Diary April 2026

cliveoconnell

MOSTLY MOZART – MANNHEIM TO PARIS

Melbourne Recital Centre & Australian National Academy of Music

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday April 1 at 11 am

Full credit to the Australian National Academy of Music, some members of which organization, under the control of horn player Carla Blackwood (herself a one-time ANAM member) will be presenting two Mozart chamber works that very few of us have experienced in live performance. First off is the Quintet in E flat for Piano and Winds K. 452 of 1784, the specific winds being oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn. There’s no indication who is the lucky pianist, but the work has a fine collegial ambience which extends to a combined cadenza for everyone but that keyboard in the finale. At the recital’s end, Blackwood performs – with a violin, two violas and cello from the ANAM personnel – an earlier Mozart from 1782: the Quintet for Horn and Strings K. 407, also in E flat. A good deal shorter than the other Mozart on the program, this work gives more prominence to the wind player and exploits the instrument’s middle register in sympathy with the rich viola output. In the middle of these benign scores comes Louise Farrenc’s 1852 Sextet in C minor for piano, flute, oboe, clarinet bassoon and horn. This is dramatic and often turbulent in the best Romantic mould, but you’d be hard pressed to retain much of its material. Anyway, she’s the Paris end of the morning’s title, but why is Mannheim mentioned? Both the Mozart works were written in Vienna, as far as I can tell. Entry is $59, with a concession rate a whole $7 cheaper; students and Under 40s get in for $49 – and don’t forget the Recital Centre’s ‘Transaction Fee’ of anywhere between $4 and $8.50 if you book online or by phone. So I wouldn’t.

ST. MATTHEW PASSION

Melbourne Bach Choir

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday April 2 at 2:30 pm

Good to see that Rick Prakhoff and his singers continue to mount major choral works, in particular this supreme masterwork of 1727 through which I first made the acquaintance of the Melbourne Bach Choir over twenty years ago. The ensemble has generally proved highly competent, ably abetted by a ‘Melbourne Baroque Orchestra‘ that I can’t remember appearing in support of any other choral forces. This year, the ripieno lines in the opening and closing choruses of Part 1 are to be given to us by the Yarra Voices, a children’s choir based on Fitzroy North. Prakhoff’s soloists are headed by tenor Andrew Goodwin, an Evangelist sans pareil. Adrian Tamburini will be singing Jesus; the soprano is Lorina Gore, Sally-Anne Russell the alto. Our tenor will be Henry Choo, while Simon Meadows and Christopher Hillier share the recitatives and arias for bass. If you’re going to do Easter with all the bells and whistles – and for Christians, this is the highpoint of the liturgical year – there’s no going past this experience, made all the more affecting because its composer was the beau ideal of a true believer. Every stage of this solid drama is intensely moving, Bach’s depiction of Christ’s route to Calvary purposeful and vivid. Seat prices fall into four grades: $139, $119, $99, $79; concessions $125, $99, $89, $69. Students pay $125, $89, $69 and $55. Everybody has to put in the Recital Centre’s fee of between $4 and $8.50, depending on the price of your ticket, if you book online or by phone. No possibility of avoiding this grasping impost as the event is usually booked out; there are only 92 seats left at the time of writing (March 20).

SEVEN LAST WORDS

Affinity Quartet

Good Shepherd Chapel, Abbotsford

Thursday April 2 at 3 pm

A much smaller scale offering than Bach’s marathon for a Passiontide observation, Haydn’s sequence of slow meditations (and a presto earthquake to finish) is an exemplary study in emotional restraint and studied simplicity. Obviously, the Affinity Quartet players are presenting the composer’s 1787 version, written at his publisher’s request and much more popular (and easier to mount) than the earlier orchestral or the later choral versions. Nothing is spelled out for you, apart from the stimulus offered by the actual words that Christ spoke in extremis. As well, there’s no getting away from the sombre effect of so many adagio movements in a row. But the end result is more refreshing than funereal. As for the performers, the quartet will be without its first violin, Shane Chen, whose place will be taken by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s principal first violin, Holly Piccoli. The rest of the Affinities remain intact: violin Nicholas Waters, viola Josef Hanna, cello Mee Na Lojewski. All of them – including the transient import – are past ANAM members. Ticket prices seem to be a matter of engaging with the purchaser’s conscience. There’s A Little Extra for $65; Standard is $45; A Little Less comes to $25. But, no matter what you decide you can pay, there’s a booking fee of $5 at every level – the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. . . .

