years before. He had already begun to show signs of his illness, the mental imbalance that drove him to attempt suicide in 1854 and would eventually kill him. It’s been posited that this was nothing but the mercury treatment for syphilis. But he also had it in his family: fully three of the Schumann children were to succumb to the same thing; and back in 1844, which they spent unhappily in Dresden, he had been plagued by tinnitus, phobias, nervous fits and apprehension of death. The neurasthenic symphony no 2 and piano concerto date from that period and they had cancelled his contract with the orchestra, and hurriedly turned back to Leipzig.
And there, eventually, things began to look up. 1847 began with an extensive concert tour for Clara, the pianist, and they had a wonderful spring in Prague before Schumann himself was received rapturously in Berlin – momentous for him, as for the first time, he was possibly even more famous than his wife. The summer they spent in his beloved Zwickau, where he was born and grew up until leaving for university – this is where the Schumann centre is based now – and that’s where he suddenly began composing again, completing not one but two piano trios in short succession.
No. 1 is the more mysterious of the two, inspired by Mendelssohn’s piano trio in the same key, which Schumann revered. The first movement sets the mood, a surging mix of unrest and euphoria, with mainly the piano set against the violin with wonderful effects. The dotted scherzo and flowing trio centre section drive relentlessly upward. Crises in the melody – is this a clue to Schumann’s recent experience? – lead into a beautiful third-movement duet between violin and cello; and all the uneasy parts of the whole are brilliantly wrapped up in a classic, heroic, fiery finale.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson.
6jun7:00 pmSayonara(h) 2Second evening added
Concert Details
Join NZTrio at the TSB
Concert Details
Join NZTrio at the TSB Wallace Art Centre, Pah Homestead on June 6th, 7pm for a second final performance with Sarah as pianist. Yuri Cho is guest violinist, and drinks, nibbles, and toasts will follow.
Programme:
Approx. 75 mins no interval
Brahms: Piano Trio no. 2 in C major op. 87 (I: Allegro)
Jack Body: Fire in the Belly
Ravel: Piano Trio (I: Modéré)
Chen Yi: Tibetan Tunes (II: Dui Xie)
Beethoven: Trio in E flat major op. 1 no. 1 (IV: Finale – Presto)
Claire Cowan: Subtle Dances
Saint-Saëns: Piano Trio no. 2 in e minor op. 82 (V: Allegro)
Tickets $40 Adults / $20 Students
General Admission
BOOK NOW VIA EVENTFINDA
Time
(Wednesday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
TSB Wallace Art Centre, The Pah Homestead
72 Hillsborough Rd., Auckland
Johannes BRAHMS (GER; 1833 – 1897): Trio in C major, Op. 87
I. Allegro moderato
You know what I think of Brahms: after Bach and Beethoven the greatest, the most sublime of all composers. –von Bülow. This was 1882, the year that Hans von Bülow made that famous pronouncement, in a letter to his wife. Brahms had become the third of the three B’s.During this time, Brahms was at the height of his powers. He had two hugely successful symphonies under his belt, as well as the German Requiem and the violin concerto, all of which were making him famous across Europe.
It was also the year that, after all these orchestral successes, he chose to go back to chamber music and song. It was almost 30 years since he’d written a piano trio: and he’d actually begun this two years earlier in Vienna as one of a pair – the other he destroyed! – but this one he deemed worthy of survival and took it with him (along with the string quintet Op 88) to work on over the summer at his favourite spa resort, Bad Ischl outside Salzburg, the scene of so many Brahms masterpieces. And this is one. It’s the most powerful of the trios, the most sophisticated in terms of texture and form, and also the most harmonically daring – listen out for a key change of just a semitone (!) in the first movement. It will grab you right from the unison string opening – that first theme, and the even more beautiful second, underpin the entire trio.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Jack BODY (NZ; 1944 – 2015): Fire in the Belly (NZTrio commission 2006)
Fire in the belly is that energy that impels us to do things, make things, and to act with urgency and a sense of necessity. It is one important source of creative energy, and without it art can be flaccid and dull. It is what teenagers tend to have a lot of, and what aged folk like me need to try to recapture from time to time! The work was commissioned by NZTrio with funding from Creative New Zealand, and I was delighted to receive this invitation from an ensemble which has such a fantastic commitment to NZ music. –Jack Body
Jack Body’s music covers most genres, including solo and chamber music, orchestral music, music theatre, music for dance and film as well as electroacoustic music. He was a specialist in cross-cultural composition both in his own music, and in his teaching at Victoria University of Wellingtonwhere he established a residency for traditional musicians to work collaboratively with composition staff and students. Jack was a prolific world-class composer and ethnomusicologist with global reach. The impact of his artistic life on New Zealand audiences, composers, musicians and students is profound. He received the Arts Foundation Laureate and Icon Award in 2015.
Maurice RAVEL (FRA; 1875 – 1937): Piano Trio in A minor
I. Modéré
This mysterious, elusive, passionate, trio is the work that Ravel was writing when Europe found itself plunged into war. August 1914: he had 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 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 inJune 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. –Ravel
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 Modéré. Rhythm is key to this whole work, the inexorable weaving together of melodies and harmony: the shimmering atmosphere; the classically perfect form.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Chen YI (China; b. 1953): Tibetan Tunes (2007)
Dui Xie
Trained as a violinist in the European classical tradition, Chen Yi initially came into contact with Chinese folk music in a forced relocation to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Already widely celebrated in China as a major new composer during the increasingly open cultural climate of the 1980s, Chen Yi came to the United States in 1986 to continue her musical studies. She writes both intimate and large scale works for European and Chinese instruments, and fuses Western orchestral and choral idioms with traditional Eastern pentatonic tonalities. Her music has since been performed worldwide by orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic and Los Angeles Philharmonic, and by musicians such as Yehudi Menuhin and Yo-Yo Ma. She has held residences in both New York and Missouri and teaches at the University of Missouri–Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance.
Commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University, the two-movement Tibetan Tuneswas written for the New Pacific Trio and was premiered at the Conservatory of Music at University of the Pacific in January 2007 in Stockton, California. The second movement Dui Xie being performed this eveningis a kind of Tibetan folk ensemble music typically played with the plucked instrument Zhamunie, the bamboo flute, and the fiddle Erhu. Chen explains: The music presents the rich gestures of Du Mu (a name of a god in Tibetan Buddhism) in a serene mood.
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN (GER; 1770 – 1827): Piano Trio in E flat Major, Op. 1, No. 1
IV. Finale – Presto
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, on the Rhine, shortly before Christmas in 1770. His musical ability showed early and by the time he was 11 years, he was working as an assistant organist at the Electoral chapel and was actively involved in music-making in the houses of the local aristocrats. As a young man, Beethoven became aware of major political and social changes sweeping across Europe. In music, the traditional compositional techniques of the late 18thcentury continued for a time but new ideas were already pushing against the established boundaries. This suited Beethoven and his more emotional and expressive compositions, sometimes embellished with touches of youthful humour. He was eager to take his musical gifts to the much larger city of Vienna, seven days away by stagecoach.
For a composer, their Op. 1 marks the transition from talented student to serious composer. Beethoven had already completed about 20 chamber works when he assigned the three piano trios to his Op.1. Most of the music was composed while he was still living in Bonn – Grove suggests that the first Trio was written before 1794 – and it is possible Beethoven performed movements from them at private concerts before leaving for Vienna in 1792.
The three trios of Op. 1 were formally premiered in 1793 at the Viennese house of Prince Carl Lichnowsky to whom they are dedicated. Most of musical Vienna attended, including Haydn, who was particularly impressed with the first two trios of the set. They were published in 1795.
The E flat Trio is in four movements. In the opening Allegrothe piano leads with upward broken chords – Mannheim Rockets, a popular 18th-century gesture to add virtuosic brilliance. The mood is sparkling and is contrasted by a gentler second subject mainly on the strings. This happily explores scale passages, and references the first subject as the piano gently commences the recapitulation.
In the Adagio cantabile, the piano sings the lyrical theme A-flat theme and is joined by the strings in turn, and then jollied along with some rhythmic and harmonic surprises.
The Scherzois a spirited romp, dramatically contrasted by the long lines of the strings in the trio as the piano takes off with some little Rockets of its own. The Prestofinale opens with a piano leap and plenty of will-of-the-wisp humour. There’s another flash of the Rocket theme and a dazzling finish.
Joy Aberdein © 2012
Claire COWAN (NZ; b. 1983): Subtle Dances (co-commissioned in 2013 by NZTrio and Chamber Music NZ)
Claire is a composer and performer based in Auckland. She studied composition at Auckland University and since graduating with Honours in 2006, has pursued a career in music for concert, film, theatre and TV. Claire is an experienced orchestrator and symphonic writer, having worked with many of New Zealand’s leading orchestras.
