Timothy Nankervis Recital

Recital for Solo Cello 

St Brigid’s Church,

Maldon

13 January 2015

Bach, Suite no. 1

Britten, Suite no. 1

Taverner, Thrinos

A standing ovation!

Rare enough in a city concert hall but rarer still in a 100 seat country church.

On several levels Tim had nowhere to hide.

He had, at most, a maximum of two strings to play at any one time. To build a harmonic such as a chord he had to rely on the residual memory of the preceding one or two notes. So harmonic depended on total accuracy, especially in the Bach Suite.

No violins, no viola were going to rescue him if he fell over; no multiple piano strings to hide amongst.

His musical isolation was most obvious  in the Bach Suite. There are no surviving dynamic markings for the suites for solo cello; no louds or softs, no fasts or slows, no pauses, no nothing. Any markings in modern scores are figments of some earlier performer’s mind. A musician of the calibre of Tim would be insane to even look at them.

All of this just made the performance interesting. It was made exciting by the cellist’s naked musicianship. The first cello suite is nice to listen to played by any half competent musician such as the teenager I heard busking in Paris. But to lose yourself in Bach’s head, to sit beside him late at night in the light of a couple of candles when all the kids are finally in bed, to understand what was coming out of his psyche as his musical soul took off, needs more than technical competence; that’s assumed. Tim needed the ability to lose himself in Bach’s mind and his musicianship so that what he found could be heard coming from the string or strings he had under his bow. And the sound from under Tim’s bow was superb.

 

Tim Nankervis, St Bridget's Maldon

Image © Denise Jackel

But there was more.

Britten’s suites are modelled the baroque dances that form the structure of Bach’s cello suites. But ‘there is no more forlorn opening to a work by Britten than the beginning of this (Number One) suite’. A ‘doleful Canto’ opens and intersperses the work where ‘Britten conjures a whole peasant band’. Tim’s ability was laid bare in his attack on the complexity of the suite: ‘a battlefield call … drums … dull tabors and droning brass … a gauche stumping tune … a lyrical piece brought to an end with a ghostly bugle call’*.

It is an exhausting work and the performance was electric.

(Not the Elizabethan) John Tavener’s Thrinos was never going to be an encore to ease us out into the heavy Summer rain. Tavener said the title 'has both liturgical and folk significance in Greece - the Thrinos of the Mother of God sung at the Epitaphios on Good Friday and the Thrinos of mourning which is chanted over the dead body on the house of a close friend’. If for no other piece that day it was this lament that got the audience on its feet.

A few days before the recital Tim told me has was having butterflies just thinking about (the recital) and he knew that a beer afterwards would be fabulous.

You earned it Tim!

Timothy Nankervis is member of the Seraphim Trio, The Sonus Piano Quartet and Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and an ANAM graduate.

*Kidea, P, 2013, Benjamin Britten A Life in the Twentieth Century, Allen Lane, London

Hansel and Gretel go West

Victorian Opera, Hansel and Gretel

Wangaratta West Primary Schoool

7 November 2014

 

Elizabeth Lewis (Mother/Witch) Matthew Tng (Father/Angel/Child)) and Simon Bruckard (Orchestra)

The fantasy came unstuck with question four, ‘Why wasn’t he singing?’

In a flash their heads had leaped the pink gaffer tape on the carpet that marked the edge of the stage and into the mechanics of the production. Up to that point that had cheerfully listened to people in fairy-tale costumes (they knew the word) sung in German (which two of them admitted to speaking). Many of them had been warned to expect German and were looking for die Hexe to appear.

VO’s Master of Music students had reprised their June production and mounted two performances on Thursday in Wodonga and one in Wangaratta on Friday. They gave the kids the same high quality performance – in singing and staging – that they’d presented in Melbourne in June.

From filing into the hall – Preps at the front, toes on the pink tape just behind the orchestra (Simon Bruckard and the bubby Yamaha grand, 10 years old this year and still in beautiful condition) to filing out they had clearly had a good time. One Grade Five ostentatiously went to sleep (until he had to give in to the laughter around him and ‘wake up’) and a pair of boofers were silently removed to the side (“You! Here! Beside me. And you! Here! This other side.”) They had good enough rhythm skills to sense that H & G’s dance song was built on triplets: ‘clap, clap, clap’ and ‘snap, snap, snap’ and joined in, encouraged by Ash the VP sitting in his captain’s spot half way back and off to one side, relaxed because he knew it was all going to be good.

