Music
Refreshments
by Ian Dando
Anthony Ritchie was previously one of our better conservative composers. But at the end of 2000, he took a six-month break from composing to revitalise his style. Hearing how enterprisingly he has reinvented himself makes Piano Preludes the year’s most important CD of New Zealand music.
The most prominent innovation behind these 24 preludes is his use of magic squares. In his sleeve notes, he shows one in which all sequences of numbers add up to 65, whether going horizontally, vertically or diagonally. He illustrates how music motifs are converted from these numbers and manipulated flexibly to form the melodic content of Prelude No 7.
No 7 and especially No 16, “Grave – for Shostakovich”, where Ritchie has a field-day playing around with the three intervals in Shostakovich’s DSCH signature motif, are just two of a majority of the preludes whose unity is intervallic. That is, listen to the gaps between each note rather than the melody.
“I was loath to use mathematical concepts in composing for fear of losing control of the aural logic and flow in my music,” he says. His imaginative wealth in these preludes shows that he has lost nothing. The gains he has made in dramatic range and wider expressivity are huge. Pianist Sharon Vogan nurtures each prelude with exemplary clarity and imagination. Atoll’s recorded sound is crisp and focused.
ANTHONY RITCHIE PIANO PRELUDES. Atoll ACD 504.
On Waikohu, go straight to the plum track two – Gareth Farr’s “Tangi Haehae” (“Torn by Grief”). Farr meets the text’s protest of Maori females against their male elders head on, pushing vocalist Mere Boynton to add a chillingly strident edge to her voice. The innovation here is Farr forging a new path for Maori music, updating it into 21st-century modernism. Scoring for percussion accompaniment (played by Strike) in his two pieces reinforces this, as does his melding of Indonesian gamelan and Maori instrumental traditions in “Uri Taniwha”.
Gillian Whitehead’s “Karakia” pares down the piano to minimalism to focus on the melodic line’s lament style. Paul Booth expands Maori music by scoring a string quartet of NZSO players and percussion for his two spacious love songs and his high-quality lament.
Richard Nunn’s seven brief pieces for Maori instruments show him at his best yet, with a richer melodic flair. Hirini Melbourne shows the traditional approach to Maori song. Boynton’s versatility and warm mezzo lustre are just what’s needed for this refreshing CD. A wake-up call to broaden Maori music?
WAIKOHU, Mere Boynton and Friends. MMT 2034.
The innovation on Pink and White is organist Martin Setchell’s discovery that we do have a patchy organ writing tradition of sorts. The outstanding title work, by Anthony Ritchie, is matched perfectly by the cover reproduction of Hoyte’s 1873 watercolour of the terraces.
Other personal favourites are the sensitive match of birdsong with organ in Jack Body’s “Tui, korimako and kokako”; Douglas Mews’s clear and light “Pre-lude and Fugue”; the exuberance of John Ritchie’s “Let the pealing organ blow”; Tecwyn Evan’s “Geräuschvoll”, which has far more under its hat than flamboyant noise; and Setchell’s “Pokarekare Ana Suite” for its humour.
Setchell plays all eight works with clarity and vivid colouring on the Christ-church Town Hall’s piquantly voiced new Rieger organ.
PINK AND WHITE, Martin Setchell. Atoll ACD 605.
