Stroma celebrates its 20th anniversary

Stroma: “New Zealand’s best orchestral musicians in one room”

Composer Michael Norris, co-director of contemporary music ensemble Stroma, always chooses his words carefully. Describing the upcoming special concert to celebrate the ensemble’s 20th anniversary, a programme summing up what Stroma has been about for two decades, he reaches for adjectives. “Programming Stroma is more of a feeling than something I can articulate,” he says.  “It’s a sense of works being substantial, colourful and bold - and also lush and sweeping, stimulating the audience both emotionally and intellectually.”

Stroma’s anniversary concert in Wellington was planned for August, a year late because of pandemic disruptions in 2020. It has now been postponed till later in 2021. I’ve been to almost every concert they’ve presented since 2000 and have always been impressed by outstanding performances, carefully curated programmes and wonderfully surprising repertoire.

“The main thing I think about,” Norris says, “is that these are New Zealand’s best orchestral musicians in one room, able to elicit wonderful colours from their instruments, particularly when they’re blending with the musicians around them. I always look for works that utilize the chamber ensemble almost as a mini-orchestra rather than as a group of soloists.”

The virtuosic Terrestre for flute and ensemble by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, programmed in Friday’s concert with flutist Bridget Douglas as soloist, is, Norris says, an example. Stroma hasn’t played the “mini flute concerto” before but Norris says he’s lost count of how many works they have played by the “wonderfully prolific” Saariaho, a major figure in contemporary European composition.

Stroma’s concerts invariably include new works from New Zealand by both emerging and established composers, usually contextualized by both important 20th century music and other international contemporary music. Friday’s concert has all of these elements, including Luciano Berio’s wind quintet Ricorrenze (Recurrences) from 1987. With just five players, it has behind it what Norris describes as the Italian composer’s “bold and strident” musical personality.

There have been programming changes for Stroma over the twenty years. “When we first started,” says Norris, “we had to do mostly international works because there wasn’t a huge New Zealand repertoire for the ensemble. We’ve commissioned new work from New Zealanders every year. Now we’re almost overflowing with New Zealand music; we have composers coming to us with completed scores and for next year’s programme we’ve had to put some of them on the back burner.”

Composer Jenny McLeod

Stroma marks her 80th birthday with Cat Dreams

The very first Stroma programme in 2000 featured Jenny McLeod’s challenging chamber work, For Seven, a piece the composer has called “my high European effort”, written in her 20’s after studies with major European composers. This year McLeod turns 80 and Stroma is marking her birthday by performing again a work she wrote for them in 2009, Cat Dreams. It’s vintage McLeod, clever and humorous, each movement of the score prefaced by one of her poems about her brother’s two characterful cats followed by witty and inventive music to match. For the first movement:

Doris preens - yawns, arches.

Stanley sits, a lump unmoved.

Doris bats him round the ears.

Stupid cat.

The anniversary programme also features New Zealand premieres of two works commissioned by overseas ensembles. New Zealander Salina Fisher wrote Lumina in 2019 as one of seven composers selected for the Los Angeles Philharmonic National Composers’ Intensive. It was first performed in LA by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) at Walt Disney Concert Hall in the ‘Noon to Midnight’ Festival. Lumina takes inspiration, the composer says, “from the bioluminescent clusters of New Zealand glow-worms and the stasis and resonance of the caves they inhabit.”

Michael Norris, composer and Stroma’s co-director

“…trying to uplift the mana of under-represented groups”

The other NZ premiere is by Norris himself. Gyri - the title refers to both the intricately packed ridges on the surface of the brain and the word ‘gyre’, a whirling vortex or spiral - was commissioned six years ago by a Viennese contemporary group called Ensemble Reconsil who undertook a global project called "Exploring the World". “Australasia was one of the areas they chose,” says Norris, “and Dylan Lardelli, Sam Holloway and I represented New Zealand.” Reconsil performed all the commissioned works in Europe alongside Austrian compositions and produced a massive 14-CD set. “It’s a nice recording,” says Norris, who is looking forward to hearing Gyri live for the first time this week. Describing the piece, he mentions underlying intellectual harmonic processes but stresses that the audience needn’t be aware of these. “They’re happening underneath while the texture moves from very simple to quite complex with an organic sense of growth and decay.”

Norris and his co-director, conductor Hamish McKeich, have always supported music by women composers but in recent years they’ve made a policy of 50% representation of women’s music in Stroma’s programmes. A big influence was the global Keychange Project which invites performing organisations, festivals and schools of music to commit to gender equity in programming by signing a pledge.

Norris has spent a lot of time on research, making lists and catalogues of music composed by women, and at first he found more barriers than expected. “Because historically these women composers, particularly some of the greats of the mid-20th century, haven’t been given their due, they haven’t been recorded well or their scores made available for perusal on line. For a programmer those two things are essential.” The situation has improved in recent years. “I’m getting to know the composers’ voices, and particularly which composers would work well with Stroma’s forces.”

Norris’s commitment to representation is extending to “composers of colour and the music of   not only women but non-binary and gender queer composers.” For him it’s about “the diversity of the population, trying to uplift the mana of underrepresented groups.” Although New Zealand’s borders are closed, he’s also very aware of the work of international colleagues and is excited about discovering new voices. “Like Cuban composer Tania León -  I don’t know why she’s not better known. There’s a really massive work of hers that the London Sinfonietta did that I have an ambition to perform – it’s slightly too big for Stroma but a really stonking piece.”  

In 2017 Stroma presented a concert called Tātai Whetū featuring Ariana Tikao and Alistair Fraser, performers on Māori traditional instruments. The title, which referred to a composition on that programme by Philip Brownlee and Tikao, translates as “a cluster of stars” and the concert was subtitled “New directions in indigenous musical forms — Stroma meets New Zealand's masters of taonga pūoro.” It was something of a turning point for Stroma which has featured composers using taonga pūoro in their programmes each year since.

Taonga pūoro musicians Ariana Tikao and Alistair Fraser (right) rehearse with Stroma

This week, Te Aitanga Pepeke (“the world of insects”)  by composers Simon Eastwood and Alistair Fraser will represent this strand of Stroma’s work in the anniversary concert. “It also means”, says Norris, “thinking about things differently. Ariana and I are talking about a collaborative project in the future which will be done in a workshop way rather than my going away and writing a piece.”  This and the commitment to representing a range of composers are catalysts for considering what contemporary composition is, Norris suggests, “and creating music to address these issues, making Stroma’s work more interesting and surprising.”  

Stroma: 20th Anniversary Concert, featuring music by Jenny McLeod, Salina Fisher, Kaija Saariaho, Simon Eastwood and Alistair Fraser, Luciano Berio and Michael Norris. With Alistair Fraser (taonga pūoro) and Bridget Douglas (flute). COVID restrictions have meant the concert has been postponed from its planned August date until 23 November, 2021.