Plakidis: Music for String Orchestra.  Martin Anderson brings out some fascinating stuff on his label – and he also brought out this, which has faded from memory within 48 hours.  Pleasantly pastoral would sum up the only bit I can even vaguely recall.

Tsontakis: String Quartet No. 3.  eMusic’s new pricing policy has me downloading partial albums far more – not ideal, but there seems little chance of much movement until they spot how the classical music market works.  But I digress, and anyway this is a disc I might well go back to.  Tsontakis has been garnering a few prizes of late (the Grawemeyer for one) and this string quartet was very striking, with a strong whiff of late Britten about it.  Well worth exploring.

Now, consider this: a Russian symphony, with a huge first movement that hurtles headlong from climax to climax, and a finale that climaxes with thundering chords.  Shostakovich 4, surely?  No, it’s Popov’s First, the Olympia recording of which I revisited today.  (Olympia have now folded, but there have been later recordings – try Telarc.)  Popov isn’t Shostakovich, but his first symphony is well worth digging out – it’s by no means all bombast, and is quite wild at times.  Popov got stamped on by the authorities, of course, and the second is much tamer: a deep opening string movement (Shostakovich 6, anyone?), a scherzo which veers perilously close to a well-known Shrovetide Fair at times, and a fairly nondescript pair of movements to close.  Popov, by some accounts, became very much a toe-the-liner later, but the First is a remarkable piece, and anyone with an ear for 20th century Russian music should hear it.

Porter: Kiss Me, Kate.  Sublimity of a different order.  I saw the London transfer of this Broadway revival, and, gosh, it was good.

Mark O’Connor: Americana Symphony: perfectly pleasant stuff, that stays barely a minute in the memory.  The disc contains the symphony plus O’Connor’s sixth violin concerto (played by the composer with a rather good tone).  It’s very nicely crafted, tuneful, but try as I might I can’t recall anything of either work.

Tarik O’Regan: Threshold of Night: O’Regan has been somewhat touted as a ‘next big thing’.  Not quite clear why – the first piece on the disc starts off as if it’s going to be as densely packed as MacMillan but rather chickens out.  The Ecstasies Above sounds rather like Michael Nyman with a chorus – not necessarily a bad thing (if you’re Michael Nyman, that is).  Triptych aspires to Karl Jenkins-hood.  There’s some skill here, but nothing particularly individual.

Panufnik: Symphonies: Panufnik loved complex structures for his symphonies while always saying that listeners didn’t need to know about them.  He named his symphonies rather than number them – the two on this disc are Mistica (No. 6) and Sfere (No. 5).  The latter is mentioned as being organised around a plan involving a number of nesting spheres, and there are a couple of obvious features (not least the three sets of timpani placed left, centre and right around the orchestra) that seem to relate to this.  It’s the better symphony of the two – more tautly organised, and the antiphonal timps aren’t as heavily reminsicent of Nielsen 4 as those in Holmboe 8 (I think it’s 8).  It ends with quite a bang, which is presumably why it’s the second one on the disc.  Whatever Mistica’s structure may be based upon, what comes out is a sequence of vignettes which doesn’t quite add up to a symphony – indeed, I was some way into Sfere before I realised Mistica had finished.

Paulus: Violin Concerto etc: There are times when you listen to an American composer who is trying to reclaim tonality (or whatver the buzz phrase is) and you know it’s going to be reheated Copland.  Paulus doesn’t quite fall into that.  The violin concerto is the most impressive work on the disc, and could make the jump to repertoire if someone like Joshua Bell took it up.  The Concertante does start out rather like Stravinsky-by-the-yard (as quite a bit of Stravinsky does, mind) but does develop into something of greater interest.  The Symphony for Strings is the weakest, I felt – there’s rather too much that’s reminsicent of that sort of English string music which some people seem to have seized upon as a genre (Naxos have 6 discs of it, each sliding downwards to oblivion faster than its predecessor).  There are some great works for string orchestra, and this isn’t one of them, though it wouldn’t frighten any passing horses.

First, Beethoven’s Op. 16 quintet for piano and wind.  Good bog-standard early Beethoven, competently put together, but not yet quite ‘him’, despite a lavish sprinkling of da-da-da-dums at various points.

