The pianist is Henry Wong Doe, now Assistant Professor at Indiana
University in Pennsylvania, and a frequent visitor back to this country –
he recently performed the Grieg concerto with the Auckland
Philharmonia, and this is the first time the preludes have been recorded
together as a suite. He spoke on Upbeat about the release and his
initial reaction to the project: it is Stephen de Pledge who
commissioned them and remains their best-known performer, and Henry was
at first daunted by that, and grateful to Stephen for handing over what
is very much ‘his baby’. Yet from Stephen’s point of view, he is only
too glad for another pianist to be their champion, also. Henry, based in
the USA, is already going on to perform them in recital and this
recording for Rattle is a valuable endorsement of that. Also, as a
teacher himself, Wong Doe includes them in the students’ repertoire at
Indiana:
"There is a lot of value in these pieces in terms of
introducing young students to 21st century repertoire, that it’s not
daunting at all, because a lot of these pieces are actually quite
accessible. So I’m going to hopefully tour this in the USA and also New
Zealand, give more exposure to these works. I hope they can be in the
same kind of repertoire as Chopin and Liszt…"
Stephen
commissioned the first Landscape Preludes in 2003, while he was still
living in the UK. The journey towards the complete cycle is a story of
inspiration and determination that was five years in the making and has
resulted in the first collection of 12 very individual voices, that at
the same time share something very New Zealand. They are already
speaking for us overseas: it is the first coherent collection of New
Zealand piano music yet produced.
It began with a Wigmore Hall
recital Stephen had in January, 2004. The original idea was to provide
himself with programme fillers: small pieces, useful for a pianist, that
could fill out a programme as individual pieces or be performed
together as a cycle. Immediately, he thought of a cycle of 12 – twelve
is a nice number, symmetrical, enough to provide plenty of variety
within it as a set. And immediately he thought of New Zealand. As an
expat and active figure in the contemporary music scene he found himself
playing a lot of British and European music but nothing new from New
Zealand: there was New Zealand music around –Edwin Carr, Jenny McLeod –
but that was at least 30 years old by then. There was nothing ‘cutting
edge’.
"It was the New Zealander coming out in me I suppose. I
wanted to create an identity for New Zealand music overseas, a
contemporary identity, and the Wigmore festival was putting my cards on
the table – I wanted to say this is New Zealand music, this is where I
come from, here I am."
The association with New Zealand suggested the name: Landscape Preludes. He got the support
of Creative NZ and had a set of three commissioned for that first
recital: Gillian Whitehead, Eve De Castro Robinson and Victoria Kelly – a
triumvirate that he found ‘very satisfying, three different
generations, nice’. Whitehead’s Arapatiki, ‘the way of the flounder’,
is the name for the sand flats that she looks over from her home at
Harwood, outside Dunedin. It remains the first of the series and ‘has
something to do with the advance and retreat of the tide’, as she puts
it herself: a piece of impressionism that opens with the song of the
korimako, the bellbird. Eve de Castro Robinson’s prelude this liquid drift of light is one of the more accessible to student pianists, a
‘glistening sound web’ in the words of William Dart; and Victoria
Kelly’s Goodnight Kiwi is at once a nostalgic glance at the television
that many of us grew up with and, simultaneously, a profoundly moving
paean to her dying mother. (Michael Houstoun has recorded this piece,
also, and speaks about it and the performer’s relation to emotion in
music – very interesting! See the accompanying DVD on the Rattle
release, Inland.)
Stephen’s Wigmore recital was received
extremely well, and later that year he came back for a solo tour for
Chamber Music New Zealand, driving himself the length and breadth of the
country. He needed to select the rest of the composers: and Scilla
Askew, then director of SOUNZ, put together massive piles of CDs for him
that he listened to on the car stereo, blind, driving through the vast
landscapes of the south island. That was how he chose the remaining
nine.
