KEY POINTS:
With Wellington's biennial culture bash opening in two weeks, conductor Karen Grylls, Tower Voices New Zealand and the New Zealand String Quartet must be fully engaged in mastering Jenny McLeod's The Poet, which receives its premiere on the first Sunday of the festival.
"They are going to find
it pretty hard," McLeod admits with a hearty laugh, commenting how she had added a few vocal exercises at the end of the score.
McLeod is one of our most singular voices, with an oeuvre that, over 45 years, has made a virtue out of unpredictability. Her intellectually demanding works of the mid-1960s found their release in the all-embracing multicultural theatre work of Earth and Sky in 1968.
The 80s saw two rock sonatas for piano and a joyous score for Yvonne Mackay's The Silent One; more recently there have been the Messiaen-like Tone-Clock Pieces for piano and the huge 1991 choral work He Iwi Kotahi Tatou.
Speaking of the 11 Janet Frame settings that make up The Poet, the composer says: "I simply want it to be a piece that lasts, that fits the circumstances and still be listenable to in 20 or 30 years' time. I am Scottish and don't like doing a lot of effort for one occasion."
Frame was initially on McLeod's mind when she and tenor Keith Lewis were working towards a song-cycle. "We chose some darker Frame poems and, when I got stuck on this bleak, black stuff, I had to think about George Bush to make myself angry enough to respond to Frame's words."
The Poet does not have an iota of bleakness; the mood is predominantly rollicking, with wit and satire aplenty.
"She is writing about the poet," McLeod says. "The way the artist is being valued here warms the heart of another artist. This bitter-sweet celebration is a most appropriate theme for a festival occasion."
A glance at the score and her endlessly inventive music seems to leap off the page.
She has great fun with Frame's often surreal images - the "dry people" frightened of getting wet feet when the poet's best-kept words flow out on to the street or the touching portrait of a poet climbing up a ladder with only one rung.
McLeod is glad she has waited so long to approach Frame's poems "with their burning wealth of possible meanings. She is marvellous. I wouldn't have had the technique or mind to cope with it until now."
Three days later, in the smaller Ilott Concert Chamber, there will be another McLeod first performance when British pianist Stephen De Pledge presents his specially commissioned set of 12 Landscape Preludes, a suite of works written by renowned New Zealand composers.
In the programme note for her contribution, McLeod mentions "a less than reassuring human element" in her evocation; she explains to me how it grew out of "eight months fighting Transit New Zealand's plans to build a four-lane highway that would have taken away our houses. It changed my whole psyche."
It is four years since De Pledge gave us the first three Preludes, by Gillian Whitehead, Eve de Castro-Robinson and Victoria Kelly.
He says that, in commissioning his composers: "I was attracted by the huge diversity of today's music. At no other time in history would you get 12 such incredibly different styles.
"What a great time to be around. There are no rules, you can do whatever you like and it's all valid."
The diplomatic De Pledge won't name a favourite but admits he loves six or seven and likes all the rest. However, he is clearly taken by Dylan Lardelli's Tuwhare-inspired Reign ("so amazingly pianistic") and is obviously fascinated by Auckland composer Samuel Holloway who explores architectural concepts of "terrain vague", a term used by architects to describe "unresolved, marginalised spaces in the urban landscape".
When I spoke with De Pledge, he had still not finalised the order of his 12 pieces. "You could change around half a dozen and you've got a completely different overall programme. It could be so different, whether you juxtapose them harshly or make it a smooth journey."
While Wellington will enjoy another first taste here, one can only trust this programme will be able to journey smoothly and swiftly to other centres so more of us can enjoy De Pledge's initiative.
PERFORMANCE
What: The Poet: A Song Cycle, Janet Frame poems set to music, with Tower Voices New Zealand.
Where and when: Wellington Town Hall, Feb 24, 5pm.
What: Landscapes, with Stephen De Pledge.
Where and when: Ilott Theatre, Wellington Town Hall, Feb 27, 7pm.
