KEY POINTS:
Over the last 20 or more years, I have heard Peter Scholes' music here, there and everywhere, from the composer bopping away on his own clarinet with guitarist Ivan Zagni, to his scores for films like Desperate Remedies, Memory and Desire and The Tattooist as well as concert
hall fare.
On Sunday, the Auckland Chamber Orchestra premieres Scholes' Requiem Concerto, a full-scale work involving violin soloist (Dmitri Atanassov) and vocal soloists (including Patricia Wright and Carmel Carroll).
The piece grew from a score for a movie that never made it. When Niki Caro's Tosca's Requiem fell over in the late 90s, Scholes had an extended concert piece that would have been part of the film's narrative.
After the death of his son Eliot in 2002 and his wife, violinist Katherine Harris, two years later, there was a new focus for this Requiem Concerto.
"Grief takes a long time to work through," Scholes explains. "I found that the traditional words of the Requiem weren't where I was at spiritually."
Scholes' own text opens with gentle reiterations of, "Think of them"; we hear of enduring memories and dreams. We contemplate the way we continue the finished journeys of others through the joy of hope.
"Basically, don't forget," is how the composer sums up the message.
"Live, work and play with clarity," Scholes' words stipulate at one point. "Clarity is not necessarily economy," he says. "I certainly don't believe in musical economy in the sense of one theme being developed and everything possible being extracted from it.
"I believe in ideas coming in, interacting and provoking changes. One of my favourite pieces is Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony, and that's not about economy."
We laugh, recalling the NZSO's spectacular performance of Messiaen's gargantuan work four years ago. In fact, there is humour in Scholes' work.
"During the early stages of grief, people would come around and, after an intense exchange of greetings and sadness, you'd relax and, in half an hour, you'd be telling stories and laughing about things. It's not just about gloom and despair."
The name of Messiaen comes up again, as Scholes' most-admired composer. "Messiaen is just wonderful. I love it all and the spirituality that comes through this music, a spirituality created in purely musical terms."
Yet, Scholes is also an intensely practical composer and an experienced conductor. The choice of a solo violin in the Requiem Concerto was because "the violin can sing", clarinettist Scholes reveals. "It's closer to the human voice than the woodwind instruments. It can make so many colours on one note, and has so many different ways of making a sound."
He speaks of the transparency of using just three women's voices and a boy soprano and the way in which, as a composer, moods seem to come upon him rather than vice-versa. "I begin with an idea and that opens up a world. The process starts you working and then you can zoom out to attend to the big structure and zoom back in and follow that original track."
The film language is not accidental, and Requiem Concerto shares some of the poignancy of Scholes' music for Niki Caro's Memory and Desire, a film which was also a meditation on loss and mourning. But all is not mournful in the Auckland Chamber Orchestra's Sunday programme. Vivaldi's Spring, Respighi's Botticelli Triptych and Copland's Appalachian Spring in the original version for 13 instruments remind us that a new season must surely be near.