"I started with Jack Body, because I knew and loved his
music, but the rest of them I just chose in a kind of purposefully
organised way. I didn’t have a huge agenda, my main concern was to have a
good overview of New Zealand composers. All generations, all different
styles and a good geographical spread. So I ended up with composers of
all ages, from Jenny McLeod to Samuel Holloway who was still very young
then: from Lyell Cresswell who’s in Edinburgh to Gillian Whitehead in
Dunedin; and across genders as well, of course… the idea was to have a
nice spread. In the end I had enough for two series. There were lots of
people I had to leave off, and it was tempting when I finished it to
start all over again."
There was no directive, apart from the
fact that the piece had to be called a Landscape Prelude, and had to
be three or four minutes in length. (Most, of course, went slightly over.) The next commissions were Lyell
Cresswell’s Chiaroscuro – dazzling and dark, like its name – and Michael
Norris’s Machine Noise: both of them on the difficult end of the
spectrum, Norris’s piece in fact ‘impossible to play – but I think that
was his aim’. Both of these he performed in the next CMNZ tour in 2006:
Jack Body’s The Street Where I Live followed a year or so later, the
humorous piece of the collection, incorporating Jack’s own description
of his home. ‘I live in Durham Street. That’s third on the left, up Aro
Street. As you drive up Aro Street, it’s a hairpin bend to the left and
then almost immediately a sharp turn to the right. Up a drive. To number
eight…’. The warmth of Jack’s description, as much as the beauty of the
piano accompaniment, is impossible to resist. ‘I love it and audiences
love it – it’s the kind of thing people remember. And it’s not too hard
to play.’
In the meantime, however, the cycle had run into a
hiccup. Funding had dried up. Stephen was just at the point of despair
when rescue came in the form of Sir James Wallance, who simply fished
out a chequebook and paid for all of the preludes that remained. Of
these, Sam Holloway’s Terrain Vague and Dylan Lardelli ’s Reign are at
the difficult end of the spectrum: ‘the very edge of virtuosity, I love
it’. Of medium difficulty are Ross Harris ’s piece A Landscape With Too
Few Lovers, inspired by one of the ‘Northland Panels’ by Colin McCahon:
also Jenny McLeod’s Tone Clock Piece XVIII, one of the great series that
she has been writing in the tone clock system since the early 2000s.
And finally, the pieces more accessible to student pianists – Gareth
Farr’s The Horizon From Owhiro Bay, ‘a musical representation of the view I
see at twilight’, impressionist and shimmering, and the mischievous
Sleeper, by John Psathas. Altogether the twelve form an extremely
satisfying cycle:
"I was quite delighted there was such a big
variety. It was great because I was a little bit nervous that I would
get twelve slow very atmospheric dreamy pieces! It was tempting to give
them a tempo or directive, fast or slow, for that reason. But I decided
just to leave them to it, and it could not have worked out better. Some
chose urban environments as their landscape, some physical, others
mental, and some of the preludes are atmospheric of course but at the
same time some people responded with more aggression as well – a couple
of people really pushed the virtuosity."
Stephen first performed
the complete set at the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts
in Wellington, in 2008. It was a somewhat stressful time for him,
flying in from the UK completely jet-lagged, playing to the composers
and giving the premiere within just two days. However, they were a
triumph: rave reviews; and he has gone on to give over 20 performances since, in England, Scotland and France as well as in New Zealand. Not only that, the
YouTube clips have meant that they have been taken up by pianists who
would never otherwise have heard of them. SOUNZ filmed those very first
performances at the festival, something Stephen pushed for, in the days
when YouTube was little more than ‘a library of silly videos’. Now it is
a significant educational resource: it was prescient of him. And the
Landscape Preludes themselves prove, in this new recording, that they
are a major set of works for the piano, one that can be accessible for
students as well as professional virtuosos, and as William Dart has
called them an ‘iconic’ collection for New Zealand.
"It’s very
satisfying for me – that was what I was hoping for, that they would not
be just my thing. I always wanted that they have a life of their own.
And you can hear the New Zealand landscape, I think… there’s a lot of
spaciousness in the writing, open intervals, bird song, tolling
gong-like sounds: all those things that we think of as the New Zealand
voice. I’m very proud of instigating them and I think they will go on."
Individual
scores of the Landscape Preludes are published by Sam Holloway’s
publishing house, Score, available through SOUNZ online. |
Resource
