LIGHTBOX
NZTrio
THE WALLACE ART SERIES LIGHTBOX
New music for piano trio by
NZTrio
New Zealand composers: Rachel Clement Claire Cowan Gao Ping Chris Gendall Samuel Holloway
c Karlo Margeti´ Alex Taylor
Since we started playing together in 2002
The diversity of styles and the strength of New Zealand
we have actively promoted the music
composition is evidenced in this latest collection. Of the seven
of our fellow Kiwi composers. Through
works on offer, five are NZTrio commissions, while the other
performances, regular commissions and
two (by Chris Gendall and Samuel Holloway) have become firm
previous recordings, we’ve been able to
favourites of our repertoire. It is perhaps fitting that this album
share this music with audiences around
is being released in the centenary year of Douglas Lilburn’s
Aotearoa, and have proudly showcased
birth, true testament that his legacy lives on strongly in the new
NZ works at prestigious overseas festivals
generation of composers, of whom we’re enormously proud.
such as the Beijing Modern Music Festival in China, and the Århus Festival in Denmark. We love performing homegrown gems, and in the past dozen or so years every concert has included at least
We hope you enjoy delving into this music, discovering new sounds, energy, expression and sonic challenges along the way. And we offer big thanks to each of these extraordinarily talented composers for continuing to inspire us with their music.
one New Zealand work. Sarah, Justine and Ashley, April 2015
LIGHTBOX
01
Lightbox (2012)
12:34
Karlo Margeti´ c (NZTrio commission) shifting states (2003) 12:27 Rachel Clement (NZTrio commission) 02 i. sabbia (sand) 2:19 03 ii. filigrana (filigree) 2:02 04 iii. bullicante (with bubbles) 1:36 05 iv. millefiori (thousand flowers) 2:43 06 v. sommerso (submerged) 3:47 burlesques mécaniques (2012) 11:42 Alex Taylor (NZTrio commission) 07 i. prologue 0:48 08 ii. [d]rag 0:24 09 iii. interlude 0:38 10 iv. a spanner 1:12 11 v. tumbledry 1:21 12 vi. gas/sisyphus 0:37 13 vii. tic 1:33 14 viii. anglegrinder 1:21 15 ix. chain 2:33 16 x. scaffold 1:15
Su Xie Si Ti (Four Sketches, 2009) 12:18 Gao Ping (NZTrio commission) 17 i. Xiao (Boisterous) 1:58 18 ii. Cuo Diao (Split Melody) 2:31 19 iii. Dui Wei (Counterpoint) 4:00 20 iv. Shuo (Shining) 3:49 21
stapes (2005) Samuel Holloway
6:53
Intaglio (2006) 7:36 Chris Gendall 22 i. 2:45 23 ii. 2:30 24 iii. 2:21 25 26 27
subtle dances (2013) 10:22 Claire Cowan (NZTrio/CMNZ commission) i. subtle dances 4:42 ii. be slow and lie low 2:35 iii. nerve lines 3:05 74:36
JUSTINE CORMACK violin
Prior to her commitments to NZTrio, Justine developed a notable orchestral career, first as Sub-Principal 1st Violinist in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and culminating in her position as Concertmaster of the Auckland Philharmonia. She appears regularly as a recitalist, concerto soloist, recording artist and adjudicator, with some recent highlights being her involvement on the international judging panels of the Michael Hill International Violin Competition, and the release of a Douglas Lilburn Duos recording with pianist Michael Houstoun. A graduate of the University of Canterbury, Justine also holds a Master of Music degree (San Francisco Conservatory) and a Doctorate of Musical Arts (State University of New York at Stony Brook). She has taught violin at Wellington’s Victoria University and held a position as violin lecturer at The University of Auckland. Justine plays an 1868 JB Vuillaume violin.
ASHLEY BROWN cello
SARAH WATKINS piano
In his student years, Ashley won the Young Musicians Competition, National Concerto Competition and Young Achievers Award plus prizes at the Adam International Cello Competition, Gisborne International Music Competition and ROSL Music Competition in London. His academic history includes a Master of Music (Canterbury), Artist Diploma (Yale) and Doctor of Musical Arts (Auckland), plus cello lecturer positions at the universities of Waikato, Canterbury and Auckland. He was a member of the Turnovsky Trio and Principal Cellist of the Auckland Philharmonia. These days, Ashley keeps a busy schedule of solo and ensemble recitals, concertos and recordings, and enjoys close collaborative relationships with musicians across the spectrum of genres. He plays the 1762 William Forster ‘Liberte’ cello.
