Landscapes: New Zealand Orchestral Music

Landscapes New Zealand Orchestral Music

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra Kenneth Young

Michael Illingworth (1932-1988), Balloons over a Landscape, 1971, oil on canvas 310 x 410 mm.

Private Collection, Auckland. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Michael Illingworth.

Painted while Michael Illingworth was an organic farmer in the Coromandel, this image celebrates both the rural environment and the life of the imagination. Illingworth's balloons are, at once, cellular structures, seed-pods and thought-balloons. He paints the fertility of both the land and of the human spirit. Born in England, Illingworth immigrated to New Zealand as a young man and became one of this country's greatest painters of contemporary mythology.

Landscapes

New Zealand Orchestral Music

1 Drysdale Overture Douglas Lilburn 2 Dancing on a Volcano Lyell Creswell 3 Stealing Tutunui Maria Grenfell 4 Elysian Fields David Hamilton 5 Hinterland Martin Lodge 6 …of memory… Ross Harris 7 Yet Another Poem of Spring Anthony Ritchie

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra Kenneth Young

© 2001 HRL Morrison Music Trust P 2001 HRL Morrison Music Trust MMT2037

Leo Bensemann (1912-1986), Takaka Stonehenge, 1983, oil on canvasboard 635 x 777 mm. BNZ Art Collection. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Leo Bensemann.

A notable typographer, editor and graphic artist, Leo Bensemann also painted some of his most poignant yet enigmatic images of the New Zealand landscape. Takaka Stonehenge hints at the mystery and hidden narratives contained in natural forms. The painting’s title highlights the similarity between the rock formations Bensemann observed in the Nelson region and the famous English circle of stones. Alongside the work of his close friend Rita Angas, Leo Bensemann’s surrealistic vision of this land is increasingly being recognised as a central strand in the country’s art history.

Landscapes

New Zealand Orchestral Music

The physical geography of New Zealand is marked by a variety of forms within extreme compactness. Traversing the length of the country, one encounters a landscape of rugged mountains and open plains, native forest and barren semi-desert, farmland and city – often in striking juxtaposition to each other – with the coastline and sea never very far off. From the relatively recent times of earliest settlement, the proximity to such a diversity of terrain has given a constant sense of perspective to the country’s inhabitants, who can measure their own efforts of settlement against the forces which have formed a landscape over the course of millennia. In the absence of a history of civilisation, New Zealanders have formed a deep attachment to the land on which they live.

This recording brings together a collection of works marked by a diversity of expression and mood, but united in that they all reflect to a greater or lesser degree the artists’ consciousness of the New Zealand landscape. Together, the works make up a ‘snapshot’ of New Zealand composition at the end of the twentieth century.

The New Zealand paintings reproduced throughout this booklet are from the Bank of New Zealand Art Collection. The collection, which comprises over 400 artworks, was assembled between 1982 and 1987. Working alongside senior staff members, art advisor Peter McLeavey set out to achieve ‘a collection based on contemporary art, encouraging young and emerging artists as well as representing those figures who essentially invented New Zealand: the canonical artists such as McCahon, Woollaston, Walters, Mrkusich.’ The HRL Morrison Music Trust greatly appreciates the generosity of the BNZ in allowing access to its wonderful collection.

Drysdale Overture

(1937)

Douglas Lilburn

When I arrived at the Royal College of Music in London, in September 1937, and was accepted as a student by Vaughan Williams, he put me through routine disciplines of writing fugues and part-songs, and then one day said: ‘Isn’t it time you composed something?’ I accepted the challenge and produced my Drysdale Overture, with its nostalgic memories in a musical language which rather disconcerted him. Still more did it upset Sir George Dyson, who brilliantly realised my rough orchestral score on the piano and then wrily said: ‘Don’t bring me another manuscript like that.’ He did, however, give it a reading rehearsal with the RCM first orchestra, and I took steps to improve my musical handwriting.

In those far-off heady days, Hans Keller’s ‘functional analysis’ had hardly impacted on the RCM – we students ignorantly and derisively called it ‘sweet F.A.’ – and so I may hardly provide an ‘analytical synopsis’. With my meagre knowledge of classical forms, I thought that proper overtures should have a solemn introduction, with motifs recalled later in various

structural guises, and that they should have a contrasting ‘second subject’ – hence my nostalgic oboe tune, with fitting Scottish inflections. Curiously, what might have been a routine ‘development’ turned into a sunlit rondo, nostalgic of childhood happiness.