Subtle Dances is a set of three short moods for piano trio. In writing, the composer has tried to approach the works as intuitively as possible. For her this creates the greatest connection between composer, performers, and the audience listening. Each work features one instrument more prominently – firstly cello, then piano, then violin. The music explores Cowan’s continued fascination with the space created within the music, in which a listener can engage. Both hypnotic and meditative, the pieces present themselves as a contrasting set of interior landscapes. They are: passing thoughts, memories, unsolvable problems, and explorations of headspace: Firstly – it begins with a dance; a rhythmical and passionate interlocking of playful lines, but not without an element of danger or risk.Secondly – an elegy, the body in its slowest state. Thirdly – a struggle, an unanswered question, a cycle – and ultimately, a transition; a bursting through, into a new light.
Camille SAINT-SAËNS (1835 – 1921): Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Opus 92 (1892)
V. Allegro
I am working quietly away at a trio which I hope will drive to despair all those unlucky enough to hear it. I shall need the whole summer to perpetrate this atrocity; one must have a little fun somehow. –Saint-Saëns
Saint-Saëns was 56 and at the height of his career when he wrote this, the second of his three piano trios. Another prodigy pianist, like Chopin: he had begun playing at the age of 2½, and by the time he was 10 he was giving public concerts of the complete Beethoven sonatas – from memory! He started at the Paris conservatoire when he was 13 and has one of the longest careers in the music business, with a chamber music output that spans 70 years, right up until the year of his death. It was a difficult life – an only child, he was brought up by his mother and grandmother after his father died. His own two infant sons died tragically within weeks of each other, his marriage broke up, and after his mother died he spent much of the rest of his life travelling, accompanied only by his dog.
He began this trio in the spring of 1892 at his favourite holiday spot, Pointe Pescade in Algeria, where he ended up settling in his old age. It had been almost 30 years since he had written his first trio and he poured himself into it, writing to a friend: “I will bring back a ‘Trio’ with piano, which has been lying around in my head for who knows how long and of which I need to rid myself. And this is no small affair! I don’t claim that it will please these gentlemen, but it must please me, and I have my requirements which are not slight.” The result was a five-movement masterpiece, of which we will hear the fifth Allegrothis evening, and it certainly did please the gentlemen critics – it’s been called the greatest French piano trio of the 19th century.
Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson.
Concert Details
Join NZTrio at the TSB
Concert Details
Join NZTrio at the TSB Wallace Art Centre, Pah Homestead on June 5th, 7pm for their final performance with Sarah as pianist. Yuri Cho is guest violinist, and drinks, nibbles, and toasts will follow.
Programme:
Approx. 75 mins no interval
Brahms: Piano Trio no. 2 in C major op. 87 (I: Allegro)
Jack Body: Fire in the Belly
Ravel: Piano Trio (I: Modéré)
Chen Yi: Tibetan Tunes (II: Dui Xie)
Beethoven: Trio in E flat major op. 1 no. 1 (IV: Finale – Presto)
Claire Cowan: Subtle Dances
Saint-Saëns: Piano Trio no. 2 in e minor op. 82 (V: Allegro)
Tickets $40 Adults / $20 Students
General Admission
BOOK NOW VIA EVENTFINDA
Time
(Tuesday) 7:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
TSB Wallace Art Centre, The Pah Homestead
72 Hillsborough Rd., Auckland
Johannes BRAHMS (GER; 1833 – 1897): Trio in C major, Op. 87
I. Allegro moderato
You know what I think of Brahms: after Bach and Beethoven the greatest, the most sublime of all composers. –von Bülow. This was 1882, the year that Hans von Bülow made that famous pronouncement, in a letter to his wife. Brahms had become the third of the three B’s.During this time, Brahms was at the height of his powers. He had two hugely successful symphonies under his belt, as well as the German Requiem and the violin concerto, all of which were making him famous across Europe.
It was also the year that, after all these orchestral successes, he chose to go back to chamber music and song. It was almost 30 years since he’d written a piano trio: and he’d actually begun this two years earlier in Vienna as one of a pair – the other he destroyed! – but this one he deemed worthy of survival and took it with him (along with the string quintet Op 88) to work on over the summer at his favourite spa resort, Bad Ischl outside Salzburg, the scene of so many Brahms masterpieces. And this is one. It’s the most powerful of the trios, the most sophisticated in terms of texture and form, and also the most harmonically daring – listen out for a key change of just a semitone (!) in the first movement. It will grab you right from the unison string opening – that first theme, and the even more beautiful second, underpin the entire trio.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Jack BODY (NZ; 1944 – 2015): Fire in the Belly (NZTrio commission 2006)
Fire in the belly is that energy that impels us to do things, make things, and to act with urgency and a sense of necessity. It is one important source of creative energy, and without it art can be flaccid and dull. It is what teenagers tend to have a lot of, and what aged folk like me need to try to recapture from time to time! The work was commissioned by NZTrio with funding from Creative New Zealand, and I was delighted to receive this invitation from an ensemble which has such a fantastic commitment to NZ music. –Jack Body
Jack Body’s music covers most genres, including solo and chamber music, orchestral music, music theatre, music for dance and film as well as electroacoustic music. He was a specialist in cross-cultural composition both in his own music, and in his teaching at Victoria University of Wellingtonwhere he established a residency for traditional musicians to work collaboratively with composition staff and students. Jack was a prolific world-class composer and ethnomusicologist with global reach. The impact of his artistic life on New Zealand audiences, composers, musicians and students is profound. He received the Arts Foundation Laureate and Icon Award in 2015.
Maurice RAVEL (FRA; 1875 – 1937): Piano Trio in A minor
I. Modéré
This mysterious, elusive, passionate, trio is the work that Ravel was writing when Europe found itself plunged into war. August 1914: he had 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 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 inJune 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. –Ravel
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 Modéré. Rhythm is key to this whole work, the inexorable weaving together of melodies and harmony: the shimmering atmosphere; the classically perfect form.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Chen YI (China; b. 1953): Tibetan Tunes (2007)
Dui Xie
Trained as a violinist in the European classical tradition, Chen Yi initially came into contact with Chinese folk music in a forced relocation to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Already widely celebrated in China as a major new composer during the increasingly open cultural climate of the 1980s, Chen Yi came to the United States in 1986 to continue her musical studies. She writes both intimate and large scale works for European and Chinese instruments, and fuses Western orchestral and choral idioms with traditional Eastern pentatonic tonalities. Her music has since been performed worldwide by orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic and Los Angeles Philharmonic, and by musicians such as Yehudi Menuhin and Yo-Yo Ma. She has held residences in both New York and Missouri and teaches at the University of Missouri–Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance.
Commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University, the two-movement Tibetan Tuneswas written for the New Pacific Trio and was premiered at the Conservatory of Music at University of the Pacific in January 2007 in Stockton, California. The second movement Dui Xie being performed this eveningis a kind of Tibetan folk ensemble music typically played with the plucked instrument Zhamunie, the bamboo flute, and the fiddle Erhu. Chen explains: The music presents the rich gestures of Du Mu (a name of a god in Tibetan Buddhism) in a serene mood.
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN (GER; 1770 – 1827): Piano Trio in E flat Major, Op. 1, No. 1
IV. Finale – Presto
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, on the Rhine, shortly before Christmas in 1770. His musical ability showed early and by the time he was 11 years, he was working as an assistant organist at the Electoral chapel and was actively involved in music-making in the houses of the local aristocrats. As a young man, Beethoven became aware of major political and social changes sweeping across Europe. In music, the traditional compositional techniques of the late 18thcentury continued for a time but new ideas were already pushing against the established boundaries. This suited Beethoven and his more emotional and expressive compositions, sometimes embellished with touches of youthful humour. He was eager to take his musical gifts to the much larger city of Vienna, seven days away by stagecoach.
For a composer, their Op. 1 marks the transition from talented student to serious composer. Beethoven had already completed about 20 chamber works when he assigned the three piano trios to his Op.1. Most of the music was composed while he was still living in Bonn – Grove suggests that the first Trio was written before 1794 – and it is possible Beethoven performed movements from them at private concerts before leaving for Vienna in 1792.
The three trios of Op. 1 were formally premiered in 1793 at the Viennese house of Prince Carl Lichnowsky to whom they are dedicated. Most of musical Vienna attended, including Haydn, who was particularly impressed with the first two trios of the set. They were published in 1795.
The E flat Trio is in four movements. In the opening Allegrothe piano leads with upward broken chords – Mannheim Rockets, a popular 18th-century gesture to add virtuosic brilliance. The mood is sparkling and is contrasted by a gentler second subject mainly on the strings. This happily explores scale passages, and references the first subject as the piano gently commences the recapitulation.
In the Adagio cantabile, the piano sings the lyrical theme A-flat theme and is joined by the strings in turn, and then jollied along with some rhythmic and harmonic surprises.
The Scherzois a spirited romp, dramatically contrasted by the long lines of the strings in the trio as the piano takes off with some little Rockets of its own. The Prestofinale opens with a piano leap and plenty of will-of-the-wisp humour. There’s another flash of the Rocket theme and a dazzling finish.
