NZTrio: passionate music from “uncommon” composers

NZTRIO

Photo credit: Chris Watson/SOUNZ

The NZTrio’s exhilarating “Untamed Hope” touring programme begins with an early work from the famously feisty British composer Ethel Smyth. Smyth, who later became a dame, was well-known for her suffragist activities, including composing the movement’s anthem The March of the Women and being imprisoned for throwing a rock through the windows of the Houses of Parliament in 1912.

Her well-documented activism means we often think of her as an early 20th century composer, but she was just 21 when she composed this Trio in D minor in 1880, the same year Mahler completed Das Klagende Lied and Tchaikovsky composed his 1812 Overture. Smyth’s Trio is a very much a 19th century work, and NZTrio revelled in her flowing intertwined lines of melody, her restless tempo changes and the soaring, lush lyricism of the final movement. Yes, the feisty Ethel makes an appearance in the urgent Presto of the Scherzo, and she’s there, too, in the passionate power of the final Allegro Vivace, but her substantial Trio, composed in the heady environment of Leipzig, is essentially a work of late Romanticism.

It is followed by an appealing new work from another 21-year-old, New Zealander Eva Bedggood. Her title Ukiyo 浮世 - The Floating World refers to a Japanese proverb meaning “living in the moment, detached from the bothers of life”. The work explores the timbral possibilities of the three instruments to conjure a calm atmosphere, oscillating piano, singing strings, using a deliberately simple harmonic language to create lovely effects. Bedggood is currently studying in Australia, and this work suggests her career as a composer will be one to watch.

US composer Joan Tower

“…an ‘uncommon woman’ is one who takes risks, is adventurous.”

After the interval, the NZTrio introduces the audience to American composer Joan Tower, New York-based, composing and teaching at Bard College, where she has worked for 52 years. The much awarded 85-year-old Tower became something of a feminist icon in the 1980’s after the Houston Symphony asked her to compose a fanfare and she wrote her first Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman. In an interview she explained: “I started thinking about Copland and the only fanfare I knew, his Fanfare for the Common Man, and the title really bothered me. For the ‘common man’? I had to turn that one around. An ‘uncommon woman’ means a woman who takes risks, who is adventurous. That was the first one...”. She subsequently wrote five more Fanfares, all dedicated to “uncommon women”, sometimes combined into a complete six-part work.

The Trio has chosen her much more recent Trio Cavany (2007), named for the States, (California, Virginia and New York) in which the three commissioning parties are based. Her own programme note for the work gives nothing away. “It is in one movement and features all three instruments in solo and in combination.”

Trio Cavany is a cracker of a piece by a fascinating composer who spent her childhood in Bolivia, and a marvellous vehicle for the NZTrio’s skills. Without extra-musical theme or story, the drama is in the instrumental conversation, with shifts in texture, tension, timbre and tempo. It’s wonderfully expressive, with great variety of gesture and skilful use of the three instruments and the shifting relationships between them. This is music about music, from rapid piano against sustained strings to agitated double-stopping cello with violin answering in kind. As pitches rise, with insistent repetition, it becomes more fiercely dramatic with all musicians energetically involved, uniting rhythmically before a slight slowing of momentum and then a big, fast, climactic ending.

The NZTrio’s “uncommon” programme ends with the earliest work, another Piano Trio in D minor, this one composed by Fanny Mendelssohn in 1847, just a month before her death aged 41. It’s a big work with an expansive, almost symphonic conception. The first movement is lengthy, and challenging for all players, and in this performance the Trio matches the marvellous expressivity of the composer. Somi Kim’s brilliant playing of the demanding, rippling piano part reminds us that Fanny was as fine a pianist as she was a composer, and by all accounts as talented as her brother Felix.

The Trio show their great rapport as an ensemble and their combined fine musical judgment in the poignant 2nd movement, marked Andante espressivo. It is followed by a short Lied, all delicious melody and flowing accompaniment, before the passionate romanticism of the final Allegro moderato. This 4th movement begins with piano alone in an almost improvisatory passage, beautifully played by Kim, before the strings join in with rich-toned conversation, Amalia Hall’s lyrical violin asking questions and cellist Ashley Brown showing his fine natural musicianship in eloquent reply. The composer’s splendid motivic and melodic development builds the tension, all three musicians marvellously committed to the full sweep of the music as it heads to its great, firm final cadence.

NZTrio

“…great programming flair.”

NZTrio has great programming flair and frequently introduces audiences to less well-known repertoire. For this programme, their choices have created a concert entirely by women composers, but they haven’t made a feature of this in marketing or musical introductions. Nonetheless, “Untamed Hope”, as the touring programme is called, made a telling point that no-one in the delighted audience could miss — women composers have not been served as well throughout history with performances and attention as their male colleagues, and the reasons are not about the quality nor the impact of their music.

One of the most stimulating books I read last year was Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World by music historian Leah Broad, an inspiring group biography, written, as one writer commented, “with terrific gusto”. It’s about Ethel Smyth and her British composer colleagues Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen. In her Epilogue, Broad commented that “the tide may be changing” for the women of Quartet, but, though more women composers have their work performed, recorded and broadcast than in the past, the statistics are still woeful. How many concerts do we attend where all composers are women? How many where all composers are men? — or, where the one work composed by a woman is the shortest on the programme?

Hats off to NZTrio for this exciting concert and for their on-going commitment to and enthusiasm for such diversity of programming. Let’s hope they are leading the way to more celebrations of the music of brilliant forgotten voices from history, alongside those of the many women composers working today.

NZTrio: ‘Untamed Hope’ Amalia Hall (violin) Ashley Brown (cello), Somi Kim (piano) Music by Ethel Smyth, Eva Bedggood, Joan Tower and Fanny Mendelssohn. Wellington November 14, 2024. Upcoming concerts in Dunedin (22 November), Arrowtown (23 November) and Gisborne (15 December).  More information here.