Kate Amos (Dew Fairy)

Four hundred and sixty Preps to Grade Six laughed at the biffo - Hansel beats Gretel with the broom; Gretel beats Hansel with the broom – and thought the angels and Sandman were weird (probably because they didn’t recognize their characters). They recognized H & G and the parents and, of course, the Hexe. They followed the plot, the listened to the music, they loved the whole deal. More than that, they knew concert etiquette – they were silent and involved for an hour – including when to applaud.

But kids are a hard audience. They don’t laugh when we adults think they should and social niceties don’t prevent them saying so if they don’t like it. And they see stuff we think we’ll get away with. One of the kids realised they’d been short-changed with a non-singing opera singer and demanded reasons. She got them. Melissa explained: the original witch, Carlos E Bárcenas, had gone home sick so s/he was replaced by his/her cover, Elizabeth Lewis. But Elizabeth, the mother in Scene One, had also been cast as a captive child in the last scene so she was replaced by Luke Stage Manager. Simple! Laughter and applause.

Their applause was warm and genuine and that really is what matters most.

Georgina Wills, Head of Music at Wangaratta West Primary School summed it up this way, "The feedback from staff and students has been excellent. The younger students especially loved it.  High quality performances from exceptional performers is so important to us at Wang West. Many of our students would never have the opportunity to experience opera  if it were not for marvellous incursions such as this."

Images ©Denise Jackel 2014

Victorian Opera-MCM Master of Music (Opera Performance) Recital

Melba Hall

The University of Melbourne

Thursday 30 October 2014

The secret is in the socks.

The singers generally had eight or nine minutes between finishing one aria and going back on to re-orient their head-space towards the next. Perhaps they liked to walk about a bit backstage to hum the orchestral introduction and sing the entry.

The orchestra, in this case Simon Bruckard, had less than half a minute to get the key, time signature, the nature of the aria and the opening dynamics settled in his head. That’s why accompanists have shiny knees. Not just from praying to St Cecilia. They have no time to find a hanky before he/she makes their entry so they wipe their sweaty palms on their trousers. In a few seconds Simon transported himself in time: from Mozart to Menotti, from Bellini to Bizet. Once oriented, he played each opening section to match what he knew would be the singers’ own dynamics: speed, volume and density of sound. The voice entries were seamless; Simon saw to that.

Simon Bruckard, Image courtesy of Victorian Opera
http://www.victorianopera.com.au/about/master-of-music-opera-performance-2014/

 

We saw all this tonight. Unsung, unacknowledged, except in the last few seconds of the recital, the orchestra – because that’s what he was – formed the base on which the singers built their magic. Even the invitation to drinks asked us to meet the singers – not the musicians, just the singers. Without his art, his magic, his solid expertise, his underpinning musicianship, no amount of wonderful acting – even that new-found skill of Matthew Tng, no amount of first-class singing would have saved the singers.

He didn’t follow. He didn’t lead. He was there with them, singly and together in ensemble every note of the way. Like a great hockey player he knew where the ball was going to go so he ran with them to that point. And if he is as good as he appeared to be in tonight’s performances they wouldn’t have realised he was doing it.

Simon is a virtuosic pianist:

Simon Bruckard, Image courtesy of Victorian Opera
http://www.victorianopera.com.au/about/master-of-music-opera-performance-2014

but he is more than that. He’s that rare musician: an accompanist. And more than that he’s a répétiteur: pianist, language coach, voice coach and rehearsal coach. He provided the lovely running figure under their lovely legato lines in Cosi. He provided the chromatic and timing structure for then to be secure in the recitatives in Figaro: spot-on all the time. He provided the frenetic dance colour in Carmen. He provided the beautiful cello-ish line in Die Zauberflöte. His was a superb performance. Sometimes I would have like more assertiveness, though, f or ff instead of mf, because it’s better to ask, I think, ‘Am I too loud?’

How did he, in an instant, transport his head in time – Délibes to Donizetti? It’s the socks. He has three pair. Look for the Tardis.

Moments of Transformation by Paul Dean

Flinders Quartet premiere performance

Montsalvat

Sunday 26 October 2014

Listening to the first performance of Moments of Transformation was a bit like watching the birth of a child. Suddenly it’s there making itself heard and you can’t put it back. But at the back of the arrival, unseen, lie the idea that gave rise to the conception, the weeks and months of  the hard work of gestation and the pain and sweat of its nativity.

Out of the tragic accidental death of the brilliant young violinist Richard Pollett came Paul Dean's monumentally powerful string quartet.