Joy Aberdein © 2012
Claire COWAN (NZ; b. 1983): Subtle Dances (co-commissioned in 2013 by NZTrio and Chamber Music NZ)
Claire is a composer and performer based in Auckland. She studied composition at Auckland University and since graduating with Honours in 2006, has pursued a career in music for concert, film, theatre and TV. Claire is an experienced orchestrator and symphonic writer, having worked with many of New Zealand’s leading orchestras.
Subtle Dances is a set of three short moods for piano trio. In writing, the composer has tried to approach the works as intuitively as possible. For her this creates the greatest connection between composer, performers, and the audience listening. Each work features one instrument more prominently – firstly cello, then piano, then violin. The music explores Cowan’s continued fascination with the space created within the music, in which a listener can engage. Both hypnotic and meditative, the pieces present themselves as a contrasting set of interior landscapes. They are: passing thoughts, memories, unsolvable problems, and explorations of headspace: Firstly – it begins with a dance; a rhythmical and passionate interlocking of playful lines, but not without an element of danger or risk.Secondly – an elegy, the body in its slowest state. Thirdly – a struggle, an unanswered question, a cycle – and ultimately, a transition; a bursting through, into a new light.
Camille SAINT-SAËNS (1835 – 1921): Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Opus 92 (1892)
V. Allegro
I am working quietly away at a trio which I hope will drive to despair all those unlucky enough to hear it. I shall need the whole summer to perpetrate this atrocity; one must have a little fun somehow. –Saint-Saëns
Saint-Saëns was 56 and at the height of his career when he wrote this, the second of his three piano trios. Another prodigy pianist, like Chopin: he had begun playing at the age of 2½, and by the time he was 10 he was giving public concerts of the complete Beethoven sonatas – from memory! He started at the Paris conservatoire when he was 13 and has one of the longest careers in the music business, with a chamber music output that spans 70 years, right up until the year of his death. It was a difficult life – an only child, he was brought up by his mother and grandmother after his father died. His own two infant sons died tragically within weeks of each other, his marriage broke up, and after his mother died he spent much of the rest of his life travelling, accompanied only by his dog.
He began this trio in the spring of 1892 at his favourite holiday spot, Pointe Pescade in Algeria, where he ended up settling in his old age. It had been almost 30 years since he had written his first trio and he poured himself into it, writing to a friend: “I will bring back a ‘Trio’ with piano, which has been lying around in my head for who knows how long and of which I need to rid myself. And this is no small affair! I don’t claim that it will please these gentlemen, but it must please me, and I have my requirements which are not slight.” The result was a five-movement masterpiece, of which we will hear the fifth Allegrothis evening, and it certainly did please the gentlemen critics – it’s been called the greatest French piano trio of the 19th century.
Programme notes by Charlotte Wilson.
may 2018
7may1:00 amChina Tour May 7 - 28
Concert Details
For details around concert dates, times, cities, and venues, please contact Vanessa Zigliani (Manager) at manager@nztrio.com
Concert Details
For details around concert dates, times, cities, and venues, please contact Vanessa Zigliani (Manager) at manager@nztrio.com
april 2018
14apr7:30 pm2018 Regional Tour: Motueka
Concert Details
NZTrio will perform at the
Concert Details
NZTrio will perform at the beautiful Chanel Arts Centre in Motueka on Saturday April 14th at 7:30pm.
Programme:
Johannes Brahms (GER) – Trio in C major, op.87
Garreth Farr (NZ) – Forbidden Colours
—
Claire Cowan (NZ) – Ultra violet
Maurice Ravel (FRA) – Trio in A minor
Tickets $20 Adults / $5 Students
Available for purchase from local retailer A Floral Affaire (03 528 4726) from late March.
Time
(Saturday) 7:30 pm
Location
The Chanel Arts Centre
31 High Street, Motueka
Johannes BRAHMS (GER; 1833 – 1897): Trio in C major, Op. 87, c. 28’
I. Allegro moderato
II. Andante con moto
III. Scherzo: Presto
IV. Finale: Allegro giocoso
You know what I think of Brahms: after Bach and Beethoven the greatest, the most sublime of all composers. ~ von Bülow.
This was 1882, the year that Hans von Bülow made that famous pronouncement, in a letter to his wife. Brahms had become the third of the three Bs.
During this time, Brahms was at the height of his powers. He had two hugely successful symphonies under his belt, as well as the German Requiem and the violin concerto, all of which were making him famous across Europe; Bülow himself was performing the first all-Brahms recital programme, bringing his piano music to the masses; and he was amassing a number of awards including two honorary doctorates, the Commander’s Cross from Meiningen, and the Emperor’s Order for Science and Art.
It was also the year that, after all these orchestral successes, he chose to go back to chamber music and song. It was almost 30 years since he’d written a piano trio: and he’d actually begun this two years earlier in Vienna as one of a pair – the other he destroyed! – but this one he deemed worthy of survival and took it with him (along with the string quintet Op 88) to work on over the summer at his favourite spa resort, Bad Ischl outside Salzburg, the scene of so many Brahms masterpieces. And this is one. It’s the most powerful of the trios, the most sophisticated in terms of texture and form, and also the most harmonically daring – listen out for a key change of just a semitone (!) in the first movement. Plus, of course, the totally sumptuous piano writing and the sheer abundance of tunes.
It will grab you right from the unison string opening – that first theme, and the even more beautiful second, underpin the entire trio. The second movement is the heart of the work, a theme and variations characterised by his favourite “Scotch snap” or “catch” rhythm – short-long pairs of notes – and an unbelievably beautiful Magyar inflected Brahmsian melody. Then an eerie little scherzo and lyrical trio, launched into at breathtaking speed: and finally, all the themes we’ve heard so far wrapped up into an exuberant, breath-taking finale.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Gareth Farr (NZ; b. 1968): Forbidden Colours – c. 10’
Gareth Farr studied composition and percussion performance at the University of Auckland and later at Victoria University in Wellington where the characteristic rhythms and textures of the Indonesian gamelan rapidly became hallmarks of his own composition. Farr continued with postgraduate study at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and after returning to NZ at the age of 25, Farr was appointed composer-in-residence by Chamber Music New Zealand, the youngest ever composer to hold that position. His music has been heard at, or especially commissioned for, high-profile events including the 50th anniversary of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the opening of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney.
Gareth writes: ‘I became intrigued by a phenomenon called “forbidden colours” which are unseeable by the human eye because their light frequencies automatically cancel each other out. The piece establishes itself as a blurry, impressionistic texture — but soon, things start popping into focus, and then sliding away again out of view. I have tried to create the musical equivalent of when you have to strain your eyes to make something out — to even ascertain if you’re looking at anything at all, or if it’s just a figment of your retinas.’
Claire Cowan (NZ; b. 1983): Ultra violet (CMNZ commission 2015) – c. 8’
Claire Cowan graduated from Auckland University in 2006 with honours, was composer in residence with the NZSO National Youth Orchestra that year, and won the NZSO-Todd Young Composer Award the following year. She has been composer in residence with Orchestra Wellington, Director of Blackbird Ensemble, which presents music-based physical theatre, and has performed in Strike Percussion Ensemble. She has written music for theatre, television and film as well as orchestra and chamber ensembles. In 2008 she lived in New York, where she worked with the underground puppet movement, eventually writing the score for an award-winning puppet movie Moonfishing. Her 2013 commission titled Subtle Dances has been one of NZTrio’s most performed works across New Zealand, Europe, and Australasia.
Cowan writes: ‘I learned that the mantis shrimp (which is the most lusciously hued crustaecean in the world) can see more colours than any creature on earth. Ultra Violet vision, at one far end of the colour spectrum, is only known to a few humans on Earth. But many birds and insects possess this quality. It is innate to their survival and navigation systems. This piece explores my continued fascination with the seemingly simple yet endlessly complex, through the growth and development of a single musical statement. What does it need to survive? How must it adapt to move forward? How will it change colour and mood with the simple addition of a non-related pitch? I think of myself as a bird, navigating through a musical landscape guided by intuition, and on a journey to create and discover colours beyond the edges of our visible spectrum.’
Maurice RAVEL (FRA; 1875 – 1937): Piano Trio in A minor, c. 28’
I Modéré
II Pantoum (Assez vif)
III Passacaille (Très large)
IV 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. ~Ravel
This mysterious, elusive, passionate, trio is the work that Ravel was writing when Europe found itself plunged into war. August 1914: he had 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 Malaysian verse form in which the second and fourth lines of a four-line 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 note by Charlotte Wilson
8apr5:00 pmArt3: Nathan Homestead
Concert Details
NZTrio returns to Nathan Homestead
Concert Details
NZTrio returns to Nathan Homestead in Manurewa (South Auckland) Sunday April 8th at 5pm.
Programme:
Johannes Brahms (GER) – Trio in C major, op.87
Claire Cowan (NZ) – Ultra violet
Maurice Ravel (FRA) – Trio in A minor
With guest violinist, Yuri Cho.