BEETHOVEN’S SEVENTH

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Robert Blackwood Hall, Monash University

Thursday April 2 at 7 pm

Here’s the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra going back to its roots. We have a collaboration between said MSO and the Zelman Memorial Symphony Orchestra, named after the first MSO leader/founder. As far as I can make out, the MSO will set the ball rolling with one of its favourite lollipops from years ago: Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture – the jolliest of quick romps and the only section we know of the 1827-1842 opera. This will be followed by the Meditation from Massenet’s opera of 1894, Thais, with concertmaster Natalie Chee outlining the soulful top line. More opera bursts upon us with the Carmen Suite No. 1, arranged from Bizet’s 1875 opera by Ernest Guiraud in about 1885. This comprises the last part of the Prelude, the Aragonaise, Intermezzo, heroine’s Seguidilla, interlude before Act 2, and Toreador theme from the Prelude and Act IV crowd scene. After this collation of popular hits, members of the current Zelman Orchestra will sit down with the MSO and take on Beethoven’s A Major Symphony. than which there is nothing more exhilarating in the composer’s output that doesn’t involve voices. Benjamin Northey conducts. As for entry prices, standard seats cost $50, concession ones are a whole $5 cheaper, and children pay $20, while everyone is oblige to yield a $7 transaction fee for ordering online or by phone. Here also, it’s an unavoidable grift because the night is selling rapidly with only 89 seats available as of tonight (March 21).

ECHOES OF VIENNA

Ensemble Liaison & Friends

Hanson Dyer Hall, Ian Potter Southbank Cntre

Thursday April 9 at 7 pm

Well, it’s not the gemutchlich Vienna of Strauss and Franz Josef but the later one of Freud and Mahler that is being celebrated here. And not just in the form of Austrian writers. True, the Liaisons will be playing some Webern, but not the hard stuff: from 1905 comes the Langsamer Satz for string quartet which, despite the commentators, is mainly in E flat Major, not C minor and an exemplary spin-off from Verklarte Nacht. Speaking of the Schoenberg circle, we also get to hear Zemlinsky’s Op. 3 Trio, written in 1896 and originally a half-hour long work for clarinet trio – which will probably be the form it takes tonight because of the Liaison foundation personnel – clarinet David Griffiths, cello Svetlana Bogosavljevic, piano Timothy Young. For no apparent reason, the ensemble presents Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes of 1919, written for an ensemble then playing in New York. This calls for clarinet and piano as well as a string quartet. For that Antipodean touch, the group gives the premiere of a work that it commissioned: Stuart Greenbaum‘s The Drowned World, a five-movement score for the Liaison trio lasting about half an hour which takes its impetus from the Ballard dystopian novel dealing with climate change. As for the Friends, these are violins Sophie Rowell and Jasmine Milton, with viola Hanna Wallace. Tickets are simple: standard $53, concession and students $42 – but don’t forget that $4-to-$8.50 transaction fee that the Recital Centre imposes on every online or phone order. You might have to come up with this odious extra as the players are now working in the building next door to the MRC in which the Hanson Dyer space seats only 400, compared to their former base of operations: the 1.000-seater Elisabeth Murdoch Hall.

