KEY POINTS:
Tomorrow night Peter Scholes and his Auckland Chamber Orchestra devote a Composer Portrait concert to the music of John Rimmer. The 69-year-old Rimmer, an established Auckland identity who recently moved to Motueka, will be paid tribute with works spanning some 31 years.
The earliest is a student Octet from 1964, which its composer describes as "very Stravinskian, with a boisterous first movement that had scales running all over the place".
The 1995 Murmures is the most recent piece chosen by Scholes. Its title means "sonic ripples" or, as Rimmer puts it, "the sort of sound that water makes when it ripples along the sea shore."
Rimmer is hooked on the sounds of the New Zealand landscape just as our painters find sustenance in its colours. "Composers listen to things around them just as artists look at things around them," says Rimmer. "It [works for me] on a subsconscious level."
Inevitably, the volcanic soundscape of his The Ring of Fire which gives tomorrow's concert its title will take central position on the programme. This was commissioned for the London Sinfonietta when it toured the country in 1976. "The English musicians gave one of the best performances I've ever had of any of my music," Rimmer recalls. "But then I knew they were pretty good and composed accordingly."
These days New Zealand composers do not have to wait for visiting virtuosi to take their music from score to concert stage. Local groups like the Karlheinz Company and 175 East have fostered a new breed of contemporary-minded musicians and tomorrow Rimmer's music will benefit from the expert artistry of the likes of clarinetist Andrew Uren and Sarah Watkins, the sure-fingered pianist of the NZ Trio.
"Musicians are not just playing notes now," Rimmer points out. "They play expressively. It's a little like those early recordings of Webern, where you were just getting notes, not music. It wasn't until Boulez came along as a conductor that Webern sounded lyrical, and the lines sang."
Rimmer's quintet De Aestibus Rerum, a prize-winner at the 1983 International Horn Society Competition, has a Latin title which represents the ebb and flow of life. "It's in a gentle tempo throughout with the underlying movement being sedate."
However, two-and-a-half decades on, his music has changed. "Now my fast music is rhythmically charged, and my slow music is stretched out. I think it's to do with one's perception of time as you get older; you start to stretch things out."
Rimmer's latest project, calling for four pianists at two pianos, is based on the pulsating Adolescent's Dance from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, "but I haven't treated it pounding away like Stravinsky did", he adds.
In times when composers like John Psathas and Gareth Farr aim for the visceral, Rimmer does not like "bashing the audience with a lot of the loud stuff. The audience for this new piano piece was very drawn in when the music was very soft, when its final chord stopped and just resonated".
Tomorrow, a dozen ACO players will tackle Rimmer's 1984 Gossamer for 12 solo strings, a piece inspired by the delicate tracery of dew-covered spider webs. After years of sitting in orchestral horn sections, waiting for his next cue, Rimmer has been fascinated by the physical movement of bow on string _ "poetry in motion".
Rimmer has always been a deeply involved musician and composer; in Motueka he takes a church choir and conducts the local brass band. He is aware of those who play his music and who listens to it. "I have always taken it upon myself to write something I could sing or play myself. I want to ... articulate things clearly. I am very concerned that people in the back row can hear what's going on. That's my way of communicating with an audience."
PERFORMANCE
What: Auckland Chamber Orchestra, The Ring of Fire tribute to John Rimmer
Where and when: Town Hall Concert Chamber, tomorrow (Sun, June 22) 5pm