The fabric of the piece is clearly woven of tragedy but it is never a memorium or a homage – a funeral panegyric – to Richard Pollett (the brilliant young violinist killed on 2011) either in its writing or in this, its first performance. The writing is immensely powerful, disturbing even. It asks the players to use a huge range of the languages of strings including mutes, sustained very high notes and no vibrato on Violin I over the other three. So it produced (it seemed to me) the life of a young person in transition from his family, from the world of music, from people who loved him to another place and the composer’s deep sadness that it happened.

There is no place to hide in this immensely difficult work. Shane Chen commented a week or so ago that his job – their job – was to make it look easy. That was never going to be the case. However the Flinders people did give us four virtuoso performances and in doing so produced music that cut straight into my gut. Was it Paul’s genius or the combined genius of Shane, Helen, Helen and Zoe? Or all five?

To put it simply, the Flinders people got it. They had worked on it note by note – I had heard them doing so. They were note and phrase perfect but, more than that they understood it; they got it. And they owned it and loved it – I had heard them tell Paul so. It was written for them – with them individually in mind –  and it was theirs.

To my mind, in spite of Paul’s intent, the work does have elements of immense grief and it does demand answers to the unanswerable question, “Why?” but in the end today we watched, with a sort of joy, the young, glittering star transform to the place of the gods.

ABCFM Evenings Monday 27 October 20147:00PM

Flinders Quartet Live

Presented by Phillip Sametz from The Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Paul Dean, clarinet

Flinders Quartet

Wolf

Italian Serenade - string quartet

Brahms

Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op 115

Paul Dean

String Quartet

and http://www.abc.net.au/classic/listen/

Following the Dean string quartet III

The Artistic Director’s Office

ANAM

5 August 2014

The third in a series of interviews with Paul Dean.
First published in Flinders Quartet: October update 2014

Paul played me an electronic version of the first three movements of the quartet. I found it, especially the third movement, emotionally very powerful. I wondered how much my response depended on knowing ‘the back story’. But he wanted to talk first about his place in history as a composer.

*****

When Mozart finished his quintet for piano and winds he wrote to his father, “This is the greatest piece I’ve ever written”. Beethoven knew that but still wrote his own piano quintet about eight years later.

Paul had talked to Andy Ford and other composers about being weighed down by monsters like Mozart sitting on your back when you are writing. Their view? It is essential to take “a bit of a Beethoven response”. ‘He just went and wrote it.’ Paul said. ‘There was no sense of “Oh god! I can’t compete”’.

‘Rather than just try to ignore the past I took the scores and CDs of Bartok second, Ligeti first and Janacek second quartet to Apollo Bay. I got a lot more out of just looking at them than listening, particularly the Bartok second. Miraculous! How did he get that sound? How did he transition from that to that? That was a really big turning point for me.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzsWlJwjrHQ

Paul knew Richard Pollett as a brilliant violinist very well – he was a student at ANAM – and he is a close friend of Richard’s parents. Did the tragedy that is the impetus for this new string quartet overwhelm its writing? Paul is very clear that he has dedicated the piece, not in homage to Richard, but to Patricia and Phil. in Richard’s memory.

That created the biggest problem: the nature of the quartet’s sound world. Originally, Paul’s ‘corny first thoughts’ involved dialogue between violin and viola because he regards Patricia as one of our great viola players. But the music didn’t come out that way. ‘I just let the music go where I thought it was going,’ he said, ‘and that got me into troubles because I went off on tangents that didn’t work (laughs) and didn’t have logical consequences.’

Paul Dean

‘I have tried to make the start of the first and third movements beautiful,’ he said,’ but beautiful in my language rather than in the sense of a lush G major or G minor chord and a luscious tune. I wanted to write an expansive work with expansive sections and that’s been the challenge. I’ve tried to use my language and that’s one of the complicating things.’

‘The second movement will be just totally ferocious’, he said, ‘and I’ve given Shane*’s nimble fingers lots of work. The fourth movement will be fast and frenetic but a different sound world to the second movement. I wrote a chorale for the last movement but I’ve ended up using it in the third movement. Maybe the last movement will be a violin solo to finish the piece; the violin playing with a practice mute so it will have the feeling of being the sub-voice to the others.’

‘It’s just my quartet and it may only have one week of performances or it might be the piece that is my breakthrough. If it’s good it will have a life. If it’s not, it will sit in the Australian Music Centre Library.’

*Shane Chen, violin Flinders Quartet