At The World's Edge Festival 2024 - Concert 3: Out of Doors

This is concert three of the 2024 At The Worlds Edge Festival, which was held in Queenstown. The venue is Te Atamira in Frankton, which is a thriving art space that was set up to serve local musicians and artists. This concert was held in the main exhibition space.

Festival directors Justine Cormack and Benjamin Baker set up this festival to bring excellent classical music to the Lakes District of New Zealand. The two of them are well connected and have excellent musical friends from New Zealand and all around the world. Each year they invite a handful of them to Queenstown to team up and form various chamber music groups to perform exciting music.

At The World’s Edge 2024 is all about the mix of folk music and classical music. Most likely unsurprisingly then, this concert is full of piano music by Béla Bartók. Hungarian pianist Daniel Lebhardt is the tour-de-force in this program. A little bit later on Daniel will be joined by violinist Alexi Kenney, and Benjamin Baker. He’s also getting a short reprieve, when Young New Zealand Pianist Madeleine Xiao sits down at the piano.

Daniel Lebhardt starts with Three Rondos on Slovak folk tunes, which Béla Bartók wrote after he collected the tunes while travelling north of Hungary and documenting what he heard.

Next, Daniel is going to play us a monumental piece, which is a combination of two pieces: Béla Bartók’s Out of Doors, and Eve de Castro-Robinson’s A Ziggzagged Gaze.

For this concert Daniel Lebhardt had the idea to intersperse the movements of Bartók’s Out of Doors with movements of A Ziggzagged Gaze. Originally written as a musical answer to Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, A Ziggzagged Gaze works just as well combined with Béla Bartók’s more modern music.

Out of Doors was written after World War I, when Bartók started to explore his own personal style for which he is now so well known for.

The first movement of Out of Doors is called With Drums and Pipes, which takes its title from a Hungarian nursery rhyme, in which a little boy heals an injured stork with the power of music. The second movement is called Barcarolla, which traditionally is a love song, sung by a Venetian gondolier to his passengers. The music of barcaroles tends to have a rolling nature, mimicking the movement of the water. The third movement is Musettes, which imitates the sound of bagpipes. Number four, Night’s Music, is an impressionistic piece, depicting a calm summers evening in Hungary with crickets chirping. And maybe you can hear in the distance of folk bands playing some beautiful music. The last movement is called Chase, which is somewhat self-explanatory.

The movements of Eve de Castro-Robinson’s A Ziggzagged Gaze all are musical responses to paintings by New Zealand artists. The first is Trick or Treat, in response to Miranda Parks; then Big Pink Shimmering One, in response to Judy Miller, Return in response to Vincent Ward, and lastly Blue Lady, in response to Marie Le Lievre.

After that massive workout Daniel Lebhardt is not getting a reprieve just yet. Welcome to the stage now violinist Alexi Kenney, to play with Daniel Lebhardt Béla Bartók’s Rhapsody No.1 for violin and piano.

 

 

 

 

So now after those massive piano pieces in the first half of this concert, Daniel Lebhardt finally gets a rest. Taking the seat at the piano now is Young New Zealand Pianist Madeleine Xiao. She’s joined by Benjamin Baker on the violin, and together they play Deep River by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in an arrangement by Maud Powell. The piece is part of the collection 24 Negro melodies.

 

 

 

Now, we have Daniel Lebhardt back at the piano for a piece by 17^th century Welsh composer Thomas Tomkins, which was written in response to the execution of Charles I and the destruction of his organ at Worcester cathedral in the UK: A Sad Pavan for These Distracted Tymes.

And we end this concert from the At The Worlds Edge Festival with three short pieces by Australian composer Percy Grainger. They are: Walking Tune, Spoon River, and finally Shepherds Hey.

Well, that’s the end of the official programme of this beautiful concert, but Daniel has one more ace up his sleeves, in the form of his encore Hungarian Melody by Franz Schubert.

Recorded on 07 October 2024 at Te Atamira, Queenstown

Recording Engineer & Producer: Adrian Hollay

 

Listen to the other concerts of the 2024 At The World's Edge Festival here:

At The World's Edge Festival 2024 - Concert 1: Dispersion

At The World's Edge Festival 2024 - Concert 2: Fantazi

At The World's Edge Festival 2024 - Concert 4: Refraction

At The World's Edge Festival 2024 - Concert 5: Aengles

At The World's Edge Festival 2024 - Concert 6: Prism