Tickets $40 Adults / $25 Locals / $20 Students
Time
(Sunday) 5:00 pm
Location
Nathan Homestead
70 Hill Road, Manurewa, Auckland
Johannes BRAHMS (GER; 1833 – 1897): Trio in C major, Op. 87, c. 28’
I. Allegro moderato
II. Andante con moto
III. Scherzo: Presto
IV. Finale: Allegro giocoso
You know what I think of Brahms: after Bach and Beethoven the greatest, the most sublime of all composers. ~ von Bülow.
This was 1882, the year that Hans von Bülow made that famous pronouncement, in a letter to his wife. Brahms had become the third of the three B’s.
During this time, Brahms was at the height of his powers. He had two hugely successful symphonies under his belt, as well as the German Requiem and the violin concerto, all of which were making him famous across Europe; Bülow himself was performing the first all-Brahms recital programme, bringing his piano music to the masses; and he was amassing a number of awards including two honorary doctorates, the Commander’s Cross from Meiningen, and the Emperor’s Order for Science and Art.
It was also the year that, after all these orchestral successes, he chose to go back to chamber music and song. It was almost 30 years since he’d written a piano trio: and he’d actually begun this two years earlier in Vienna as one of a pair – the other he destroyed! – but this one he deemed worthy of survival and took it with him (along with the string quintet Op 88) to work on over the summer at his favourite spa resort, Bad Ischl outside Salzburg, the scene of so many Brahms masterpieces. And this is one. It’s the most powerful of the trios, the most sophisticated in terms of texture and form, and also the most harmonically daring – listen out for a key change of just a semitone (!) in the first movement. Plus, of course, the totally sumptuous piano writing and the sheer abundance of tunes.
It will grab you right from the unison string opening – that first theme, and the even more beautiful second, underpin the entire trio. The second movement is the heart of the work, a theme and variations characterised by his favourite “Scotch snap” or “catch” rhythm – short-long pairs of notes – and an unbelievably beautiful Magyar inflected Brahmsian melody. Then an eerie little scherzo and lyrical trio, launched into at breathtaking speed: and finally, all the themes we’ve heard so far wrapped up into an exuberant, breath-taking finale.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Claire Cowan (NZ; b. 1983): Ultra violet (CMNZ commission 2015) – c. 8’
Claire Cowan graduated from Auckland University in 2006 with honours, was composer in residence with the NZSO National Youth Orchestra that year, and won the NZSO-Todd Young Composer Award the following year. She has been composer in residence with Orchestra Wellington, Director of Blackbird Ensemble, which presents music-based physical theatre, and has performed in Strike Percussion Ensemble. She has written music for theatre, television and film as well as orchestra and chamber ensembles. In 2008 she lived in New York, where she worked with the underground puppet movement, eventually writing the score for an award-winning puppet movie Moonfishing. Her 2013 commission titled Subtle Dances has been one of NZTrio’s most performed works across New Zealand, Europe, and Australasia.
Cowan writes: ‘I learned that the mantis shrimp (which is the most lusciously hued crustaecean in the world) can see more colours than any creature on earth. Ultra Violet vision, at one far end of the colour spectrum, is only known to a few humans on Earth. But many birds and insects possess this quality. It is innate to their survival and navigation systems. This piece explores my continued fascination with the seemingly simple yet endlessly complex, through the growth and development of a single musical statement. What does it need to survive? How must it adapt to move forward? How will it change colour and mood with the simple addition of a non-related pitch? I think of myself as a bird, navigating through a musical landscape guided by intuition, and on a journey to create and discover colours beyond the edges of our visible spectrum.’
Maurice RAVEL (FRA; 1875 – 1937): Piano Trio in A minor, c. 28’
I Modéré
II Pantoum (Assez vif)
III Passacaille (Très large)
IV 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. –Ravel
This mysterious, elusive, passionate, trio is the work that Ravel was writing when Europe found itself plunged into war. August 1914: he had 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 Malaysian verse form in which the second and fourth lines of a four-line 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 note by Charlotte Wilson
7apr7:00 pmArt3: Mairangi Bay Arts Centre
Concert Details
NZTrio returns to the Mairangi
Concert Details
NZTrio returns to the Mairangi Bay Arts Centre on Auckland’s North Shore, Saturday April 7th at 7pm.
Programme:
Johannes Brahms (GER) – Trio in C major, op.87
Claire Cowan (NZ) – Ultra violet
Maurice Ravel (FRA) – Trio in A minor
With guest violinist, Yuri Cho.
Tickets $40 Adults / $30 MAC Friends / $20 Students
Available from Eventfinda here
Time
(Saturday) 7:00 pm
Location
Mairangi Bay Art Centre
20 Hastings Rd, Mairangi Bay, Auckland
Johannes BRAHMS (GER; 1833 – 1897): Trio in C major, Op. 87, c. 28’
I. Allegro moderato
II. Andante con moto
III. Scherzo: Presto
IV. Finale: Allegro giocoso
You know what I think of Brahms: after Bach and Beethoven the greatest, the most sublime of all composers. ~ von Bülow.
This was 1882, the year that Hans von Bülow made that famous pronouncement, in a letter to his wife. Brahms had become the third of the three B’s.
During this time, Brahms was at the height of his powers. He had two hugely successful symphonies under his belt, as well as the German Requiem and the violin concerto, all of which were making him famous across Europe; Bülow himself was performing the first all-Brahms recital programme, bringing his piano music to the masses; and he was amassing a number of awards including two honorary doctorates, the Commander’s Cross from Meiningen, and the Emperor’s Order for Science and Art.
It was also the year that, after all these orchestral successes, he chose to go back to chamber music and song. It was almost 30 years since he’d written a piano trio: and he’d actually begun this two years earlier in Vienna as one of a pair – the other he destroyed! – but this one he deemed worthy of survival and took it with him (along with the string quintet Op 88) to work on over the summer at his favourite spa resort, Bad Ischl outside Salzburg, the scene of so many Brahms masterpieces. And this is one. It’s the most powerful of the trios, the most sophisticated in terms of texture and form, and also the most harmonically daring – listen out for a key change of just a semitone (!) in the first movement. Plus, of course, the totally sumptuous piano writing and the sheer abundance of tunes.
It will grab you right from the unison string opening – that first theme, and the even more beautiful second, underpin the entire trio. The second movement is the heart of the work, a theme and variations characterised by his favourite “Scotch snap” or “catch” rhythm – short-long pairs of notes – and an unbelievably beautiful Magyar inflected Brahmsian melody. Then an eerie little scherzo and lyrical trio, launched into at breathtaking speed: and finally, all the themes we’ve heard so far wrapped up into an exuberant, breath-taking finale.
Programme note by Charlotte Wilson
Claire Cowan (NZ; b. 1983): Ultra violet (CMNZ commission 2015) – c. 8’
Claire Cowan graduated from Auckland University in 2006 with honours, was composer in residence with the NZSO National Youth Orchestra that year, and won the NZSO-Todd Young Composer Award the following year. She has been composer in residence with Orchestra Wellington, Director of Blackbird Ensemble, which presents music-based physical theatre, and has performed in Strike Percussion Ensemble. She has written music for theatre, television and film as well as orchestra and chamber ensembles. In 2008 she lived in New York, where she worked with the underground puppet movement, eventually writing the score for an award-winning puppet movie Moonfishing. Her 2013 commission titled Subtle Dances has been one of NZTrio’s most performed works across New Zealand, Europe, and Australasia.
Cowan writes: ‘I learned that the mantis shrimp (which is the most lusciously hued crustaecean in the world) can see more colours than any creature on earth. Ultra Violet vision, at one far end of the colour spectrum, is only known to a few humans on Earth. But many birds and insects possess this quality. It is innate to their survival and navigation systems. This piece explores my continued fascination with the seemingly simple yet endlessly complex, through the growth and development of a single musical statement. What does it need to survive? How must it adapt to move forward? How will it change colour and mood with the simple addition of a non-related pitch? I think of myself as a bird, navigating through a musical landscape guided by intuition, and on a journey to create and discover colours beyond the edges of our visible spectrum.’
Maurice RAVEL (FRA; 1875 – 1937): Piano Trio in A minor, c. 28’
I Modéré
II Pantoum (Assez vif)
III Passacaille (Très large)
IV 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. –Ravel
This mysterious, elusive, passionate, trio is the work that Ravel was writing when Europe found itself plunged into war. August 1914: he had 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 Malaysian verse form in which the second and fourth lines of a four-line 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 note by Charlotte Wilson
november 2017
Concert Details
Programme: John Ireland (ENG): Phantasie Trio
Concert Details
Programme:
John Ireland (ENG): Phantasie Trio in a minor
Anthony Ritchie (NZ): Childhood
Dorothy Ker (NZ): Onaia
INTERVAL
Schubert (AUSTRIA): Piano Trio in E Flat major, op. 100
Soar prepares us for new heights and perspectives. Weaving through changing tapestries, you’ll find yourself adrift in daydreams (John Ireland) where life’s complexity is seemingly simplified (Anthony Ritchie), primordial soundscapes pacify (Dorothy Ker), and naivety is blissfully deliberate like a game of hide and seek (Franz Schubert).