I’m left with that lovely Mark Twain image of Jim and Huckleberry drifting on their barge down that great river, looking up at the stars and wondering ‘whether they was made, or only just happened’.

Douglas Lilburn

Douglas Lilburn (1915-2001) occupies a pre-eminent position in New Zealand music, with a legacy extending well beyond his compositional output. As a composer, a teacher, and later as a warm, generous and encouraging background presence, he presided in innumerable ways over the artistic growth of this country. His music, from the early works redolent of the influence of Sibelius and Vaughan Williams, to the electroacoustic pieces of his later years, makes up a corpus of works that has been instrumental in establishing a genuinely vernacular voice in New Zealand classical music.

The youngest of seven children, Douglas Lilburn spent his early years on Drysdale, the family sheep station in the central North Island.

After winning a prize offered by Percy Grainger for a new New Zealand orchestral piece, he enrolled in 1937 at the Royal College of Music in London, where his teachers included R.O. Morris and Vaughan Williams. On his return to New Zealand he taught composition at the Cambridge Summer Music Schools, and in 1947 joined the staff of the newly-established music

faculty at Victoria University of Wellington. Here, until his retirement in 1981, he established a centre for composition, bringing to his own music and to his students the fruits of his investigations into international trends in contemporary composition. He established Wai-te-ata Press Music Editions in 1967, and in 1984 founded the Lilburn Trust, which continues to support and promote New Zealand Music.

Bill Hammond (b.1947), The Lay of the Land, 1985, acrylic on wooden panels 1480 x 1900 mm. Reproduced by permission of the artist BNZ Art Collection By the 1980s landscape painting was widely considered no longer a viable subject for the serious artist.

Enter Bill Hammond, whose surreal reconfigurations of the New Zealand landscape revived the genre’s imaginative perspective, arranging the Southern Alps into playful symmetries. The strangely ambivalent inhabitants of Hammond’s imagination find themselves clinging to the resolutely slippery surface of his artworks. We share both their anxiety and a sense of liberation from all the old rules and expectations.

Dancing on a Volcano

(1996)

Lyell Cresswell

‘Nous dansons sur un volcano’ – we are dancing on a volcano – said the Comte de Salvandy just before the revolution of 1830 in Paris.

Dancing on a Volcano has three main sections. Loud repeated chords, which act as musical signposts throughout the work, introduce the first quiet section – an unfolding of the melodic material on which the whole piece is built. The second scherzo-like section is light and fast, leading to the third section which brings together elements of a volcanic dance and more vigorous treatment of the melodic material.

Like many New Zealanders, I was born pretty much on a fault line. Music straddles the fault line between emotion and intellect – a harmony of fantasy and logic. Dancing on a Volcano does not erupt, but sings and dances around this line.

Dancing on a Volcano was commissioned by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

Lyell Cresswell

Lyell Cresswell (b.1944) was born in Wellington, New Zealand. He studied in Wellington, Toronto, Aberdeen and Utrecht. After some teaching at Glasgow University he joined Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, as Music Organiser. From 1980-82 he was Forman Fellow in Composition at Edinburgh University, and from 1982-85 Cramb Fellow at Glasgow University. Since 1985 he has been a full-time composer based in Edinburgh.

Cresswell has been featured at many festivals, including the BBC Proms in 1989 and 1995 (for which his accordion concerto Dragspil was commissioned). He is Artistic Director of the “New Zealand, New Music” festivals, Edinburgh, 1998 and 2001.

Stealing Tutunui

(2000)

Maria Grenfell

Stealing Tutunui is based on a New Zealand Maori legend. The chief Tinirau has planned a naming ceremony for his infant son, and chooses Kae, another chief and the best tohunga (priest) he can find to perform the ceremony. As thanks for his ceremonial services, Tinirau allows Kae to ride home on his pet whale, Tutunui, and makes Kae promise to jump off the whale when he reaches his own island so that Tutunui can return home. But when Kae returns to his village, he disobeys Tinirau’s orders and casts spells on the whale, which dies in its struggles to get away.

