Arts reflections
Mentioned in dispatches: Last night I reviewed the NZ Chamber Soloist’s performance at the Gallagher Performing Arts Centre. I wrote the review with more trepidation than usual, scarcely able to read my notes afterwards because the pen had developed a nervous quiver when the pianist for the performing trio, Katherine Austin, commented ‘‘… It is so nice to have an audience of musicians to play to in this wonderful venue …’’ and I realised that the musicians to whom she was referring were attendees at the annual conference of The Institute of Registered Music Teachers of New Zealand. Such a formidability of knowledge and experience, and I, a mere scribbler, daring to venture into the realms of informed beauty and practising experience. Teachers of music are possessed of such soul, such enlightenment, such an ability to chip the perfect performer from the unformed rocks of incomprehension as are their pupils, that they warrant recognition and respect equal to that of their most successful graduates. Please, accept our gratitude.
REVIEWS
What: Aladdin Jr Who: Musikmakers
When: January 16
Where: Riverlea Theatre
Based on the Disney screenplay by Ron Clements and John Musker
Director: Toni Garson; musical director: Coryn Knapper; choreographer: Tess Benseman
Don’t you wonder, when you do go to one of the many outstanding live performances the Waikato offers, where those adult actors come from? Here is your answer. This Musikmakers presentation of Disney’s adaptation of the original Aladdin saga auditioned only 12 to 17-year-olds, some of whom came from Stagecraft, Riverlea’s own training school for young actors. The rehearsals leading up to today’s first performance, were one hell of a reminder of the demands of the stage, But it also kept the players engaged and committed. This was no breathlessly gushing ‘‘Ohlovelydarling, now try a teensy little harder for Coryn…’’ experience. This was full blooded ‘‘That doesn’t work unless you do this…’’ with the ‘‘this’’ being detailed, and the actors being required to accept the disciplines and goals which make the production a delight for an audience, not just kiddientfun for the hols. Three adults led the charge to make adult enjoyment match the laughter and pleasure of the kids. Director Garson, musical director Knapper, and choreographer Benseman brought out such skill and innate understanding in the cast that the show seemed peopled by experienced troupers. The overall quality is illustrated in the extraordinary performances of two supporting players, Emelia Jennings as the Magic Carpet, and Kayla Morrison as the impish, parrotlike, Iago. Wonderful understanding of character supported a winning ability to stay in character, and their timing and athleticism, which had them performing movements on stage which would make Roger Federer envious, brought cheers. Musikmakers and Riverlea, it is hard hard work, but for this audience the rewards were amazing.
What: New Zealand Chamber Soloists Who: Katherine Austin, piano, Lara Hall, violin, and James Tennant, cello. When: 7.30pm, Friday, January 19
Where: Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts
Programme includes: Beethoven Piano Trio Op 1 No 3 in C minor and Dvorak Trio in E minor Op 9, ‘‘Dumky’’
After a month or more of the bliss of Christmas and the hedonistic shallows of the opening pages of the New Year, I needed this. I needed to correct my aural settings, retune them to be ignited by the sumptuous pleasures of Beethoven. The National Treasure we call New Zealand Chamber Soloists consists of three immortals who can not only offer intelligent critiques and analyses, they can also teach – and do – and are producing students who are winning international prizes and worldwide recognition. Incidentally, the value of this recognition to Brand Waikato University is enormous. A marketing programme to garner such results would pay the salaries of several associate vice-chancellors. Lesson over, because this is about teachers who practise what they teach, who engage audiences at the highest levels of their art, and who succeed every time they are on the stage. They, the trio, began the evening with Beethoven’s Piano Trio in C minor Op.1 No 3. What a choice. Such opening bars bliss is made of, as simple as they are evocative, the perfect honey trap to introduce the unpredictably dramatic experience which follows. At a Hamilton Civic Choir rehearsal in a past era, shock, horror, and a hissing of the matronage, as conductor Gyon Wells referred to Beethoven as Basher. Surprise, darlings. Here it is, in all its glory. It took the virtuosity of the Chamber Soloist Trio to display it, but this was Beethoven at braggadocio con magnifico best, passionate, thrusting, explosively memorable. It was made memorable, of course, by his interpolation of passages which might have been written expressly for the trio, a few bars of the most delicate solo piano from lightning-fingered Austin, elegantly bewitching threads of sound, almost visual in their perfection, from Hall’s violin, and then, with the fuse lit, as it so often is, by Tennant’s spellbinding cello, the trio exploded into pulse-raising splendour. Finally, the coda seems simply to run out of puff. It does not, of course. The music simply withdraws from our consciousness and finally there is a fulfilled silence … This was the very essence of musical pulchritude. And, yes. Music is erotic, and this was a perfect demonstration. This was also a concert which crossed other kinds of boundaries, Before the interval we heard the premiere performance of Andrew Buchanan Smart’s developing work, Piano Trio Op 8 Tongariro, one of a triptych of works based on images of the three iconic mountains, Ruapehu, Tongariro, and Ngauruhoe. The allegro, dynamic, evocative, aurally visual, has Tongariro in eruption, beginning with rising, foreboding, musical harbingers of violence, moving from moments of Hall’s pizzicato lava bubbles bursting with a latent heat to powerful explosions of sound from the trio at full volume. The onomatopoeic focus continues through the second movement where the land lies still, and in the third, the musical vision is of regrowth. The individual images are powerfully evocative of a landscape this writer knows well, but the construction was reminiscent more of the picaresque compilation of image and event of a Cervantes, than the developmental narrative of the Beethoven we had just heard. And so to the Dvorak, or not, as the font would have to be reduced to five in order for me to continue. How does one survive falling in love with a trio? This was a memorable concert.