BOOK NOW ($50Adult/$25 Student)
Time
(Tuesday) 7:00 pm
Location
Loft at Q
305 Queen St Auckland 1011
John Ireland (ENG; 1879 – 1962): Phantasie Trio in a minor – c. 12’
in tempo moderato – allegro – Tempo I – Animando – Meno mosso, quasi andantino – Tempo I – vivace e ritmico – In tempo – Vivace e giocoso – Vivacissimo
This lovely trio is another of those that owe their life to Walter Willson Cobbett, the British businessman who was mad about chamber music and, in 1905, established the Cobbett prize for works in one single movement with plenty of contrast and equal parts for the instruments – in the manner of an Elizabethan fantasy.
John Ireland entered this in 1906, aged 27, when he was organist and choirmaster of a church in Chelsea and was beginning to make his name as a composer. He’s a melancholy figure: his father was 70 when he was born, and he was left orphaned when first his mother then his father died in quick succession when he was still in his early teens. All his life he struck up doomed relationships with women who were 30 years younger, his one brief marriage was a disaster and he became something of a recluse, eventually retreating into a converted windmill in the depths of the Sussex countryside and declining the award of a CBE. One of his colleagues – he taught at the Royal College of Music, where he’d studied – described him as “a self-critical, introspective man, haunted by memories of a sad childhood”, and he spent a lot of time in the Channel Islands where he became known for going on great long walks alone. And yet, still waters run deep! His epitaph reads “Many waters cannot quench love”.
You fancy that you can hear that in this trio. Deeply passionate and impressionistic – Ireland adored Debussy and Ravel and more or less invented “English impressionism” – it teems with the sort of melody and emotion that Ireland poured into his songs, passing through several changes in the mood, true to the brief, and racing “playfully” to the end. It was pipped to the post by Frank Bridge in the prize that year, coming second, but it was enough to encourage Ireland to write more. A few years later he did win with his first violin sonata and was on the road to fame.
Anthony Ritchie (NZ; b.1960): Childhood – c. 10’
Anthony Ritchie studied composition at Canterbury University, and completed a Ph.D on the music of Bartok. He studied composition at the Liszt Academy in Hungary, before becoming Composer-in-Schools in Christchurch, in 1987. He moved to Dunedin in 1988 to be Mozart Fellow in composition, at Otago University, and later was Composer-in-residence with the Dunedin Sinfonia completing his Symphony No. 1 Boum.
He freelanced from 1995-2002, writing many commissioned works for performers as diverse as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Class Act Opera, and The Australian Song Company. In 2000 his Symphony No.2 was premiered by The Auckland Philharmonia at the International Festival of the Arts. The comic opera “Quartet” also featured at the 2004 Festival. Anthony Ritchie has composed film music in collaboration with Natural History NZ, including “Southern Journeys” (2000). In 2004 his opera “The God Boy” was a critically acclaimed success at the Otago Festival of the Arts.
His work is increasingly known overseas: in 2014 A Bugle Will Do was recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and performed by The Ulster Orchestra, and Salaam was premiered by the Belgium choir Aquarius. Most recently, his oratorio Gallipoli to the Somme was premiered to critical acclaim in New Zealand and will be performed in London in 2018. He is currently Associate Professor of Music at Otago University.
Childhood was composed for NZTrio as part of the composer’s sabbatical leave from The University of Otago, for performances in 2017 and beyond. The composer acknowledges the support and assistance of the performers in the trio, Justine Cormack, Ashley Brown and Sarah Watkins.
The piece reflects on different stages in life, and makes connections between our own childhood and that of our children, and indeed our grandchildren. Observing and relating to children is like a renewal of hope and wonder, that counterbalances the experiences and tribulations of adult life. Therefore, the style of the music is deliberately naïve and simple, while also containing undercurrents of complexity.
An opening progression of a tone gradually expands and unfolds into dual pentatonic scales on the piano. The strings enter with a basic open 5th progression that grows into a short theme. This theme forms the basis for much of the material that follows, almost in the manner of a theme and variations. A third ingredient emerges after letter E, a chord progression that ascends on the piano. An ABAB structure is established leading to a climax, and a new variation on the main theme appearing at letter K. This tantrum-like idea suddenly switches to a calming, neutral theme at bar 182, and this pattern repeats, and these two sharply contrasting sections alternate. The ‘calming’ idea eventually takes over at letter P, and is developed. However, an echo of the tantrum-like idea sounds at letter S, with primitive, percussive progressions on the piano. The music’s energy winds down, with violin and cello developing a soulful duo. There are reminders of earlier piano arpeggios before the child-like texture of the opening returns to end the piece.
Dorothy Ker (NZ; b. 1965): Onaia – c. 15’
Dorothy Ker’s music is performed and broadcast in both hemispheres and has been heard at venues and international festivals in Auckland, Belfast, Darmstadt, Huddersfield, Perth, Taipei, Seoul, at the ISCM, and London. In 1992 she immigrated to the UK, where she studied with Nicola Lefanu and Harrison Birtwistle, completing a PhD at York University in 1998. Her studies were followed by Research Fellowships at Reading University (2001-2004) and Sheffield University (2005-2010), where she is currently a Senior Lecturer. In 2013-2014 she was resident at the Douglas Lilburn House while on study leave. In 2015 she was awarded the Composers Association of NZ Trust Fund Award for her contribution to New Zealand music.
Dorothy writes: “Onaia stream (near Rotorua/Te Puke) passes through a narrow gully, where it is possible to wade barefoot through the shallow waters, going deeper and deeper into the high banks and ancient foliage, for several hours. Onaia is not a depiction of that place (nor a journey through it) but a translation of its energies. The sounds are not from there but make a visceral connection to it, playing with patterns and resonances, and with various qualities of surface and touch. The piece falls in pitch from extreme height to the deepest available pitch, a musical journey that might be understood as the unravelling of a single, stratified, spectrum of texture and resonance.”
Onaia is a co-commission from Fidelio Trio and NZTrio, with funding provided by Creative New Zealand. It was composed while Dorothy was in residence at the Lilburn House in Wellington, NZ, while on Study Leave from the University from Sheffield in 2013-2014.
Franz Schubert (AUSTRIA; 1797 – 1828); Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat Major, D.929 Op. 100 – c. 43’
Allegro
Andante con moto
Scherzando. Allegro moderato
Allegro moderato
There was a time when I talked unwillingly of Schubert, whose name, I thought, should only be whispered at night to the trees and stars. – Robert Schumann
This divine trio is one of the last things Schubert ever wrote. It was also one of the very few of his works ever performed in public, at the one and only public concert during his lifetime, and the only one ever published outside Vienna. The great irony of his genius was that despite how hugely prolific he was – more than 1,500 works including massive quantities of piano and chamber music, nine symphonies and over 600 songs – Schubert lived his whole life unrecognised by all but his small circle in Vienna: he had no post, no patron, received no commissions, made hardly any money, performed only in private, gave a lot of it away, and his music quickly became scattered far and wide among his publishers, family and friends. Not even Brahms, who idolised him, had any idea of the true quantity of his output and it was four decades before he began to be appreciated in the way that he deserved.
The E-flat trio is dated November 1827. He was already ill: diagnosed as typhoid fever at the time, it now is certain to have been syphilis, which had plagued him intermittently for years and which plunged him into the occasional depressions that so transcendently work their way into his songs. In March he had been a torchbearer at Beethoven’s funeral: the following November, 1828 at the age of only 31, he was dead. And yet that year is one full of masterpieces – Schwanengesang, the great C major symphony, the last set of impromptus, both piano trios, the C major quintet. He wrote both trios in quick succession and they are companion pieces: the B-flat sunny and lyrical, the E-flat dark and dramatic, and the one that Schubert himself preferred. He worked unusually hard on it – the manuscript is full of changes – and when it was ready to send to his publisher he gave it such a moving dedication. “Dedicated to no one, save those who find pleasure in it”.
It grabs our attention immediately. High drama combines with Schubert’s unmatched and endless gift for melody, especially in the heart-rending slow movement: the scherzo and trio are brilliantly impish and witty; and he excels even himself in a final movement of incomparable brilliance and beauty. Schubert has sometimes been criticised for not paying enough attention to formal structure, his melodies are so beautiful, but this trio utterly gives the lie to that. As Liszt once said, “Such is the spell of your emotional world that it very nearly blinds us to the greatness of your craftsmanship.”
Programme note for Piano Trio in E flat coming soon….
