On track: Composers in flight

By WILLIAM DART

Wellington's Waiteata Music Press has supported and cherished the New Zealand composer for decades by being this country's main music publisher - creating a vast catalogue of scores, from symphonies to the humblest piano pieces.

It still does this but, more recently, it has added CDs to its endeavours. Music that otherwise might languish unheard on the printed page can now spring to life at the touch of a button.

Most recently, Waiteata has focused its energies on a series of Composer Portraits.

Ross Harris and Gillian Whitehead were the first to be honoured; Jack Body and Jenny McLeod have been added to the list.

Body's disc captures this dynamic composer in full flight. At one end of the spectrum is the NZSO's fierce Little Elegies, a rather dark "celebration" of 25 years of television in this country; at the other, the austere beauties of seven Michelangelo sonnets, woven to perfection by mezzo Linden Loader and soprano Karen Heathcote.

As always, Waiteata uses a mix of archival material from Concert FM (Tudor Consort's Five Lullabies, as enchanting as they were back in 1991, and Flurry, an aptly titled party piece for three string quartets caught at the 2002 International Festival) and new recordings.

Amongst the latter, the most memorable are Chinese pianist Gao Ping drawing heavenly sounds from the 1968 Four Stabiles and our own irrepressible piano man, Dan Poynton, putting "Silver threads among the gold" through what sounds like a Debussian wash.

The Jenny McLeod collection does not manage the range of Body's disc and Epithalamia, a student song-cycle, sits uneasily between the cool modernism of her 1966 For Seven and her recent Tone-Clock Pieces.

The players of Stroma give For Seven an intensely musical reading, but somehow miss the light and shade and sinuous dialogue of the Lontano performance which I reviewed last year. How wonderful, though, to have all 11 of the Tone-Clock Pieces available at last, especially Jeffrey Grice's incandescent account of the first seven, unhampered by the intrusive audience noise which mars Diedre Irons' performances of the final four.

* Composer Portrait: Jack Body (Waiteata WTA 006); Composer Portrait: Jenny McLeod (Waiteata WTA 005) available from Waiteata Press, Victoria University School of Music, PO Box 600, Wellington