Then a new quintet from Anthony Ritchie, commissoned for this tour.  Ritchie is a very talented composer whose orchestral music I greatly enjoy.  This wind quintet was at the Mladi end of the spectrum, very heavily inspired by nature, with two excellent movements followed by a bthird that slightly outstayed its welcome.  Worth hearing again, though as Radio NZ were broadcasting the concert live, that may have to wait.

Berio’s Opus Number Zoo followed.  A real oddity – a set of four anthropomorphic poems narrated by whoever isn’t blowing down their instrument at the time.  This is Berio in Folksongs mode not Sinfonia mode, and a nice reminder of his humour and ability to write lighter music.

Finally, Poulenc’s Sextet for piano and wind quintet – is there another piece for this ensemble (they played half a movement of it as an encore)?  The programme came with a quote from the composer to the effect that he didn’t write new harmonies like Stravinsky, Debussy or Ravel, but surely there was a place for a composer who reused old chords…  The irony is that, whatever chords Poulenc uses, he is one of those composers who is immediately identifiable, frequently within a bar.  Also, he’s irrepressible – the slow movement breaks off into a canter, only to recollect that it is supposed to be the still centre.  The saddest response to this music is to dismiss it because gaiety isn’t a serious matter.  As Figure Humaine and the Dialogues show, such gaiety opens you to very serious things indeed.  Unmitigated seriousness too readily topples over into po-faced solemnity.

As usual, the concert included a piece by the NYO composer-in-residence:  Natalie Hunt’s Only to the Highest Mountain, which started in the orchestra’s tuning and meant that Daniel had to creep onstage amongst the rest of the orchestra, and emerge, applauseless, to conduct once the tuning was under way.  Hunt has a good ear which needs to stop listening to La Mer.

Next was Ravel’s left-hand piano concerto, played very nicely by the excellent John Chen.  I find the two-hand concerto more compelling – in fact, it’s almost as if Ravel put all the structure into that one, leaving this to be far more rhapsodic, even if arranged around some striking motifs.  It never quite gels for me, however well played.

The choice of repertoire for a youth orchestra concert is an interesting field for speculation.  Since a huge chunk of the audience will be parents, siblings and other relatives, many of whom never otherwise attend concerts (witness the row of bored boys in front of us), then the pieces should be a bit splashy, as well as capable of surviving the huge orchestras these groups tend to be.  The two-hand concerto fitted the bill better.

As would almost any Mahler symphony than No. 7.  I’m not one of those who think it a misunderstood masterpiece.  I think it is rather woolly towards the end, despite many incidental beauties.  The last movement rondo is a panoply of recurring themes that never quite amounts to what it wants to be.  No. 6 (with the added visual of the puniest percussionist waffing around the rear of the stage with a mallet) is better if it’s that period of Mahler you’re after.  With this one the best we got was Daniel’s baton arching over the orchestra at the end of the first movement.  Someone in the percussion section retrieved it and it was ferried back to him for the start of the second movement, to a round of applause.

None of this detracts from the playing, which was splendid, but it wasn’t the right programme.

Odyssey had much the same sort of build-up – the largest single span of orchestral music ever, Rattle insisting on recording it being part of his new contract, and so on.  I thought it would be of interest to revisit it after some years.  One of the first things I recalled was that it contained a prominent downward scale with timpani – and indeed it does.  There have been very few works where odd parts of something rarely heard have stuck in the memory (another was the second act of The Mask of Orpheus, heard once, and then recognised about six years later when played unannounced).  I thought this a good thing – and in fact Maw unifies the work by several such motifs (a little braying theme appears early on the woodwind, and only comes back noticeably about 70 minutes later, and even then takes some time before it is blasted out raucously on the horns, which seems to be its destiny; another ‘theme’ is actually a single chord, which the music returns to, or holds in the background regularly).

The piece holds the listener minute-to-minute, which is remarkable over such a span.  Despite the use of identifiable thematic material, I’m less convinced about the large-scale architecture, although there is a strong sense of development throughout.  I think it’s because the actual journey taken remains somewhat hidden.  It’s as if Homer had written his Odyssey about Homer not Odysseus – something very internalised is going on, but it doesn’t alays surface in the story.

