NZTrio: folksongs, dances and dreams
NZTrio Homeland Three tour: energy and intensity
Image credit: Chris Watson/SOUNZ
The final NZTrio Wellington concert for 2023 began quietly with gorgeous music played with great sensitivity. Three Nocturnes by Ernest Bloch, a composer perhaps best-known for music drawn from his Jewish heritage, reveal a side of the Swiss-born American heard less often. The atmospheric writing in the first two Nocturnes is almost French, influenced perhaps by Bloch’ s years studying and working in Belgium, Germany and France. Violin and cello are often muted, and the light and delicate Andante is followed by a deliciously gentle lullaby with folksong elements. The passion arrives suddenly in the stormy third and final Nocturne, marked Tempestoso, edgy and offbeat, and played with splendid energy.
The concert was the third in the Trio’s ‘Homeland’ series, the title referring to the nationalist preoccupations of some of the composers. The whole programme was typical of the approach that has endeared the Trio to audiences over its 21-year life. We anticipate from their concerts well-chosen music, intelligently curated, and fascinating works less-often played.
Like most of the audience I’d never heard the brilliant 2nd Piano Trio by Vítězslav Novák, a pupil of Dvořák. His piece is subtitled Quasi una ballata (“Almost a ballad”). Written in 1902 by a composer in his early 30’s, it’s a modernist work, but Novák was also strongly influenced by his famous teacher and draws on folk tunes in a dark and often anguished composition. The Trio’s superb performance communicated, with great variety of tone and dynamics, the composer’s pain, irony and emotional range.
The mood lightened for Frank Martin’s Trio sur des mélodies populaires irlandaises (Trio on popular Irish melodies). Like Bloch, Martin was Swiss, but from a Huguenot French-speaking Christian family in Geneva. His Trio is positively whacky at times, using Irish melodies woven together in a composition largely organised by rhythm and cross-rhythm. NZTrio approached it with a light touch and stunning rhythmic virtuosity, evoking the folk-fiddle origins of the Irish material. It may have seemed effortless but the musicians were working hard, while the witty composer was having fun, almost inviting us to rise to our feet and dance along. It made an exuberant ending to the first half of the programme.
No NZTrio tour would be complete with the premiere of a commissioned work from a New Zealand composer. As I’ve noted before, over their two-decades-plus history, they’ve premiered over 75 new works, an outstanding contribution to the canon. For the Homeland Three tour they’ve featured a new trio by Ross Harris, who was in the audience and took the stage to introduce his composition Prendre ses rêves pour des réalités (Let your dreams be your reality).
As his title suggests, Harris’s work has the qualities of a dream, with charming little musical ideas and occasional dance-like fragments floating in and out, creating what the composer described as a “stream-of-consciousness”. Moods shift, sometimes fierce, sometimes gently mocking, pizzicato effects changing quickly to sobbing legato, the piano sometimes drifting off to a dreamy place of its own. When the pace picks up, there’s briefly a nightmare-like sense of running and chasing, before the players come together, slowing the tempo with elegiac, falling lines as the music drifts to its conclusion.
NZTrio play Ross Harris’s Prendre ses rêves pour des réalités
Ashley Brown (cello), Somi Kim (piano), Amalia Hall (violin)
“…the piano sometimes drifts off to a dreamy place of its own.”
Photo credit: Chris Watson/SOUNZ
The language is atonal, occasionally reminiscent for me of the fantasy world of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. The Trio’s fine performance had all the character and contrast needed for this fascinating and kaleidoscopic new work.
Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Trio no 4 in E minor, Opus 90, known as "Dumky", was a substantial and satisfying conclusion to the programme. NZTrio have played a number of Dvořák’s Trios and made the point that this one, the last of four, is a little different from the others.
A ‘Dumka’ is a Ukrainian lament, ‘Dumky’ the plural, and in this Trio the composer has created six Dumka episodes or movements, within which he explores his rich folk-influenced thematic material. Slow, sometimes sorrowful melodic episodes are contrasted with rapid folk dances. The Trio always found the joyous quality in the music, slow sections wonderfully thoughtful and expressive, virtuosity and rapport evident in a rhythmically subtle approach to the fast Slavonic dances. This music requires a big emotional range and they used the acoustics of the Public Trust Hall well, playing against the windows on the side wall, projecting a full warm sound and thrilling the good-sized audience with their energy and intensity. Bravi!
NZTrio at the Public Trust Hall
…thrilling the good-sized Wellington audience.
NZ Trio Homeland Three, Dumky, Public Trust Hall, Wellington 23 November 2023