Concert Details
Programme: John Ireland (ENG): Phantasie Trio
Concert Details
Programme:
John Ireland (ENG): Phantasie Trio in a minor
Anthony Ritchie (NZ): Childhood
Dorothy Ker (NZ): Onaia
INTERVAL
Schubert (AUSTRIA): Piano Trio in E Flat major, op. 100
Soar prepares us for new heights and perspectives. Weaving through changing tapestries, you’ll find yourself adrift in daydreams (John Ireland) where life’s complexity is seemingly simplified (Anthony Ritchie), primordial soundscapes pacify (Dorothy Ker), and naivety is blissfully deliberate like a game of hide and seek (Franz Schubert).
BOOK NOW ($50Adult/$25 Student)
Time
(Sunday) 5:00 pm
Location
Loft at Q
305 Queen St Auckland 1011
John Ireland (ENG; 1879 – 1962): Phantasie Trio in a minor – c. 12’
in tempo moderato – allegro – Tempo I – Animando – Meno mosso, quasi andantino – Tempo I – vivace e ritmico – In tempo – Vivace e giocoso – Vivacissimo
This lovely trio is another of those that owe their life to Walter Willson Cobbett, the British businessman who was mad about chamber music and, in 1905, established the Cobbett prize for works in one single movement with plenty of contrast and equal parts for the instruments – in the manner of an Elizabethan fantasy.
John Ireland entered this in 1906, aged 27, when he was organist and choirmaster of a church in Chelsea and was beginning to make his name as a composer. He’s a melancholy figure: his father was 70 when he was born, and he was left orphaned when first his mother then his father died in quick succession when he was still in his early teens. All his life he struck up doomed relationships with women who were 30 years younger, his one brief marriage was a disaster and he became something of a recluse, eventually retreating into a converted windmill in the depths of the Sussex countryside and declining the award of a CBE. One of his colleagues – he taught at the Royal College of Music, where he’d studied – described him as “a self-critical, introspective man, haunted by memories of a sad childhood”, and he spent a lot of time in the Channel Islands where he became known for going on great long walks alone. And yet, still waters run deep! His epitaph reads “Many waters cannot quench love”.
You fancy that you can hear that in this trio. Deeply passionate and impressionistic – Ireland adored Debussy and Ravel and more or less invented “English impressionism” – it teems with the sort of melody and emotion that Ireland poured into his songs, passing through several changes in the mood, true to the brief, and racing “playfully” to the end. It was pipped to the post by Frank Bridge in the prize that year, coming second, but it was enough to encourage Ireland to write more. A few years later he did win with his first violin sonata and was on the road to fame.
Anthony Ritchie (NZ; b.1960): Childhood – c. 10’
Anthony Ritchie studied composition at Canterbury University, and completed a Ph.D on the music of Bartok. He studied composition at the Liszt Academy in Hungary, before becoming Composer-in-Schools in Christchurch, in 1987. He moved to Dunedin in 1988 to be Mozart Fellow in composition, at Otago University, and later was Composer-in-residence with the Dunedin Sinfonia completing his Symphony No. 1 Boum.
He freelanced from 1995-2002, writing many commissioned works for performers as diverse as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Class Act Opera, and The Australian Song Company. In 2000 his Symphony No.2 was premiered by The Auckland Philharmonia at the International Festival of the Arts. The comic opera “Quartet” also featured at the 2004 Festival. Anthony Ritchie has composed film music in collaboration with Natural History NZ, including “Southern Journeys” (2000). In 2004 his opera “The God Boy” was a critically acclaimed success at the Otago Festival of the Arts.
His work is increasingly known overseas: in 2014 A Bugle Will Do was recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and performed by The Ulster Orchestra, and Salaam was premiered by the Belgium choir Aquarius. Most recently, his oratorio Gallipoli to the Somme was premiered to critical acclaim in New Zealand and will be performed in London in 2018. He is currently Associate Professor of Music at Otago University.
Childhood was composed for NZTrio as part of the composer’s sabbatical leave from The University of Otago, for performances in 2017 and beyond. The composer acknowledges the support and assistance of the performers in the trio, Justine Cormack, Ashley Brown and Sarah Watkins.
The piece reflects on different stages in life, and makes connections between our own childhood and that of our children, and indeed our grandchildren. Observing and relating to children is like a renewal of hope and wonder, that counterbalances the experiences and tribulations of adult life. Therefore, the style of the music is deliberately naïve and simple, while also containing undercurrents of complexity.
An opening progression of a tone gradually expands and unfolds into dual pentatonic scales on the piano. The strings enter with a basic open 5th progression that grows into a short theme. This theme forms the basis for much of the material that follows, almost in the manner of a theme and variations. A third ingredient emerges after letter E, a chord progression that ascends on the piano. An ABAB structure is established leading to a climax, and a new variation on the main theme appearing at letter K. This tantrum-like idea suddenly switches to a calming, neutral theme at bar 182, and this pattern repeats, and these two sharply contrasting sections alternate. The ‘calming’ idea eventually takes over at letter P, and is developed. However, an echo of the tantrum-like idea sounds at letter S, with primitive, percussive progressions on the piano. The music’s energy winds down, with violin and cello developing a soulful duo. There are reminders of earlier piano arpeggios before the child-like texture of the opening returns to end the piece.
Dorothy Ker (NZ; b. 1965): Onaia – c. 15’
Dorothy Ker’s music is performed and broadcast in both hemispheres and has been heard at venues and international festivals in Auckland, Belfast, Darmstadt, Huddersfield, Perth, Taipei, Seoul, at the ISCM, and London. In 1992 she immigrated to the UK, where she studied with Nicola Lefanu and Harrison Birtwistle, completing a PhD at York University in 1998. Her studies were followed by Research Fellowships at Reading University (2001-2004) and Sheffield University (2005-2010), where she is currently a Senior Lecturer. In 2013-2014 she was resident at the Douglas Lilburn House while on study leave. In 2015 she was awarded the Composers Association of NZ Trust Fund Award for her contribution to New Zealand music.
Dorothy writes: “Onaia stream (near Rotorua/Te Puke) passes through a narrow gully, where it is possible to wade barefoot through the shallow waters, going deeper and deeper into the high banks and ancient foliage, for several hours. Onaia is not a depiction of that place (nor a journey through it) but a translation of its energies. The sounds are not from there but make a visceral connection to it, playing with patterns and resonances, and with various qualities of surface and touch. The piece falls in pitch from extreme height to the deepest available pitch, a musical journey that might be understood as the unravelling of a single, stratified, spectrum of texture and resonance.”
Onaia is a co-commission from Fidelio Trio and NZTrio, with funding provided by Creative New Zealand. It was composed while Dorothy was in residence at the Lilburn House in Wellington, NZ, while on Study Leave from the University from Sheffield in 2013-2014.
Franz Schubert (AUSTRIA; 1797 – 1828); Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat Major, D.929 Op. 100 – c. 43’
Allegro
Andante con moto
Scherzando. Allegro moderato
Allegro moderato
There was a time when I talked unwillingly of Schubert, whose name, I thought, should only be whispered at night to the trees and stars. – Robert Schumann
This divine trio is one of the last things Schubert ever wrote. It was also one of the very few of his works ever performed in public, at the one and only public concert during his lifetime, and the only one ever published outside Vienna. The great irony of his genius was that despite how hugely prolific he was – more than 1,500 works including massive quantities of piano and chamber music, nine symphonies and over 600 songs – Schubert lived his whole life unrecognised by all but his small circle in Vienna: he had no post, no patron, received no commissions, made hardly any money, performed only in private, gave a lot of it away, and his music quickly became scattered far and wide among his publishers, family and friends. Not even Brahms, who idolised him, had any idea of the true quantity of his output and it was four decades before he began to be appreciated in the way that he deserved.
The E-flat trio is dated November 1827. He was already ill: diagnosed as typhoid fever at the time, it now is certain to have been syphilis, which had plagued him intermittently for years and which plunged him into the occasional depressions that so transcendently work their way into his songs. In March he had been a torchbearer at Beethoven’s funeral: the following November, 1828 at the age of only 31, he was dead. And yet that year is one full of masterpieces – Schwanengesang, the great C major symphony, the last set of impromptus, both piano trios, the C major quintet. He wrote both trios in quick succession and they are companion pieces: the B-flat sunny and lyrical, the E-flat dark and dramatic, and the one that Schubert himself preferred. He worked unusually hard on it – the manuscript is full of changes – and when it was ready to send to his publisher he gave it such a moving dedication. “Dedicated to no one, save those who find pleasure in it”.
It grabs our attention immediately. High drama combines with Schubert’s unmatched and endless gift for melody, especially in the heart-rending slow movement: the scherzo and trio are brilliantly impish and witty; and he excels even himself in a final movement of incomparable brilliance and beauty. Schubert has sometimes been criticised for not paying enough attention to formal structure, his melodies are so beautiful, but this trio utterly gives the lie to that. As Liszt once said, “Such is the spell of your emotional world that it very nearly blinds us to the greatness of your craftsmanship.”
