New work is a breath of fresh air

Zephyr, with Diedre Irons, will perform Ritchie's new wind quartet. Photo / Supplied

Opus numbers may seem rather old-fashioned these days, but Aucklanders have the opportunity to hear Anthony Ritchie's Opus 142 on Tuesday when the Wellington group Zephyr plays his new Wind Quintet.

Shostakovich's Opus 142 was written when the Russian was 66; the prolific Ritchie has a year or so to go before he confronts his half-century.

In 1926, Shostakovich's First Symphony had its origins as a student work of the composer; Ritchie's first big break came in 1980 when he too was studying and Radio New Zealand commissioned a Concertino for Piano for the Schola Musica orchestra. "I'm still quite fond of parts of that work," Ritchie muses. "Sometimes it sounds a bit close to Shostakovich and Stravinsky but I was trying to write with a little more control. I was a fairly wild and undisciplined composer early on."

For some decades now, Ritchie has been one of our busiest composers. His orchestral piece, The Hanging Bulb, based on a Philip Clairmont painting, is widely studied in schools; two symphonies have been recorded by the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra and his 2004 opera The God Boy, based on the Ian Cross novel, received not one, but two productions.

Last month, his Third Piano Concerto was premiered with pride by Uwe Grodd's Manukau Symphony Orchestra, with the eloquent Emma Sayers on the keyboard. "I was blown away," is Ritchie's first spontaneous reaction, as was the audience who burst into applause after the Concerto's first movement. "Emma has such a sense of poetry in her playing and Uwe is so good at shaping the music."

The Concerto is immaculately tailored to the resources of the musicians. "I have a reasonable amount of experience as to what can be done and what should be avoided. Perhaps I have erred on the side of being too easy on the players but, over the last five years or so, I've taken a leaf out of John Psathas' book and just stretched the musicians regardless."

Ritchie had no need to pull his musical punches with Zephyr who commissioned the new Quintet - all five players are NZSO principals.

Yet writing for woodwind instruments has its own issues. "They're all such individual voices," Ritchie says. "You can't depend on harmonic padding as you can with strings, or with a piano; the challenge is to make them blend."

With the Quintet he has been able to make "a conscious effort to write the sounds that I like".

The South Island landscape crops up in the composer's programme note for the work although he cautions against reading this too literally.

"It's more about a sense of freedom and getting away from the troubles of the world," Ritchie explains. Images of wind, a recurrent feature of the piece, "are secondary to the feeling of openness and reflection". More significant for Ritchie is a setting of James K. Baxter's By the Dry Cardrona which he has woven into the work, a tune that he came across on an old cassette by folksinger Martin Curtis.

"By putting a folk tune into a piece, I'm trying to keep this music in touch with ordinary people. It might sound like a cliché, but it's very important that classical music isn't stuck in some ivory tower and written for a small bunch of people who can appreciate it. It needs to be more than that."

PERFORMANCE

What: Zephyr, with Diedre Irons
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Tuesday at 8pm