Kae and his people feast on the delicious whale, while Tinirau waits for the whale to return.

The next day, the wind carries the aroma of Tutunui’s roasted flesh back to Tinirau, who decides to send women to fetch the unsuspecting Kae. The women paddle to Kae’s village, and that evening perform waiata (songs) and games to make him laugh, so as to recognise him by his ugly teeth. The women perform an incantation to bring sleep to the village. When everyone is asleep and all is quiet, the women lay the sleeping Kae in their canoe and paddle away into the night and back to

Tinirau. Kae awakens from his enchanted sleep to an angry Tinirau, realises that his hour has come, and the whale Tutunui’s death is avenged.

Maria Grenfell Maria Grenfell (b.1969) was born in Malaysia and raised in Christchurch, New Zealand. She received music degrees from the University of Canterbury, the Eastman School of Music, and a doctorate from the University of Southern California, where she was also a lecturer. Maria Grenfell’s work takes much of its influence from poetic, literary and visual sources and from nonWestern music and literature. Her orchestral and chamber music has been performed in the USA, South Africa and Mexico as well as in New Zealand and Australia. Maria has been a violinist with the Christchurch Symphony and the New Zealand Youth Orchestra. She is currently a lecturer at the Conservatorium of Music of the University of Tasmania in Hobart.

Elysian Fields

(1998)

David Hamilton

In this work I have returned to one of my favourite compositional devices: the re-working of an existing piece of music in a type of inverted variation form. Previous such works include Well Done, Mister Bach and One More Time, Mr Couperin. This work is based on the hymn tune St Elizabeth, usually sung to the words “Fairest Lord Jesus”. The work consists of one complete statement of the harmonic framework of the hymn. All the musical material is in some way developed from the notes of the hymn and its harmonisation. Rather than hearing the ‘theme’ at the beginning, as would be the standard procedure in a set of variations, the music builds up to the ‘theme’ which is only heard in its original form towards the end.

The title has no specific programmatic intent. Elysium was where the Greeks believed that the dead went, and also has the idea of being a place or state of perfect happiness. I liked the idea of the title, and the music is intended to reflect some of those positive feelings.

Elysian Fields was commissioned by the Auckland Youth Symphony Orchestra on the occasion of their 50th anniversary in 1998. It is

dedicated to the orchestra and their conductor of many years, Michael McLellan.

David Hamilton David Hamilton (b.1955) is currently Head of Music at Epsom Girls Grammar School and Deputy Musical Director of the Auckland Choral Society. During 1999 he was Composer-inResidence with the Auckland Philharmonia, and he took a second year’s leave from school in 2000 to pursue a number of composition projects.

He has had works commissioned by major orchestras, instrumental groups and choirs throughout New Zealand. His particular interest is choral music and his music is particularly popular with school choirs. Works have been performed in a number of places around the world including Australia, Japan, Canada, USA and England. A number of his choral works have been published and recorded in North America and Finland, and in 2000 he won first prize in a choral composition competition organised by the University of Bologna, Italy.

Hinterland

(1998)

Martin Lodge

Having grown up in Tauranga on the Pacific coast, the sea was a constant and familiar presence duirng my childhood. But behind the ranges that frame the Bay of Plenty region lay the mysterious interior distances of the central plateau of the North Island, with its snowcapped active volcanoes, dark pine forests, lakes and geothermal activity. As an adult looking back, that geographical hinterland appears as an analogy for a comparable spiritual condition.

Memory constructs the background personal landscape (or ‘inscape’) of our lives. Literally meaning ‘the land at the back’ in German, Hinterland at one level reflects thoughts about landscape and memory, history and the individual personality.

A piano piece by Anton Bruckner called Erinnerung (‘Remembering’) provides a theme which is quoted and fantasised on, and integrated with original material.

Hinterland was commissioned by the Auckland Philharmonia and was first performed by the Philharmonia conducted by Enrique

Diemecke in the Auckland Town Hall on 4 March 1998. The work is dedicated to Peter Shaw, the noted author, teacher and arts commentator.