Sarah Watkins has enjoyed an impressive career as chamber musician, collaborative partner and recording artist, performing throughout Japan, England and the United States with some of America’s leading instrumentalists. She holds both a Doctor of Musical Arts and Master’s in collaborative piano from the Juilliard School in New York City, and a Bachelor’s from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Academic highlights include coordinating the collaborative piano programme at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California, and working for several years on the music faculty of Purchase College, New York. As a United States resident for fourteen years, Sarah was a staff pianist at Juilliard, Yale University and the Aspen Music Festival.
KARLO MARGETIC LIGHTBOX
Karlo Margeti´c (b.1987) holds degrees in composition and clarinet from the New Zealand School of Music. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including the 2013 SOUNZ Contemporary Award (for Lightbox), the NZSO/Todd Young Composer Award (2006), and the Trusts Young Composer Competition (Auckland Philharmonia 2005). In 2013 he was a Composer Fellow at the Intimacy of Creativity Composition Workshop at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Karlo has received commissions and performances from a wide variety of soloists and groups including NZTrio, New Zealand String Quartet, STROMA, Michael Houstoun, Claire Edwardes,
Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, Auckland Chamber Orchestra, and Wellington Youth Orchestra. He was Composer-in-Residence with Orchestra Wellington in 2014, with the NZSO National Youth Orchestra in 2007 and was Young Composer-in-Residence with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra in 2007 and 2008. An active performer, Karlo is Co-Director of the SMP Ensemble, and has appeared with them as composer, clarinettist, conductor and narrator. The composer writes: ‘When I think of a piano trio, I immediately think of a transparent interplay of lines. This has something to do with the fact that the instruments that make up the modern piano trio are not particularly homogeneous, unlike say, a string quartet. It’s as if somebody had strewn some line drawings of simple three-dimensional objects on a photographer’s lightbox, all on top of one another, resulting in an unexpected and strangely beautiful assemblage.’ Lightbox was commissioned by NZTrio with funding from Creative New Zealand in 2012.
RACHEL CLEMENT SHIFTING STATES Born in 1972, Rachel Clement studied composition with John Rimmer and John Elmsly at the University of Auckland, graduating with a Master of Music (composition) with distinction in 1997. She has worked extensively as a composition tutor in secondary schools in Auckland and Christchurch and held the position of Composer in Schools for the Auckland area. Her children’s opera Jam (funded by Creative NZ) with libretto by Margaret Mahy, was performed in 2002 by Canterbury Opera Youth and was selected to feature as part of the 2002 Wild Opera project. Rachel has composed for contemporary ensembles 175 East and Stroma and was the recipient of the 2001 Trust Fund Award from the Composers’ Association of New Zealand. She has lectured part-time in Composition at the University of Canterbury, managed the library and stage of the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, worked as the National Secondary Schools Arts Coordinator for Music under contract to the Ministry of Education and in 2005
and 2006 held the position of Mozart Fellow at the University of Otago. shifting states is a set of short pieces inspired by an interest in mid-twentieth century glassmaking, in which the process of changing state, or changing phase, is essential to the production of the many types of art glass. Each piece is titled with the name of a different technique and expresses some of the processes of freezing, melting, vaporisation, condensation and sublimation: sabbia (sand), filigrana (filigree), bullicante (with bubbles), millefiori (thousand flowers), sommerso (submerged).
shifting states was commissioned by NZTrio with funding from Creative New Zealand in 2005.
ALEX TAYLOR BURLESQUES MÉCANIQUES
Born in 1988, Alex Taylor is a composer,
His recent projects include a substantial bassoon concerto
poet and multi-instrumentalist based in
commissioned by Ben Hoadley and the Auckland Chamber
Auckland. He studied English and Music
Orchestra, and a recomposition of Henry Purcell’s Dido and
at Auckland University and completed
Aeneas in collaboration with Frances Moore’s Unstuck Opera
his Master’s in Composition with First
company. He has collaborated with prominent artists across
Class Honours under Dr Eve de Castro-
a range of artforms, including painter Michael Smither, actor
Robinson and Associate Professor John
Renee Lyons and poet Stephanie Christie.
