Wellington Town Hall
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and soloists Anthony Marwood (violin) and Jenny Wollerman (soprano)
In a New Light
New Zealand Listener May 17th 2010
Review by Rod Biss
Wellington Town Hall
Ross Harris’ new Violin Concerto has a strange effect on the listener, who seems to be almost drawn into its creation. It starts hesitantly, the soloist on his own playing fragmentary ideas: then the clarinet enters and his brief melody invites the other woodwind to join him. In effect, the beautifully textured concerto, hovering tantalisingly between tonality and atonality, is at last under way.
The soloist is hardly ever out of the limelight, decorating and rhapsodising on the material. Then the orchestra arrives on a hushed, seamless chord, over which the soloist reflects on its melodic ideas and draws them together. The concerto ends with the orchestra finally bowing out, leaving the soloist to return to the same fragments with which the concerto opened. “Questions finally unanswered,” writes Harris in the briefest of programme notes. It is a work that captures perfectly the essence of our time - it is also a work of extraordinary and haunting beauty.
The success of the performance owed much to the commitment and understanding British violinist Anthony Marwood brought to it. It was a performance that heightened the emotion of the solo line: there was tenderness, mystery and joy of the dance, as well as thrilling virtuosity. The orchestra under Tecwyn Evens baton gave enthusiastic support.
Harris’ song cycle The Floating Bride, the Crimson Village consists of 11 settings of poems by Vincent O’Sullivan that in turn respond to paintings by Marc Chagall. Harris, O’Sullivan and Chagall are ideal creative collaborators: colour is vital to them all. O’Sullivan’s words acknowledge the colour of things. Harris has created a score that glows with musical colour, naivete, clarity and his own feeling for melody. The songs were mostly short, instantly appealing and ideally suited to Henny WOllerman’s agile and even-toned soprano.
New Zealand String Quartet and soprano Jenny Wollerman.
The Abiding Tides
New Zealand Listener March 20-26 2010
Review by Rod Biss
The New Zealand String Quartet with soprano Jenny Wollerman gave a riveting first performance of Ross Harris’ The Abiding Tides, eight interconnected settings of pomes by Vincent O’Sullivan. It is a work that instantly enriched our heritage of New Zealand music. O’Sullivan’s poems explore the way the sea affects all our lives; specifically, he writes in an introduction, they”move between the sinking of the Titan” and more recent tragedies that may be “as recent as this afternoon, for all we know”. Harris’ music provides preludes and accompaniments to his unfailingly sensitive vocal line. The backgrounds he paints are varied, often light, with much pizzicato, and when the scene darkens he writes a ghostly frozen introdutcion of long vibrato-free notes. The titanic is never named, but there is no doubt we are hearing a tragedy; the sixth song ends with the words “The boat will take you to sea, where the sea will win”, and from there the next two songs,”Light seeps its grey composure on the mild day” and a Latin verse”Nox perpetua”, provide a solemn resolution. Harris’ music here is extraordinarily simple, noble and richly inspired. The cycle - in effect an agnostic requiem - ends for the victims in darkness, for the listener in consolatory peace.
Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington
Saturday, 23rd May 2009
Review by Peter Mechen
Ross Harris’s work, called “Ave Maria Stella” was paired with a work by Dufuy
of the same name, each work taking as its starting-point a popular plainchant
hymn which dates from the 9th Century. Ross Harris’s setting resembled a kind of
twenty-first century window-view of the original plainchant, creating a great deal
of ambient resonance with held notes underpinning the melodic contours and
brightening or darkening in places the thematic strands, these somewhat medieval
in style. Elsewhere, touches of modal harmony recall the work of Ralph Vaughan Williams,
while the composer’s different groupings (lower men’s voices creating a haunting effect
when singing almost sotto voce in their lower registers, against which the
women’s voices build a marvellous archway of tone) began piling up the
intensities, and reached a wonderful climax at the words “Spirito Sancto”,
followed by a richly rapt “Tribus honor unus”(The honoured Trinity).
Rod Biss Review New Zealand Listener September 6-12 2008
Two Reviews of The Sleep of Reason performed by 175 East Sunday 6th May 2007 at Hopetoun Alpha
Metro-live Guide (author – Eve de Castro-Robinson)
“Another Kiwi at the height of his powers is Ross Harris, whose The Sleep of Reason kicked off with a thrilling blast of cacophony and held interest right to its mesmerising conclusion – a held note across the sextet, winds and trombonist circular breathing (breathing continuously while playing). Harris has become irrepressibly prolific of late, skillfully avoiding ruts or dead-ends. Every creation pops up freshly minted, its array of colours vividly hued, its polyphonic web meticulously crafted; the stuff’s razor-sharp, as bold as a leonine roar. This latest work was literally a breath-taking end to an inspired concert.”
