KEY POINTS:
REVIEWS
What: Auckland Chamber Orchestra
Where: Town Hall Concert Chamber
What: New Zealand String Quartet with Pedro Carneiro
Where: Auckland Town Hall
Reviewer: William Dart
The final of the Auckland Chamber Orchestra's Composer Portraits concerts was truly a chamber affair; a tribute to Gillian Whitehead, with works spanning 23 years, none calling for more than seven musicians.
Cleverly complementing the recent Tuhonohono concert, which focused on Whitehead's compositions with taonga puoro, this Sunday night programme displayed the composer using the European musical forms with which she made her international reputation.
Whitehead explained how the 1986 Manutaki was inspired by flying swallows and flautist Adrianna Lis and clarinetist Andrew Uren caught this to their last eddying phrase. Yet not all the playing was of this order, the strings being rougher-toned and even the authoritative David Guerin sometimes over-dominant on piano.
After two short pieces - Guerin not quite catching the tenderness of Lullaby for Matthew and Claire Nash making a miniature a cappella scena out of Pikeri - there was the opportunity to hear the Quintet which the Southern Cross Soloists premiered on their 2005 Chamber Music New Zealand tour.
A certain lack of consistency across the players impacted on this demanding score. Even more than in Manutaki, one could appreciate the opposition of severe piano and placatory, trilling woodwind; at times, in its effective unisons, there were premonitions of things to come in more recent Whitehead compositions. Carl Wells bowled through some lusty horn writing and, as in Manutaki, it was not difficult to see the skilled Uren as the focus of the ensemble.
The centrepiece of the evening was the 1980 Hotspur, sung by Zan McKendree-Wright in front of its original Gretchen Albrecht banners.
Albrecht's sumptuous colours were in harmony with McKendree-Wright's rich mezzo. A statuesque figure, the singer balanced the fierce with the vulnerable in Fleur Adcock's words and Whitehead's often unsparing vocal lines; the fourth section, with its intricate ornamentation, flowed as if it were written for her.
The instrumental ensemble was more cohesive here, with the clarinets of Uren and Donald Nicholls exploring the outer reaches of expressiveness, in a coruscating duel at one point in the second section. Bruce McKinnon, presiding over a vast battery of percussion instruments, was the soul of energy and finesse, and Peter Scholes' conducting was at its most persuasive.
* Helene Pohl, the New Zealand String Quartet's leader, pretty much summed up John Psathas' new Kartsigar when she described its composer as "mining his Greek roots with intense passion and many quarter-tones".
Opening Monday's town hall concert, Kartsigar was far more than just raw passion. Psathas' two takes on traditional Greek music showed cerebral considerations as well, as they balanced the plucked against the bowed, and, later on, melodic freedom with the strength of repetition.
The musicians were with him all the way, whether passing around the soul-searching tunes of the first piece or sounding out the adroitly shared pedal notes of the second.
Beethoven's great C sharp minor Quartet was the only concession to traditional concert fare and, discounting some tiredness in the final pages, this was first rate.
Tranquillity was etched with inevitability in the opening Adagio and the following Allegro had just the right blithe swing. The Rondo was an appropriately madcap affair, particularly when pizzicati were flying around.
Pedro Carneiro, the ace Portuguese percussionist, flew solo in Psathas' One Study One Summary, brilliantly punctuating smooth marimba waves with the sonic jolt of junk percussion. Only in the composer's tape component, with its throbbing, predictable pulse, did I feel a little let down.
The Quartet reprised Tan Dun's 8 Colours, a work they have had under their fingers for some time now. They delved into its highly-coloured canvas, extracting every sonic tint possible; many must have been startled by their energetic strummed pizzicato and slapping of fingerboards.
Carneiro would join them for another, less radical Chinese work, an attractive movement from Chen Yi's Sound of the Five.
Carneiro's other three pieces with the quartet, all from Portuguese composers, skilfully displayed the coming together of two musical worlds.
Luis Tinoco's End Meets was a textural study of criss-crossing, shivery sonorities in a minimalist patchwork, presented without a slip between hand and instrument.
The selection closed with three movements from Eurico Carrapatoso's Suite d'aquem e d'alem mar 11, which ended in 6/8 and high spirits. Its cartoonish zaniness made one suspect that the spirit of the great Carl Stalling is alive, well and influencing a few composers in Portugal.