Elmsly in 2011. He has been composerin-residence with the NZSO National Youth Orchestra, the Auckland Youth Orchestra and the Caselberg Trust. In 2012 he was the youngest recipient to date of the SOUNZ Contemporary Award, New Zealand’s most prestigious composition
burlesques mécaniques is a collection of grotesque miniatures whose characters are not people or animals but dances. These dances have been mechanised, electrified, and often obscured by their own rhythmic impulse. Old forms are given new identities, freed from the confines of metric stability and the expectation that they be ‘danceable’.
prize. Alex was the New Zealand Young Composer representative at the 2014 Asian Composers League in Tokyo and in
burlesques mécaniques was commissioned by NZTrio with funding from
2013 received the CANZ Trust Fund Award.
Creative New Zealand in 2012.
GAO PING SU XIE SI TI (FOUR SKETCHES) Gao Ping is a composer-pianist born in 1970 in Chengdu, Sichuan province of China. He studied in the USA in the 1990s. In demand as a composer, he has received commissions and performances from musicians around the world. Many prestigious venues have presented his work, such as the Aspen Music Festival, Dresdner Musikfestspiele, Hibiki Hall Festival (Japan), New Zealand International Arts Festival (Wellington), and the Beijing-Modern International Music Festival. As a pianist, Gao Ping’s repertoire is extensive; he has performed to acclaim all over the world. In 2008, Gao Ping premiered his Piano Concerto with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Kenneth Young. The Listener enthusiastically acclaimed the two-movement work as ‘a major concerto’. Gao Ping’s two albums released on the Naxos label were critically acclaimed and were described as ‘music which wants to be heard with ears of a child, full of wonder and amazement…. deep and vulnerable.’
Gao is currently a Professor in Composition at the Conservatory of Music at Capital Normal University as well as a guest professor at the China Conservatory of Music. He previously taught at the Canterbury University in New Zealand. As the movements are short and concise, they possess a single mood, and often a single musical idea. They are like snapshots of moments in memory. Some of them are indeed musical translations of scenes from the composer’s experiences, for example, Counterpoint was inspired by seeing a village funeral procession in rural China. The family members of the deceased progressed slowly, interrupted by frequent kneeling down and crying (which can be both a formal part of the ritual and an expression from the heart), while a band of a very odd mixture of
Western and Chinese instruments (such as a trombone and a suona, a Chinese double-reed instrument) led the way by playing very upbeat happy music. It is not surprising as funerals in China are referred to as ‘the White Happiness’, while weddings are the red counterparts. In Ping’s music, the two moods are in counterpoint, creating a synthetic mood of the happy and sad. Cuo Diao, split melody, or wrong key (Movement 3) is an isorhythmic love song in which notes in the tune are playfully replaced by…wrong notes… which are not from the tune or its mode. These erroneous notes, however, later little by little form a transposition of the original tune in a higher register. Su Xie Si Ti was commissioned by the 2009 NZ Music Educator’s Conference for NZTrio, with funding from Creative New Zealand.
SAMUEL HOLLOWAY STAPES (2005)
Samuel Holloway (b. 1981) is based in Auckland. His work is often concerned with the perception of musical time and form, music’s materialities, and the relationship between notation and performance. Samuel’s work has been performed by prominent artists and ensembles in Asia, Europe and North America, including Klangforum Wien, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Stroma, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. He has recently undertaken a number of projects with the collective et al., and their collaborative work Upright Piano is held in the Chartwell Collection at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T¯amaki. Samuel lectures in music at Unitec, Auckland, and is artistic director of 175 East.
stapes is the first piece in a series of three trios collectively entitled Middle Ear. The stapes (or stirrup) is the smallest in the chain of three bones that transmit vibrations from the eardrum to the internal ear in the process of transformation of external soundwaves to a response within the listener. In this work, the players work both together and against each other, in individual and collective struggles for articulacy.