Martin Lodge Martin Lodge (b.1954) studied music with Douglas Lilburn, David Farquhar and Ross Harris at Victoria University of Wellington. He held the Mozart Fellowship composer residency at Otago University in 1990 and 1991 and in 1993 he was Composer-in-Residence with the Auckland Philharmonia, for whom he wrote his Symphony no.1 Flowers of the Sea. He has been president of the Composers Association of New Zealand, and publishes and broadcasts regularly on New Zealand music and other topics. Currently he is Chair of the Music Department at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, where he teaches composition and music history.

Dick Frizzell (b.1943), On the Forest Road to the Headwaters of the Tarawera River, 1987, oil on board, 1205 x 1172 mm. BNZ Art Collection. Reproduced by permission of the artist Dead or dying trees have been a prevalent symbol for the passing of the native forest particularly since the 1930s when Christopher Perkins and Eric Lee Johnson discovered the motif. Influenced by Pop Art and graphic design, Frizzell offers a more ambivalent version of milling and land clearance. In a 1994 interview he said his ‘milling’ pictures ‘weren’t intended as a conservationist statement—I only painted them because I liked the way the dead trees looked on the side of a hill’.

...of memory...

(1998)

Ross Harris

...of memory... was written for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. The work unfolds via the development and transformation of the opening melody and leads the listener through diverse musical worlds, accumulating energy until the final dash to the finish. Distant memories of romantic symphonic music haunt the musical landscape this work inhabits.

Ross Harris

Ross Harris (b.1945) was born in the small town of Amberley in North Canterbury. He was educated in Christchurch and attended Canterbury University where he gained his Bachelor of Music before moving to Victoria University in Wellington to complete his Masters degree. He was appointed a lecturer in Music at Victoria University in 1971 and is currently an Associate Professor in Composition there. In 1985 he was awarded the QSM for public service following the premiere of his opera Waituhi. In 1990 he received the CANZ Citation for Services to New Zealand Music. Ross has written over 100 compositions including songs, chamber music, operas, orchestral music, jazz and rock music.

Yet Another Poem of Spring

(1991)

Anthony Ritchie

In 1981 I composed a series of piano pieces called Poems of Spring, in which I juxtaposed the exhilarating beauty of a Christchurch spring with the terrible pain of a broken relationship.

Ten years later, and in the middle of a cruel Dunedin winter, I recalled this Christchurch spring as I was composing this short piece for the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra. 1991 was a year in which I managed to climb out of a dark phase in my life, and consequently this piece expresses a sense of excitement and affirmation.

It was designed as a fanfare to open a concert and combines several short motifs into a busy mosaic of sound.

Anthony Ritchie

Anthony Ritchie (b.1960) was born and educated in Christchurch. He received his first commission in 1982, his final year at Canterbury University, resulting in the Concertino for Piano and Strings. Anthony went on to complete a PhD on the music of Bart贸k, and studied composition with Attila Bozay at the Liszt Academy. He has worked as a freelance composer since 1994, and has written for a wide variety of performers including the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Auckland Philharmonia , Michael Houstoun and Wilma Smith, and also choreographers such as Shona Dunlop and Dan Belton. As well as having composed a large variety of vocal and instrumental works he has also written music for theatre and dance. Many of his works have been performed overseas, and a growing number are being recorded and published commercially.

Kenneth Young Conductor

Kenneth Young is one of New Zealand’s leading conductors. He has established himself as a passionate and skilled interpreter of the Romantic and 20th-Century repertoire, and twenty years of practical orchestral playing has given him a specialised rapport with his colleagues. Himself a composer, he has a particular interest in post-Romantic repertoire, and he has received recognition for his recordings of New Zealand orchestral music.

Young took up the position of Principal Tuba with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in 1976, and his experience as a conductor with the NZSO dates from 1985, culminating in his appointment as the orchestra’s Conductor-inResidence early in 1993. He has worked with all the regional orchestras throughout New Zealand, and his engagements with the NZSO and the New Zealand Chamber Orchestra have included highly acclaimed CD recordings of the orchestral works of Edwin Carr and Gareth Farr, and opera excerpts with the New Zealand tenor Keith Lewis. He has also regularly conducted seasons with the Royal New Zealand Ballet.