Amongst Maw’s other works I’d single out Life Studies which made a great impression on me in a couple of performances.

These three are all large-scale symphonic poems (although the central work, and the strongest, I felt) is also a cello concerto.  Very approachbale stuff, with motifs ready to spring dramatically, and a good range of orchestral colour. Well worth revisiting.

The first story is set in the opal mines of NSW, where a young girl has two imaginary friends (Pobby and Dingan, of course).  Her slightly older brother is scornful of these characters until one day they go missing – indeed, they die, and the girl starts to fade away.  The bulk of the story is about his efforts to rouse the rather hard-bitten township to help find them, a task not assisted by the fact that his father is suspected of being a ‘ratter’ (someone who sneaks into other miners’ claims).  The story culminates in Pobby and Dingan’s joint funeral, which a large proportion of the town attends, and Rice brings the tale to a sudden, bleak conclusion.  It’s a remarkable tale by any standard – beautifully written in a boy’s voice – and an amzing debut.

Specks in the Sky is quite different, though has a similar sudden shift to bleakness, this time from rather unusual comedy.  The central character is again a child, this time living with her sister and mother in a camel park, a would-be tourist attraction in a remote corner of America.  The father, a rather desultory sort of bloke, is absent, and not missed by mother and sister, but the central girl thinks it would be better if the family were together again.  Into this milieu drop a collection of implausible paratroopers, who have bailed out of a top secret mission.  There are fifteen of them, and each is skilled in some strangely unmilitary skill: veterinary medicine, cordon bleu cookery, flower arranging, literary criticism.  They all talk in the gung-ho, clean-limbed, all-American style, but with a faint touch of formality that is almost Shalespearean.  They appear to have been trained specidically to drop in on unsuspecting civilians and revolutionise their lives.  The one blot is that the sixteenth paratrooper has ‘raspberry-pancaked’, and a posse is sent out to retrieve the corpse.  Things go astray when the coffin slips during the burial, and turns out to be empty.  The macabre result is the turning point that sets the family back to reunion.

The first and second read-throughs of these pieces made it clear that Pobby and Dingan was the better, but this time I think the surreality of Specks swung it.  It is a comic gem (it would be a stunning audiobook), and Rice remains on my must-buy list.  If only he’d write something else.

Angels don’t die, and so Xas, the angel from VL, can reappear in its sequel set over half-a-century later.  We’re now in the early days of aviation and Hollywood, and the two worlds meld, initially via the spectacle of stunt-flying, which Xas does to retain the sense of the air rushing past him.  Two film directors with almost identical names (a bizarre touch that presumably is meant to hint at their being two facets of the same character?) are initially in competition; an actress is disfigured in a fire and becomes a gifted film-editor, working for both- and that’s the main quadrumvirate of the plot, such as it is.  It’s a story about how these lives interact, but I sensed a substantial amount of symbolism getting in the way.  A black girl is trying to set up a flying school for other blacks, who are otherwise unable to learn to fly – she loses her money in the crash, and enters a race to Hawaii to recoup the loss – but her plane vanishes.  The boyfriend who started the blaze that disfigured the actress drifts in and out, although it seems probable that he’s dead.  Xas suddenly remembers he took some pearls from a lady friend a century or so earlier, and these pearls are dropped into the plot from time to time.

But it all seems a bit desultory.  Knox is putting her theology (and it’s a curious one) ahead of the plot.  A couple of times plot lines are waved in your face.  One (the similarity of the directors’ names) doesn’t bear fruit, but a long disquisition on just why the badly-burned heroine cannot have sex leads, via a rather unsettling description of the locaton of her first-, second- and third-degree, to successful congress (though not with the person I expected).  The aftermath of this rebirth of sexual activity is sensitively handled, and is probably the strongest part of the book.

In amongst all this, Xas is wrestling with Lucifer, sometimes literally.  Lucifer the fallen angel is not quite as fallen here – he may be the equal of God, just in charge of the other side.  Xas is one of his crew, but also has close connection with God; indeed, he is something of a go-between – Lucifer can only talk to God when he is in Xas’ presence.  These scenes feel very bolted-on.

I didn’t dislike the book; Knox writes very well.  But it’s not of the same standard as The Vintner’s Luck, nor on a par with the two ‘Dream’ books of recent years.