CHRIS GENDALL INTAGLIO (2006)
Press, Peer Music Hamburg and Promethean Editions, and recorded on Atoll Records. His work Wax Lyrical
Born in Hamilton in 1980, Chris Gendall studied composition at Victoria University of Wellington before completing a doctoral degree at Cornell University. He has participated in a number of festivals and conferences, including the Wellesley Composers’ Conference, the Aspen Music Festival, the Britten-Pears Contemporary Composition programme, the Royaumont Voix nouvelles Composition Course, and the Aldeburgh Festival. He was the Creative New Zealand/Jack C. Richards Composerin-Residence at the New Zealand School of Music for 2010–11.
was the winner of the 2008 SOUNZ Contemporary Award. Intaglio is a printmaking technique in which an image is etched or engraved on the surface of a plate. Ink would then be applied to the plate and removed from the surface, leaving ink only in the incisions. The title refers less to the work itself than to
Chris Gendall’s works have received performances in Europe,
the process of composing it, a small
Asia, and North and South America, from such performers as the
insight into the composer’s ideas about
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Brave New Works, Stroma,
how material manifests in musical
NZTrio, the New Juilliard Ensemble and the New Zealand String
shape. This piece is written in three
Quartet. Select works are published by the Wai-te-ata Music
uninterrupted movements.
CLAIRE COWAN SUBTLE DANCES
Born in Auckland in 1983, Claire Cowan is a composer from Auckland who works mostly in the realm of collaborative composition and soundtracks. Classically trained as a cellist and orchestrator, her output ranges from chamber music, film and TV, dance, theatre and full orchestral works. Her music has been performed by soloists and ensembles throughout the USA, NZ, Europe, Japan and Australia and her film music has been heard in many international festivals. Her band The Blackbird Ensemble is a theatrical orchestra who perform music in unusual spaces and challenge classical
performance conventions. Listen to Claire’s Music online: www.soundcloud.com/clairesmusic Claire is represented by Native Tongue Publishing: www.nativetongue.com.au More about the Blackbird Ensemble: www.blackbirdensemble.com subtle dances is a set of three short moods for piano trio. In writing, the composer has tried to approach the works as intuitively as possible. For her this creates the greatest connection between composer, performers and the audience listening. Each work features one instrument more prominently–firstly cello, then piano, then violin. The music explores Cowan’s continued fascination with the space created within the music, in which a listener can engage. Both
hypnotic and meditative, the pieces present themselves as a contrasting set of interior landscapes. They are: passing thoughts, memories, unsolvable problems and explorations of headspace. Firstly–it begins with a dance; a rhythmical and passionate interlocking of playful lines, but not without an element of danger or risk. Secondly–an elegy, the body in its slowest state. Thirdly–a struggle, an unanswered question, a cycle–and ultimately, a transition; a bursting through, into a new light.
subtle dances was co-commissioned in 2012 by NZTrio and Chamber Music New Zealand with funding from Creative New Zealand.
Produced by Wayne Laird Recorded in April 2014 by Steve Garden on a Steinway D at the Adam Concert Room, Victoria University of Wellington Piano tuning by Michael Ashby Cover artwork ‘English Electric’ by New Zealand artist, Jim Speers Cover image courtesy of the Wallace Arts Trust NZTrio photos by John Crawford Design by UnkleFranc Printing by Studio Q
English Electric
The vision of the Wallace Arts Trust is to support, promote and expose New Zealand contemporary artists while providing the wider public with an inimitable cultural and historical resource of contemporary New Zealand art. These objectives are achieved in part by the acquisition of new artworks by contemporary New Zealand artists, as well as holding the annual Wallace Art Awards. In addition to operating the TSB Bank Wallace Art Centre at the Pah Homestead, 72 Hillsborough Road, Auckland, the Wallace Arts Trust loans out artworks to institutions ranging from schools to universities and hospitals. Beyond this the Trust financially supports many other arts organisations in New Zealand.
Jim Speers (2004) From the Wallace Arts Trust collection
Jim Speers is represented by Starkwhite
Rattle is a division of Victoria University Press, Victoria University of Wellington
RAT-D058 2015
To observe things is to recognise the passing of time. (In my art) I explore economic activities in urban landscapes, attending to the particularity of things. I’m interested in the way social forces are made physical through buildings and landscapes. Everything is connected: flags and taxi trips are interwoven with people’s memories and plants growing.
