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Landscapes: New Zealand Orchestral Music
The physical geography of New Zealand is marked by a variety of forms within an 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 some 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 the CD 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.
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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
The HRL Morrison Music Trust gratefully acknowledges the support of the following organisations in the making of this recording:
Creative New Zealand
NZSO
Wellington Convention Centre
ConcertFM
The Lilburn Trust
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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’.
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
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Dancing on a Volcano was commissioned by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.
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.
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
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 snow-capped 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.
...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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.’
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