Classical
A midwinter night's dream
by Ian Dando
The CSO and NZSO were at their best during the Christchurch Arts Festival.
If arts festivals are about highlighting important rarities rather than having more of the same, what better for Christchurch’s than William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the complete incidental music of Felix Mendelssohn in the latter’s bicentenary?
The music is ossified on a few CD versions isolated from the play. As director Elric Hooper states in his revealing
notes, it took a little over four hours in its original form of 1842. To reduce it to today’s usual two-hour format, yet retain Mendelssohn’s intimate integration between speech and music, was Hooper’s exacting task.
He omitted some scenes and shortened others. He used a narrator to ensure any inherent bumps in the plot were seamed over with continuity in this highly skilled abridgment. Using a Globe-type production of no scene changes or props enabled him to economise on time. He got the overall ambience of the work while retaining his typical fingerprints of sharp detail and superb dramatic timing.
The excellent choreography was especially delicate in such key moments as Puck’s arm and body movements when pouring his magic love potion over the two pairs of sleeping lovers. A ballet troupe of young children had their great moments as the tiny benevolent fairies. The Christchurch Symphony Orchestra under Tom Woods captured the gossamer delicacy of Mendelssohn’s scoring, especially where it matters in the woodwinds. This production gave us a two-hour holiday from reality, my only regret being that the festival did not give it the second night it richly deserved as an extreme rarity in live performance.
The rounded depth of sound we seldom get from our orchestras here pleasantly surprised me in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s outstanding Shostakovich Symphony No 10 in the second half of its Great Romantics programme. The majestic opening string chord that kicks off the second movement’s frenetic anger had such punch it had me counting up the player list in the programme to find not the usual near 92 players but, aha, 104. What a difference a dozen more makes to sonority and balance.
Conductor Mark Wigglesworth’s interpretation painted the symphony as a black requiem to Joseph Stalin, with all the Soviet Union giving the finger to the brute in movements such as the second, which expresses 50 angry crescendos in a mere five minutes. How well Wigglesworth captured the satire of the macabre waltz and shaped those massive climaxes of the opening movement. Just when you think Shostakovich couldn’t possibly write a louder or more abrasive one, the next is just that. My ears hung on to every note of the NZSO’s playing. They made it sound exactly as it is – the greatest of Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies by far. It is some time since an NZSO performance has moved me so much. Keep the 104 players, too. I’m permanently spoilt.
Typically, Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin focuses on crowds rather than heroes. Its resultant failure to establish an emotional bond with the audience makes it a curate’s egg by modern tastes, although some scenes do allow us to care about the outcome, such as the renowned clip of a pram with baby rolling unchecked down the steps in the Odessa massacre.
The film, projected in the town hall auditorium, breaks up into five titles, such as Men and Maggots. The men’s protest at being fed rancid meat leads to mutiny and the more spectacular crowd scenes via the skilful cutting and recutting for which Eisenstein was famous.
Battleship Potemkin was reconstructed in 1993 with live orchestral accompaniment. The noisiest bits from Shostakovich’s symphonies No 4, 11 and 14 seem to have been chosen to match the film’s brutally militaristic ambience. An enlarged CSO, with two timpanists and piles of brass and percussion, all conducted by Woods, assaulted our ears with a noise level almost requiring earmuffs.
It was left to the T’ang Quartet, with New Zealand pianist John Chen’s Abundant Lands programme of three piano quintets, to clean up the tail of the festival’s small number of concerts of good quality.
If one of your violinists has a sickie or is otherwise indisposed, phone Fijian-born Kiwi Wilma Smith, ex-NZSO concertmaster, now concertmaster with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Such is her ability to meld seamlessly into a touring group’s repertoire after only two rehearsals, she had me fooled into believing she had permanently changed jobs to become leader of this Singaporean quartet.
Smith joined in its warm and exhilarating closing Dvořák Piano Quintet and the quietly frozen requiem feel to Schnittke’s opening Piano Quintet, as well as the centrepiece of the concert, the launch of the festival’s Gao Ping commission.
Gao’s piano quintet Mei, Lan, Zhu, Ju is named after four Chinese plants with different characters, and benefited from the Singaporeans’ sensitivity and insight into his thinking.
Gao has now worked in the West long enough to integrate his increasingly Chinese ambience to subtly avoid the worst clichés of Western tradition. He sees these as its age-old harmonic progression towards cadences. Gao prefers static eastern beauty. His answer to feeling the West is too chained up and tied to strict notation is to give his music more freedom, to let it improvise a bit, as in the chance music and many quasi-improvisatory solos in parts of the quintet’s rapid third movement.
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