Concert Details
Programme: John Ireland (ENG): Phantasie Trio
Concert Details
Programme:
John Ireland (ENG): Phantasie Trio in a minor
Anthony Ritchie (NZ): Childhood
Dorothy Ker (NZ): Onaia
INTERVAL
Schubert (AUSTRIA): Piano Trio in E Flat major, op. 100
Soar prepares us for new heights and perspectives. Weaving through changing tapestries, you’ll find yourself adrift in daydreams (John Ireland) where life’s complexity is seemingly simplified (Anthony Ritchie), primordial soundscapes pacify (Dorothy Ker), and naivety is blissfully deliberate like a game of hide and seek (Franz Schubert).
With guest violinist Manu Berkeljon
Tickets $40 Adults / $20 Students & CGW Friends
Time
(Thursday) 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
City Gallery
101 Wakefield St, Wellington
John Ireland (ENG; 1879 – 1962): Phantasie Trio in a minor – c. 12’
in tempo moderato – allegro – Tempo I – Animando – Meno mosso, quasi andantino – Tempo I – vivace e ritmico – In tempo – Vivace e giocoso – Vivacissimo
This lovely trio is another of those that owe their life to Walter Willson Cobbett, the British businessman who was mad about chamber music and, in 1905, established the Cobbett prize for works in one single movement with plenty of contrast and equal parts for the instruments – in the manner of an Elizabethan fantasy.
John Ireland entered this in 1906, aged 27, when he was organist and choirmaster of a church in Chelsea and was beginning to make his name as a composer. He’s a melancholy figure: his father was 70 when he was born, and he was left orphaned when first his mother then his father died in quick succession when he was still in his early teens. All his life he struck up doomed relationships with women who were 30 years younger, his one brief marriage was a disaster and he became something of a recluse, eventually retreating into a converted windmill in the depths of the Sussex countryside and declining the award of a CBE. One of his colleagues – he taught at the Royal College of Music, where he’d studied – described him as “a self-critical, introspective man, haunted by memories of a sad childhood”, and he spent a lot of time in the Channel Islands where he became known for going on great long walks alone. And yet, still waters run deep! His epitaph reads “Many waters cannot quench love”.
You fancy that you can hear that in this trio. Deeply passionate and impressionistic – Ireland adored Debussy and Ravel and more or less invented “English impressionism” – it teems with the sort of melody and emotion that Ireland poured into his songs, passing through several changes in the mood, true to the brief, and racing “playfully” to the end. It was pipped to the post by Frank Bridge in the prize that year, coming second, but it was enough to encourage Ireland to write more. A few years later he did win with his first violin sonata and was on the road to fame.
Anthony Ritchie (NZ; b.1960): Childhood – c. 10’
Anthony Ritchie studied composition at Canterbury University, and completed a Ph.D on the music of Bartok. He studied composition at the Liszt Academy in Hungary, before becoming Composer-in-Schools in Christchurch, in 1987. He moved to Dunedin in 1988 to be Mozart Fellow in composition, at Otago University, and later was Composer-in-residence with the Dunedin Sinfonia completing his Symphony No. 1 Boum.
He freelanced from 1995-2002, writing many commissioned works for performers as diverse as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Class Act Opera, and The Australian Song Company. In 2000 his Symphony No.2 was premiered by The Auckland Philharmonia at the International Festival of the Arts. The comic opera “Quartet” also featured at the 2004 Festival. Anthony Ritchie has composed film music in collaboration with Natural History NZ, including “Southern Journeys” (2000). In 2004 his opera “The God Boy” was a critically acclaimed success at the Otago Festival of the Arts.
His work is increasingly known overseas: in 2014 A Bugle Will Do was recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and performed by The Ulster Orchestra, and Salaam was premiered by the Belgium choir Aquarius. Most recently, his oratorio Gallipoli to the Somme was premiered to critical acclaim in New Zealand and will be performed in London in 2018. He is currently Associate Professor of Music at Otago University.
Childhood was composed for NZTrio as part of the composer’s sabbatical leave from The University of Otago, for performances in 2017 and beyond. The composer acknowledges the support and assistance of the performers in the trio, Justine Cormack, Ashley Brown and Sarah Watkins.
The piece reflects on different stages in life, and makes connections between our own childhood and that of our children, and indeed our grandchildren. Observing and relating to children is like a renewal of hope and wonder, that counterbalances the experiences and tribulations of adult life. Therefore, the style of the music is deliberately naïve and simple, while also containing undercurrents of complexity.
An opening progression of a tone gradually expands and unfolds into dual pentatonic scales on the piano. The strings enter with a basic open 5th progression that grows into a short theme. This theme forms the basis for much of the material that follows, almost in the manner of a theme and variations. A third ingredient emerges after letter E, a chord progression that ascends on the piano. An ABAB structure is established leading to a climax, and a new variation on the main theme appearing at letter K. This tantrum-like idea suddenly switches to a calming, neutral theme at bar 182, and this pattern repeats, and these two sharply contrasting sections alternate. The ‘calming’ idea eventually takes over at letter P, and is developed. However, an echo of the tantrum-like idea sounds at letter S, with primitive, percussive progressions on the piano. The music’s energy winds down, with violin and cello developing a soulful duo. There are reminders of earlier piano arpeggios before the child-like texture of the opening returns to end the piece.
Dorothy Ker (NZ; b. 1965): Onaia – c. 15’
Dorothy Ker’s music is performed and broadcast in both hemispheres and has been heard at venues and international festivals in Auckland, Belfast, Darmstadt, Huddersfield, Perth, Taipei, Seoul, at the ISCM, and London. In 1992 she immigrated to the UK, where she studied with Nicola Lefanu and Harrison Birtwistle, completing a PhD at York University in 1998. Her studies were followed by Research Fellowships at Reading University (2001-2004) and Sheffield University (2005-2010), where she is currently a Senior Lecturer. In 2013-2014 she was resident at the Douglas Lilburn House while on study leave. In 2015 she was awarded the Composers Association of NZ Trust Fund Award for her contribution to New Zealand music.
Dorothy writes: “Onaia stream (near Rotorua/Te Puke) passes through a narrow gully, where it is possible to wade barefoot through the shallow waters, going deeper and deeper into the high banks and ancient foliage, for several hours. Onaia is not a depiction of that place (nor a journey through it) but a translation of its energies. The sounds are not from there but make a visceral connection to it, playing with patterns and resonances, and with various qualities of surface and touch. The piece falls in pitch from extreme height to the deepest available pitch, a musical journey that might be understood as the unravelling of a single, stratified, spectrum of texture and resonance.”
Onaia is a co-commission from Fidelio Trio and NZTrio, with funding provided by Creative New Zealand. It was composed while Dorothy was in residence at the Lilburn House in Wellington, NZ, while on Study Leave from the University from Sheffield in 2013-2014.
Franz Schubert (AUSTRIA; 1797 – 1828); Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat Major, D.929 Op. 100 – c. 43’
Allegro
Andante con moto
Scherzando. Allegro moderato
Allegro moderato
There was a time when I talked unwillingly of Schubert, whose name, I thought, should only be whispered at night to the trees and stars. – Robert Schumann
This divine trio is one of the last things Schubert ever wrote. It was also one of the very few of his works ever performed in public, at the one and only public concert during his lifetime, and the only one ever published outside Vienna. The great irony of his genius was that despite how hugely prolific he was – more than 1,500 works including massive quantities of piano and chamber music, nine symphonies and over 600 songs – Schubert lived his whole life unrecognised by all but his small circle in Vienna: he had no post, no patron, received no commissions, made hardly any money, performed only in private, gave a lot of it away, and his music quickly became scattered far and wide among his publishers, family and friends. Not even Brahms, who idolised him, had any idea of the true quantity of his output and it was four decades before he began to be appreciated in the way that he deserved.
The E-flat trio is dated November 1827. He was already ill: diagnosed as typhoid fever at the time, it now is certain to have been syphilis, which had plagued him intermittently for years and which plunged him into the occasional depressions that so transcendently work their way into his songs. In March he had been a torchbearer at Beethoven’s funeral: the following November, 1828 at the age of only 31, he was dead. And yet that year is one full of masterpieces – Schwanengesang, the great C major symphony, the last set of impromptus, both piano trios, the C major quintet. He wrote both trios in quick succession and they are companion pieces: the B-flat sunny and lyrical, the E-flat dark and dramatic, and the one that Schubert himself preferred. He worked unusually hard on it – the manuscript is full of changes – and when it was ready to send to his publisher he gave it such a moving dedication. “Dedicated to no one, save those who find pleasure in it”.
It grabs our attention immediately. High drama combines with Schubert’s unmatched and endless gift for melody, especially in the heart-rending slow movement: the scherzo and trio are brilliantly impish and witty; and he excels even himself in a final movement of incomparable brilliance and beauty. Schubert has sometimes been criticised for not paying enough attention to formal structure, his melodies are so beautiful, but this trio utterly gives the lie to that. As Liszt once said, “Such is the spell of your emotional world that it very nearly blinds us to the greatness of your craftsmanship.”