DISNEY’S BEAUTY AND THE BEAST IN CONCERT

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Friday April 10 at 6:30 pm

We’re coming up to 35 years since this Disney film came out but it’s stayed in the public eye, I’d suggest, due to the familiarity of the Broadway musical version that has been a dollar-spinner for quite a few companies since the original bastardization of 1994. Still, like Snow White, it’s been a Disney mainstay and will doubtless engage with young Melbourne audiences. Speaking of which, standard entry ranges from $88 to $136; concession holders and children pay $5 less (ah, the joy of a blatant money-grab), and you have a $7 booking fee if you order online or by phone. Which you might have to do because the event is selling fast. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra will be directed by Jen Winley, currently the West Australian Symphony Orchestra’s associate conductor and one of the few musicians endorsed to conduct Disney in Concert undertakings. I’ve seen the film a few times but cannot recall any of Alan Menken‘s songs or set pieces, not even the Academy Award-winning title song. But I reckon I’d be in a minority on this night, especially after the rousing finale to this tale of a love that supposedly transcends appearances, only to smooth out differences in the end – something like what we hope will happen with the Iran excursion.

This program will be repeated on Saturday April 11 at 1 pm and at 8 pm.

CHORAL SPLENDOUR

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday April 16 at 7 pm

You’ll get some fine Baroque majesty in this program from the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra under artistic director Paul Dyer, as well as a good dollop of Baroque instrumental power. Employing the additional services of his Brandenburg Choir, Dyer directs two of Handel’s 1727 Coronation Anthems: the inevitable Zadok the Priest, and the The King shall rejoice which was meant to be sung at the actual moment of the monarch’s crowning. Preceding these powerful D Major statements come excerpts from two Bach cantatas. The first is Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, from which 1723 work the well-known Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring chorale appears under its original title of Jesus bleibet meine Freude. There’s also the opening chorus to consider; I don’t think the singers will give us the mid-work chorale, Wohl mir, dass ich Jesum habe which is simply a pre-repeat of Jesus bleibet. Then comes the second cantata: Wir danken dir, Gott of 1731and here you have only the opening titular chorus and a monumental final chorale in Sei Lob und Preis. For the secular scraps, we’re promised Bach’s gripping D minor Double Violin Concerto from around 1730 headed by Shaun Lee-Chen and Ben Dollman, and Telemann’s difficult-to-date Overture in D which is actually a suite comprising the overture, two minuets, a passacaglia, an air, a trumpet duet called Les Postillons, and a concluding Fanfare. As usual with the Brandenburg organization, seat prices are all over the place, with standard ones ranging from $45 to $167 with reasonable reductions for concession holders and seniors, even better for students and Under 40s. And you can’t ignore the Recital Centre’s $4-to-$8.50 transaction fee that is piled onto your expenses.

This program will be repeated on Saturday April 18 at 5 pm and on Sunday April 19 at 5 pm. Seat prices are considerably more expensive for these.

MAHLER & TCHAIKOVSKY

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday April 16 at 7:30 pm

Kahchun Wong, principal conductor of the Halle, takes the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra through Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 of 1888 in the later stages of tonight’s program. This is one of the composer’s most approachable works; even the slow movement is a kind of quiet laugh with its Frere Jacques opening on a solo double bass, and you’re spared the emotional wrenches of later symphonies’ adagio segments. The orchestral resources aren’t too far over-the-top, although you need 15 woodwind and 17 brass to meet the composer’s requirements. Still, the last movement is always in danger of tipping into excess-climax country – in fact, I can’t recall a performance where it hasn’t, Starting the night is an Australian work from the MSO’s Cybec Young Composer in Residence, Andrew Aronowicz: his newly-minted The Erl-King, which the orchestra commissioned. This has nothing to do with Schubert – well, not much. It’s based on a short story by Angela Carter telling of a maiden ensnared by the woodland murderer; she turns the Goethe plot around and kills him. For a concerto, we have Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme with flugelhorn player Sergei Nakariakov replacing the usual cello soloist: it’s offering the sort of altered perspective that brings me out in hives. This Russian/Israeli musician has recorded Tchaikovsky’s defenceless work, so you’d have to assume that some recording gurus think the exercise was worth it. Your normal tickets range from $75 to $139, concession tickets are a whole $5 cheaper, children under 18 enter for $20; everybody pays the $7 transaction fee if you dare to book online or by phone.

This program will be repeated on Friday April 17 at 7:30 pm and on Saturday April 18 at 2 pm. Friday is a ‘relaxed performance’ – $35 for everyone except children who get in for $15 – and that nomenclature seems to suggest that any kind of behaviour is tolerated – even doing a Berlioz and shouting out ‘Where is the cello?’

