Garden of earthly delights

Retiring Auckland School of Music teacher John Elmsly believes it is vital that composers get out into the wider community. Photo / Studio Guidon

Retiring after 32 years of teaching composition at the University of Auckland's School of Music, John Elmsly admits, "It's great to have time to reflect a bit."

The rewards have been many but there is also a disturbing side to life in academia. He is deeply concerned about a tertiary culture and mindset that now classify artistic endeavours as research outcomes; he is "increasingly worried when academic friends themselves are starting to use that language".

Elmsly weighs his words carefully and I can hear parallels with the composer's lean and immaculately crafted music. Looking over some of the more sparsely notated pages of his new Ritual Triptych that NZTrio premieres tomorrow, he points out how he likes everything to be "essential, with nothing gratuitous. When I find something that says what I want to say in just one or two layers, then I don't feel the need to go beyond that".

Auckland music-lovers owe this man a considerable debt, after three decades of university-based public concerts, in which Elmsly programmed a wealth of New Zealand music. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the next Karlheinz Company concert without his meticulously assured conducting.

"It's important music is heard in a real performance," he says. "A computer might chatter away quite easily with a nice version, but it's not a real person responding."

Elmsly has had major scores such as his Cello Symphony and Pacific Hockets recorded by Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and he has strong feelings about the need for music to reach out to wider audiences.

In June, he conducted the St Matthew's Chamber Orchestra in a programme of Mozart, Bach and Haydn, as well as the first airing of Waitemata, a short score by the young Aucklander Nelson Lam. The concert went well, drawing the SMCO's usual loyal audience, "even if we had the worst clash you could ever imagine in the concert calendar - the NZ Symphony Orchestra playing Beethoven's Choral Symphony with Simon O'Neill as tenor soloist", he laughs.

"It's important for composers to get out into the wider community," he stresses. "This is why I was so pleased to work with NZTrio on the new piece. These musicians are not your conventional chamber music group. Their concerts pull in very knowledgeable people as well as very enthusiastic people with not so much knowledge, which is just as important."

On Sunday, Elmsly's Ritual Triptych sits alongside Beethoven, Mendelssohn and the contemporary Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino. Sciarrino's shortish Piano Trio, written in 1987, is an extremely colouristic work and the two contemporary pieces fit well alongside the evening's more traditional fare.

"The hardest thing for a composer is to strike a personal balance between originality and approachability. They're both important. I don't feel I'm just writing for aficionados or contemporary music fanatics. If the music offers no point of contact for somebody who's keen to listen, then there's a problem."

Elmsly's programme note for Ritual Triptych mentions three-panel paintings by English artist Francis Bacon as well as the celebrated Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.

The music comes closest to Bosch's vision in its central movement, which Elmsly describes as "pretty wild but not in an unpleasant sense. It's certainly not as sinister as some of the delights in Bosch's garden".

The new score is relatively sparing when it comes to the "special effects" you will hear in Sciarrino. Elmsly stipulates that "what matters in the finish is the sound". Extended techniques should "always sound good," he adds. "If they just explore without a satisfactory artistic result, I'm not interested."

Performance

What: NZTrio
Where and when: Q Theatre Loft, 305 Queen St, tomorrow at 5pm