NZ Herald – William Dart
“Questioning was implicit in many of the pieces and Ross Harris' The Sleep of Reason posed more than its share. Was that jaunty trombone solo a tune we should recognise? Was that chord a Richard Strauss meltdown?
William Dart -NZ Herald 5/6/2006
“After interval, Ross Harris ' Second Symphony consolidated on the considerable achievements of Harris' symphonic debut last year, both formally and emotionally. A true symphony of song built around Vincent O'Sullivan's poems, this was Auckland 's first opportunity to hear Madeleine Pierard in full flight.
The mezzo illuminated O'Sullivan's often chilling critique of the senselessness of war. Unfazed by tumultuous orchestral shifts around her, she held the audience in thrall until her final top C from off-stage.
The work may be perfectly moulded to its text, but it also has a taut formal structure which gives it a symphonic strength. The orchestra gave a consummate performance, no doubt proud of the part that it was playing in the genesis of a major New Zealand score.
The concert ended with a rip-roaring account of Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini but such a melodramatic vision of hell was no match for the horror and terrible sadness of the man-made hell that Harris and O'Sullivan had already revealed.”
Rod Biss -NZ Listener 12/6/2006
William Dart -NZ Herald 28/11/2005
Excerpt from review of Taurangi Trust Records CD of NZ flute music "Ross Harris' Ka wawara te hau delves into impressionistic dissonance, wooing our ears not with melody but with subtle inflections of colour and intensity, perfectly gauged by the players and producer Roger Smith."
William Dart -NZ Herald 28/11/2005
Ross Harris's Cento is much more than a cut-and-paste scrapbook of past orchestral triumphs - in between two explosions of sound, this score bears the signature of the composer who, a few months back, gave us his first symphony. There are definite rewards for tune-spotters. Who might have considered Tchaikovsky as a compliant bedmate for Colonel Bogey? It happens when the Pathetique underscores not only the Kenneth Alford march but also Alex Lithgow's Invercargill March.
William Dart -NZ Herald 27/8/2005
"Not every concert can boast a symphonic premiere, and Ross Harris' Symphony was inevitably the peak of the Auckland Philharmonia's programme last Thursday.
After conductor Steven Smith and the orchestra had given us a dramatic dissection of the work's crucial first page, layer by layer, Harris' virtuoso first movement left one gasping for breath.
In a explosion of orchestral colour, the music veered from plaintive bassoon to roto-tom frenzy. Rhythmically, it was volatile, austere one minute, tripping to a tambourine ostinato the next.
Yet, with even a passing contrabassoon idea being a tipped-over version of one of those first-page motifs, it was unflinchingly symphonic.
In the pastoral second movement, angular lines and pungent timbres assured astringency and, while the Finale might have not quite had its say within the composer's desired three minutes, it was a veritable whirlwind.
With cheeky xylophone, woozy clarinet and splattered second chords it zipped and zapped, chopping and changing direction like a weathercock in a twister."
William Dart -NZ Herald 2/6/2004
"Harris' At the Edge of Silence was a fragile utterance which, in the words of its composer, hovered on the edge of audibility, around the nether regions of double pianissimo. Its prismatic scoring and spry lines nod to Webern, its textural clarity and gestural precision are pure Harris. Written for these virtuoso musicians and dispensed with affection and verve, and conducted by Hamish McKeich, Edge left few colours unexplored, down to flautist Bridget Douglas' singing into her instrument, a nice bluesy touch. This work, built around a poignant reminiscence from Schumann's Piano Quartet, was the centrepiece of an evening that opened with George Crumb's 1965 Eleven Echoes of Autumn."
William Dart - NZ Herald 8/11/2004
"The other Saturday soloist was tuba player Andrew Jarvis in Ross Harris' Labyrinth, which opened in bracing style, before Harris drew us into his musical maze. Was this cryptic composer, rather fond of inserting a sly quote or two into his scores, reminding us of his own At the Edge of Silence when Bridget Douglas' flute came out of the orchestral texture? Did an extended passage for strings have something vaguely Viennese and fin-de-siecle in its veins?
This was 10 minutes teeming with incident, and incredibly beautiful when Jarvis went off on his lyrical searches over repeated string chords or wandering violins, making his F tuba sing like the most romantically inclined of horns."