Mezzo-soprano Bianca Andrew shone during Chamber New Zealand's most recent performance.
Mezzo-soprano Bianca Andrew shone during Chamber New Zealand's most recent performance.
Chamber Music New Zealand's latest offering — a concert-goer's guide to the perplexities of today's music — was a brave venture.
The framing was perfect: four songs from Schoenberg's 1912 Pierrot Lunaire, ravishingly delivered by mezzo Bianca Andrew. Behind her, Hamish McKeich coaxed the glint of tungsten filigree from thecontemporary ensemble Stroma.
In between, distinguished American critic and MacArthur Fellow, Alex Ross narrated our whirlwind tour, punctuated by extracts that carried us through to the twitchy postminimalism of 2000 vintage David Lang.
The clarity and incisiveness of Ross' 2007 best-seller The Rest is Noise would have been welcome in a mostly unengaging read through a sometimes dense text. Too many references were obscure for an uninitiated audience, compacted by audibility problems thanks to an inadequate sound system.
Among the mostly spot-on performances, only a short Ligeti duet in his early folkish style underwhelmed. However, the wild ride of Messiaen's Dance of Fury from his Quartet for the End of Time sorely needed the dramatic context of its two gentler flanking movements.
Composers Gillian Whitehead and Jenny McLeod brought a Kiwi connection to the evening. Whitehead's atmospheric Manutaki (grievously mispronounced by Ross) was radiantly complete; two gleaming extracts from McLeod's prismatic For Seven occasioned a comparison with American painter Jackson Pollock. How much more apt was the composer's own image for the work, likening it to scurrying life on a forest floor?
I suspect that, for many, having Patrick Barry and Ken Ichinose preview some of their exotic sounds made Xenakis' visceral Charisma live up to its name.
If there was a star of the evening, it would have to have been Bianca Andrew, stunningly gowned, moving with ease from Berio's avant-garde O King to one of Stravinsky's spiky Shakespeare settings. And had lyrics been provided, more would have appreciated her sly, wicked smile as she sang her penultimate Schoenberg number, a full-on expressionist ode to decapitation.
Lowdown: What: Alex Ross with Stroma Where: Auckland Town Hall Reviewer: William Dart
