Music is the link for the soul

By WILLIAM DART

The post-mortems were in the paper by Saturday morning, including talk of a $6 million loss in ticket sales, but for anyone on the contemporary music trail, the last few days of Wellington's International Festival proved irresistible.

The premise of Quartet, a new one-act opera by Stuart Hoar and Anthony Ritchie, was simple: a string quartet, trapped in mid-tour hell on the West Coast, is kept going by the lure of a gig at - you've guessed it - the Wellington Festival.

A snatch of Brahms from the Nevine Quartet followed by a possum dropping on stage set the tone, which tended towards strained facetiousness. And, in case jokes didn't register, comicbook surtitles nudged.

A few gasps accompanied the first oral sex scene in New Zealand opera, although Stephen Sondheim would have been more outraged by some of Hoar's laboured rhymes. It was the cheap jibes ("Hokitika, darling, the Hamilton of the West Coast!") that got me, along with callow chatter about youth suicide.

Ritchie's score bubbled along in a sea of quotes and the quartet of singers (Kate Lineham, Linden Loader, Brendon Mercer and Jason Barry-Smith) delivered their lines with remarkable ease and naturalness, although a reasonable stretch of arioso wouldn't have gone amiss.

The festival's portraits of New Zealand composers became one of its hottest tickets, and on Saturday afternoon it was Jack Body's turn. Body wrote his Love Sonnets of Michelangelo in 1982 for two singers and dancer Michael Parmenter. Twenty-two years on, this austerely passionate work was re-presented from a new angle.

Linden Loader and Karen Heathcote sang, with the lower-voiced Loader best catching the burnished sensuality of the work. An older, naked Parmenter appeared on screen above, lovingly filmed by the composer, muscle by muscle, vein by vein, most disturbingly when the dancer's eye seemed to penetrate one's soul.

The New Zealand String Quartet reminded us just how powerful last year's Saetas had been, and pianist Dan Poynton conveyed the physical and spiritual rigours of 14 Stations. Poynton relived the agonies of so many performing artists, ending, back to piano, with his arms twisted around in desperate pursuit of the music still to be sounded.

The brevity of Body's one new work, Paradise Regained, was a disappointment when there had been talk of more substantial offerings. No quarrel though with the springboard dialogue that sparkled between Emma Sayer's piano and I Wayan Gde Tudane's gangsa, and none with the work's humanist heart (it's a tribute to the resilience of Bali).

Four hours later, it was back to the Orient with Tan Dun conducting the NZSO in the Michael Fowler Centre.

It was the many and various sounds of water that held together the Chinese composer's Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra, and David Cossin was ingenious in his virtuosity, feverishly so when beating out rhythms on water bowls. The subtly impressionistic orchestral contribution registered most vividly, alas, during the score's more overtly Hollywood moments.

After interval, The Map, a concerto for cello, video and orchestra, premiered by Yo Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony a little over a year ago, gave us what we had been waiting for. It's a substantial work, blending Hunan folk music with the Western orchestral palette as if the two had sprung from the same mould.

Tan Dun's own video field recordings were riveting in themselves - from the concentration of a leaf-blower to sparring cymbal players - but in tandem with the orchestra and Matthew Barley's eloquent solo cello, they offered a journey that could have gone on for more than the hour we were allotted.

This composer has commented that music is the link for the soul to discover the world. In these times when multiculturalism is too easy a card to play, The Map showed that reconciliation without compromise is possible.