Concert Details
Programme: John Ireland (ENG): Phantasie Trio
Concert Details
Programme:
John Ireland (ENG): Phantasie Trio in a minor
Anthony Ritchie (NZ): Childhood
Dorothy Ker (NZ): Onaia
INTERVAL
Schubert (AUSTRIA): Piano Trio in E Flat major, op. 100
Soar prepares us for new heights and perspectives. Weaving through changing tapestries, you’ll find yourself adrift in daydreams (John Ireland) where life’s complexity is seemingly simplified (Anthony Ritchie), primordial soundscapes pacify (Dorothy Ker), and naivety is blissfully deliberate like a game of hide and seek (Franz Schubert).
With guest violinist Manu Berkeljon
Tickets $40 Adults / $20 Students
Time
(Wednesday) 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm UTC+12:00
Location
The Piano
156 Armagh Street, Christchurch, NZ
John Ireland (ENG; 1879 – 1962): Phantasie Trio in a minor – c. 12’
in tempo moderato – allegro – Tempo I – Animando – Meno mosso, quasi andantino – Tempo I – vivace e ritmico – In tempo – Vivace e giocoso – Vivacissimo
This lovely trio is another of those that owe their life to Walter Willson Cobbett, the British businessman who was mad about chamber music and, in 1905, established the Cobbett prize for works in one single movement with plenty of contrast and equal parts for the instruments – in the manner of an Elizabethan fantasy.
John Ireland entered this in 1906, aged 27, when he was organist and choirmaster of a church in Chelsea and was beginning to make his name as a composer. He’s a melancholy figure: his father was 70 when he was born, and he was left orphaned when first his mother then his father died in quick succession when he was still in his early teens. All his life he struck up doomed relationships with women who were 30 years younger, his one brief marriage was a disaster and he became something of a recluse, eventually retreating into a converted windmill in the depths of the Sussex countryside and declining the award of a CBE. One of his colleagues – he taught at the Royal College of Music, where he’d studied – described him as “a self-critical, introspective man, haunted by memories of a sad childhood”, and he spent a lot of time in the Channel Islands where he became known for going on great long walks alone. And yet, still waters run deep! His epitaph reads “Many waters cannot quench love”.
You fancy that you can hear that in this trio. Deeply passionate and impressionistic – Ireland adored Debussy and Ravel and more or less invented “English impressionism” – it teems with the sort of melody and emotion that Ireland poured into his songs, passing through several changes in the mood, true to the brief, and racing “playfully” to the end. It was pipped to the post by Frank Bridge in the prize that year, coming second, but it was enough to encourage Ireland to write more. A few years later he did win with his first violin sonata and was on the road to fame.
Anthony Ritchie (NZ; b.1960): Childhood – c. 10’
Anthony Ritchie studied composition at Canterbury University, and completed a Ph.D on the music of Bartok. He studied composition at the Liszt Academy in Hungary, before becoming Composer-in-Schools in Christchurch, in 1987. He moved to Dunedin in 1988 to be Mozart Fellow in composition, at Otago University, and later was Composer-in-residence with the Dunedin Sinfonia completing his Symphony No. 1 Boum.
He freelanced from 1995-2002, writing many commissioned works for performers as diverse as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Class Act Opera, and The Australian Song Company. In 2000 his Symphony No.2 was premiered by The Auckland Philharmonia at the International Festival of the Arts. The comic opera “Quartet” also featured at the 2004 Festival. Anthony Ritchie has composed film music in collaboration with Natural History NZ, including “Southern Journeys” (2000). In 2004 his opera “The God Boy” was a critically acclaimed success at the Otago Festival of the Arts.
His work is increasingly known overseas: in 2014 A Bugle Will Do was recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and performed by The Ulster Orchestra, and Salaam was premiered by the Belgium choir Aquarius. Most recently, his oratorio Gallipoli to the Somme was premiered to critical acclaim in New Zealand and will be performed in London in 2018. He is currently Associate Professor of Music at Otago University.
Childhood was composed for NZTrio as part of the composer’s sabbatical leave from The University of Otago, for performances in 2017 and beyond. The composer acknowledges the support and assistance of the performers in the trio, Justine Cormack, Ashley Brown and Sarah Watkins.
The piece reflects on different stages in life, and makes connections between our own childhood and that of our children, and indeed our grandchildren. Observing and relating to children is like a renewal of hope and wonder, that counterbalances the experiences and tribulations of adult life. Therefore, the style of the music is deliberately naïve and simple, while also containing undercurrents of complexity.
An opening progression of a tone gradually expands and unfolds into dual pentatonic scales on the piano. The strings enter with a basic open 5th progression that grows into a short theme. This theme forms the basis for much of the material that follows, almost in the manner of a theme and variations. A third ingredient emerges after letter E, a chord progression that ascends on the piano. An ABAB structure is established leading to a climax, and a new variation on the main theme appearing at letter K. This tantrum-like idea suddenly switches to a calming, neutral theme at bar 182, and this pattern repeats, and these two sharply contrasting sections alternate. The ‘calming’ idea eventually takes over at letter P, and is developed. However, an echo of the tantrum-like idea sounds at letter S, with primitive, percussive progressions on the piano. The music’s energy winds down, with violin and cello developing a soulful duo. There are reminders of earlier piano arpeggios before the child-like texture of the opening returns to end the piece.
Dorothy Ker (NZ; b. 1965): Onaia – c. 15’
Dorothy Ker’s music is performed and broadcast in both hemispheres and has been heard at venues and international festivals in Auckland, Belfast, Darmstadt, Huddersfield, Perth, Taipei, Seoul, at the ISCM, and London. In 1992 she immigrated to the UK, where she studied with Nicola Lefanu and Harrison Birtwistle, completing a PhD at York University in 1998. Her studies were followed by Research Fellowships at Reading University (2001-2004) and Sheffield University (2005-2010), where she is currently a Senior Lecturer. In 2013-2014 she was resident at the Douglas Lilburn House while on study leave. In 2015 she was awarded the Composers Association of NZ Trust Fund Award for her contribution to New Zealand music.
Dorothy writes: “Onaia stream (near Rotorua/Te Puke) passes through a narrow gully, where it is possible to wade barefoot through the shallow waters, going deeper and deeper into the high banks and ancient foliage, for several hours. Onaia is not a depiction of that place (nor a journey through it) but a translation of its energies. The sounds are not from there but make a visceral connection to it, playing with patterns and resonances, and with various qualities of surface and touch. The piece falls in pitch from extreme height to the deepest available pitch, a musical journey that might be understood as the unravelling of a single, stratified, spectrum of texture and resonance.”
Onaia is a co-commission from Fidelio Trio and NZTrio, with funding provided by Creative New Zealand. It was composed while Dorothy was in residence at the Lilburn House in Wellington, NZ, while on Study Leave from the University from Sheffield in 2013-2014.
Franz Schubert (AUSTRIA; 1797 – 1828); Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat Major, D.929 Op. 100 – c. 43’
Allegro
Andante con moto
Scherzando. Allegro moderato
Allegro moderato
There was a time when I talked unwillingly of Schubert, whose name, I thought, should only be whispered at night to the trees and stars. – Robert Schumann
This divine trio is one of the last things Schubert ever wrote. It was also one of the very few of his works ever performed in public, at the one and only public concert during his lifetime, and the only one ever published outside Vienna. The great irony of his genius was that despite how hugely prolific he was – more than 1,500 works including massive quantities of piano and chamber music, nine symphonies and over 600 songs – Schubert lived his whole life unrecognised by all but his small circle in Vienna: he had no post, no patron, received no commissions, made hardly any money, performed only in private, gave a lot of it away, and his music quickly became scattered far and wide among his publishers, family and friends. Not even Brahms, who idolised him, had any idea of the true quantity of his output and it was four decades before he began to be appreciated in the way that he deserved.
The E-flat trio is dated November 1827. He was already ill: diagnosed as typhoid fever at the time, it now is certain to have been syphilis, which had plagued him intermittently for years and which plunged him into the occasional depressions that so transcendently work their way into his songs. In March he had been a torchbearer at Beethoven’s funeral: the following November, 1828 at the age of only 31, he was dead. And yet that year is one full of masterpieces – Schwanengesang, the great C major symphony, the last set of impromptus, both piano trios, the C major quintet. He wrote both trios in quick succession and they are companion pieces: the B-flat sunny and lyrical, the E-flat dark and dramatic, and the one that Schubert himself preferred. He worked unusually hard on it – the manuscript is full of changes – and when it was ready to send to his publisher he gave it such a moving dedication. “Dedicated to no one, save those who find pleasure in it”.
It grabs our attention immediately. High drama combines with Schubert’s unmatched and endless gift for melody, especially in the heart-rending slow movement: the scherzo and trio are brilliantly impish and witty; and he excels even himself in a final movement of incomparable brilliance and beauty. Schubert has sometimes been criticised for not paying enough attention to formal structure, his melodies are so beautiful, but this trio utterly gives the lie to that. As Liszt once said, “Such is the spell of your emotional world that it very nearly blinds us to the greatness of your craftsmanship.”
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