Latest news with #Messiaen
NZ Herald
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
NZTrio's Magnifique concert captivates with Schubert and Vasks
Schubert's one-movement Notturno offered eight minutes of total beguilement, delivered with true Viennese charm, its gentle hesitations hinting at a Strauss family waiting in the wings. The truly magnificent and beating heart of the programme came with Episodi e canto perpetuo, a 1985 work by Latvian composer Peteris Vasks, an intensely moving response to Messiaen's classic Quartet for the End of Time. There were close and specific parallels with the Messiaen, from a seat's edge, feverish dance in driving unisons to two oases of purest song, showcasing violinist Amalia Hall and the trio's new cellist Matthias Balzat. These culminated in a heart-stopping finale, uncredited in the printed programme, that moves irrevocably upwards, as if to heaven, Vasks having achieved his 'song of love' after travelling a 'difficult road through evil, delusion and suffering'. Here is a composer who navigates with enviable ease from traditional scoring – Bartok being inevitably referenced in two Burlesca movements – to the freer notations and effects of the later Lutoslawski. Yet he has been woefully under-represented in our concert halls. In my many decades of concert-going, I only recall one instance: cellist David Geringas in 2011 stunning a town hall audience after his Dvorak concerto with a short Vasks encore. After interval, Linda Dallimore's commissioned Self Portrait was short, agreeably astringent, and very much to the point, even if the young New Zealand composer had made more of its boppy final section, marked 'soulful, joyful, bluesy'. Saint-Saens' Second Piano Trio proved a workout of Olympian proportions for pianist Somi Kim. This is a sparkler of a score, with Hall and Balzat elegantly weaving around Kim's shifting, evanescent textures. All three musicians contributed equally to the brittle wit of its second movement, coming together in full strength for a thrilling, purposeful finale. How pleasing it is to heartily recommend this concert before the NZTrio take Magnifique to Cambridge on Wednesday, Rotorua on Thursday and Whakatāne on Friday.
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Britten Sinfonia/Sinfonia Smith Square review – quiet fervour and formal grace
Innovative as always, Britten Sinfonia joined forces with Sinfonia Smith Square for a programme of music for wind ensemble by Messiaen and Stravinsky, alongside Stravinsky's Mass and 20th-century French motets (Poulenc, Duruflé, more Messiaen) sung by the choir of Merton College, Oxford. There were two conductors, Nicholas Daniel for the wind ensemble music, and Benjamin Nicholas (Merton's director of music) for the a cappella works. Daniel, also the Britten Sinfonia's principal oboist since its founding in 1992, steps down at the end of the current season, and this was effectively his final concert with the orchestra. The programme was sombre and beautifully constructed. The main work was Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum, Messiaen's great memorial to the dead of both world wars. It was commissioned to mark the 20th anniversary of the second, and is still an essential reminder, another 60 years on, of the necessity of hope in dark times. It was prefaced by other 20th-century works reflecting on conflict. The echoes of both Russian Orthodox church music and The Rite of Spring that lurk behind Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments suggest a world lost to revolution and exile, while his Mass, written in the US between 1944 and 1948, moves from hard-edged austerity towards a chilly peace, tentative at best. Poulenc's Quatre Motets Pour un Temps de Pénitence, only three of them sung here, date from early 1939, their surface calm barely concealing deep unease at impending crisis. Ritual elements rightly predominated in performances. Daniel's way with the closing sections of Symphonies of Wind Instruments proved extraordinarily moving, as the music moves towards sad resignation. The Mass was a thing of quiet fervour and formal grace, beautifully sung and played. The reverberant acoustic of St George's Cathedral, Southwark, can sometimes swallow definition and detail in Stravinsky. The vast hieratic ceremonials of Et Exspecto, in contrast, expanded and resonated superbly into the space in an interpretation of intense solemnity, superb control and, at times, cataclysmic loudness. Merton College choir sounded beautiful in the motets: Duruflé's Ubi Caritas et Amor was particularly exquisite. And Daniel also gave us a transcription for oboe of Messiaen's Vocalise-étude, originally a conservatoire test piece for soprano and piano, done with exquisite tone, extraordinary lyrical poise and wonderful depth of feeling.
The Guardian
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Brighton Philharmonic/MacGregor review – compelling Messiaen played with panache
The Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra marked its centenary with a performance of Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony under their principal conductor Joanna MacGregor – only the fourth music director in the orchestra's 100-year history. MacGregor herself is a familiar interpreter of the obbligato piano part, which here was played by her former pupil, Australian pianist-composer Joseph Havlat, while MacGregor conducted the symphony with considerable fire and brilliance. Cynthia Millar, meanwhile, was the ondes martenot soloist. Completed in 1948, and inspired by Messiaen's fascination with various versions of the legend of Tristan and Iseult, Turangalîla is essentially an examination of sexual and spiritual love, in which consuming desire can be seen at once as affording access to the divine and bringing in its wake the potential for suffering or destruction. Though a devout Catholic, Messiaen was no prude, and music of deep sensuality and carnality gives way throughout to ecstatic dances of cosmic jubilation and moments of incipient menace. MacGregor and the BPO captured the work's emotional immediacy, hypnotic force and sense of almost tangible physicality to compelling effect. Textures gleamed and glistened, rhythms were crisp, precise, superbly articulated. Joie du Sang des Étoiles, taken fractionally faster than we sometimes hear it, sounded thrilling in its elation and drive. Jardin du Sommeil d'Amour, the work's effective slow movement, was all drowsy sensuousness, the strings silky; the piano solo, suggestive of birdsong, exquisitely done by Havlat, whose playing combined shimmering elegance with intensity throughout. Millar matched his rapt introversion here. Just occasionally, however, the balance between them came adrift elsewhere, and the ondes martenot's moans and whoops sounded fractionally too distant. The work's brief moments of darkness were chillingly realised, though, particularly the seventh (itself entitled Turangalîla 2) of the work's 10 movements, where brass, ondes and piano are brought into stark opposition. Turangalîla is, of course, very much a showpiece for a virtuoso orchestra, and the Brighton Philharmonic – its members drawn from the principal players of London's orchestras together with young musicians – played with terrific panache and commitment. Heady stuff, beautifully done.