Outside New Zealand, Young has worked with the Queensland Orchestra, the West Australian Symphony Orchestra and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, the City of Osaka Sinfonia and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

In addition to his work as a performer and conductor, Young has become one of New Zealand’s leading composers. Various commissions from Chamber Music New Zealand, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the International Festival of the Arts and Radio New Zealand have been performed nationwide and also in the United States, Europe and Australia.

Other recordings from conducted by Kenneth Young.

Keith Lewis Kenneth Young Opera, Kings, Orchestral Gods & Mortals Works

Gareth Farr Orchestral Works

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New Zealand Symphony Orchestra The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra is the country's national orchestra and the flagship of the performing arts in New Zealand. It was founded in 1946 and gave its first public performance in March 1947. The orchestra’s 50th anniversary was celebrated in 1996, and in 1999 James Judd was appointed its first Musical Director.

The orchestra numbers 90 players who are drawn from the international pool of musicians.

It gives over one hundred performances each year, which include concert seasons of major symphonic repertoire in seven subscription centres, as well as visits to smaller centres.

The NZSO is involved in education programmes, performs family and schools concerts, accompanies opera and ballet productions and records for television, film and radio. It commissions and performs New Zealand music, and has a long recording history which has seen it move into the world market and win many international awards.

A highlight of the NZSO’s tours outside of New Zealand was the much-celebrated visit to

Seville to perform at the1990 Expo with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa under the baton of Conductor Laureate Franz-Paul Decker. Notable recent highlights include two performances at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Arts Festival (which featured premieres of works by Gareth Farr), and the NZ sell-out concerts in the 2001 ‘Ludwig! A Feast of Beethoven’ series.

Other recordings of New Zealand orchestral music from www.trustcds.com.

Kenneth Young Gareth Farr Orchestral Orchestral

Works Works

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M.T. Woollaston (1910-1998), Taramakau, 1965, oil on board, 905 x 1220 mm BNZ Art Collection. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Toss Woollaston The underlying energy and structural forms of the New Zealand landscape captivated Toss Woollaston for the 70 years of his active career as a painter. Based in Greymouth in the 1950s he discovered nearby Taramakau, a landscape which became the subject of many drawings and watercolours, from which this oil painting evolved.

Woollaston said in a 1994 interview: ‘I like to paint looking with the light towards the subject in clear weather… I’m interested in what I see, and seeing it in the clearest conditions you can get. No mysteries of any sort.’

Recorded in the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, New Zealand, 23-25 July 2001.

Producer: Murray Khouri, Continuum Engineer: Keith Warren, Radio New Zealand Digital Editing & Mastering: Wayne Laird, Atoll Executive Producer: Ross Hendy Booklet Editor: Thomas Liggett Artwork Notes: Greg O’Brien Design: Mallabar Music Thanks to: Greg O’Brien, City Gallery Wellington Mark Dowland, BNZ Deane and Rhonda Cope Other releases by HRL Morrison Music Trust can be found at the internet site: www.trustcds.com

Zealand musicians of international calibre. All funds received by the Trust are used to make recordings, present concerts – both in New Zealand and overseas – and assist artists to undertake projects to further develop their talents.

The HRL Morrison Music Trust gratefully acknowledges the support of the following organisations in the making of this recording:

© 2001 HRL Morrison Music Trust P 2001 HRL Morrison Music Trust PO Box 1395, Wellington, New Zealand ALL RIGHTS OFTHE PRODUCERAND OFTHE OWNER OF THEWORKREPRODUCED RESERVED.UNAUTHORISED COPYING,HIRING,LENDING,PUBLICPERFORMANCEAND BROADCASTING OF THIS RECORD PROHIBITED.

The Lilburn The HRL Morrison Music Trust was established in March 1995 as a charitable trust to support New

Trust

Landscapes

New Zealand Orchestral Music

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra Kenneth Young

1 Drysdale Overture Douglas Lilburn 2 Dancing on a Volcano Lyell Creswell 3 Stealing Tutunui Maria Grenfell 4 Elysian Fields David Hamilton 5 Hinterland Martin Lodge 6 …of memory… Ross Harris 7 Yet Another Poem of Spring Anthony Ritchie

Total Duration

MMT2037 Digital Stereo Recording

© 2001 HRL Morrison Music Trust P 2001 HRL Morrison Music Trust

PO Box 1395, Wellington, New Zealand

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www.trustcds.com

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