JURASSIC PARK IN CONCERT

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday April 23 at 7:30 pm

Two films in one month? Overkill? Well, you can’t really apply that term to this saga of prehistoric mayhem in which too many characters get away from the claws and teeth of the ravening re-created to generate credibility. For all its scientific and narrative nonsense, Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster still keeps you on tenterhooks, especially when the kids are threatened by a gang of velociraptors. The score, to be played by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under Nicholas Buc, was not one of John Williams ‘ more memorable products; for my money, it never improves on the spaciousness suggested in the credits theme, although this gets worked to the limit through its wearyingly repetitive C-B-C motif. Yet the score is mildly imaginative when illustrating the behaviours of the island’s various animal denizens although I’m sorry but, when those computer-generated images trot or wing into view, I can’t help chortling at the cast’s various reactions. So what? This will be sold out: a financial, if not a critical success for the MSO. Standard seats fall between $89 and $165; concession holders and children get in for $5 less, which must be galling for the elderly and parents. Add to that the $7 transaction fee per order and it’s an expensive night out, especially for a film that lasts only a bit over two hours although the powers-that-be have determined that there will be an interval.

This program will be repeated on Friday April 24 at 7:30 pm and on Sunday April 26 at 1 pm.

SONOROUS XIII: ROS BANDT & VIJAY THILLAIMUTHU

Melbourne Recital Centre and Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio Limited

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday April 30 at 7 pm

Nothing concrete is scheduled for this exercise which lasts for two hours without interval. The cunning have already booked out the available beanbags; everybody else has to cope with your normal Primrose Potter Studio seating for $45 ($40 concession; yeah, I’m panting at the door) along with the Recital Centre’s flexible $4-to-$8.50 transaction fee. It’s No. 13 in the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio‘s series called Sonorous and nobody can doubt that it will be because we’re promised octaphonic sound as the many electronic instruments on offer are manipulated by Ros Bandt, a veteran in the field, and Vijay Thillaimuthu – a younger gun who is one of the supervisors at the MESS site. Bandt has a wide field of expertise; my main experience of her work was through her participation in the early music group La Romanesca. But that was decades ago and streets away from this evening’s form of music-making. If you’re up for a couple of hours being exposed to Sensurround with a strong emphasis on the auditory rather than the intellectual, I’d suggest this recital could be revelatory. You’d hope that the two sound manipulators have a far-reaching repertoire; that’s a helluva long time to sit passively.

Fine, but under-weight

cliveoconnell

THE DEVIL’S VIOLIN

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Sunday March 15, 2026

Ilya Gringolts

Perhaps someone was making a point about possession. A good deal of the program essay by Kate Holden for this afternoon’s Australian Chamber Orchestra concert concerned the instruments that both soloist Ilya Gringolts and his support are lucky enough to play, if not own – Guarneri, Stradivarius, Da Salo,, Maggini. As for the underworld connotations, I suppose the connection with Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata was hard to resist, although a more convincing piece to play, other than the Italian composer’s tall-tale opus, might have been L’histoire du soldat, but that presents a whole new ball-game in requisite soloists.

For this event, apart from Gringolts’ presence as soloist in several concerti and leading everything else, only three extra musicians came into play: theorboist/Baroque guitarist Simon Martyn-Ellis. harpsichordist Masumi Yamamoto, and violist Thomas Chawner moonlighting from Brisbane’s Orava Quartet. In line with a mainly ‘old’ music undertaking, Gringolts confined his forces to six violins (including himself), pairs of violas and cellos, and the perennial Maxime Bibeau on double bass.

As for what Baroque music we heard, the visiting guest director offered two Vivaldi concerti – a solo and a double violin – as well as the Tartini sonata arranged by the ACO’s own Bernard Rofe for all the strings to swan in and out, Geminiani’s Concerto Grosso No. 12 called La Follia, and the slightest of lollipops in Westhoff’s Imitazione della campane extracted from his Violin Sonata No. 3 which was published in 1694.

Among all this period material, Gringolts inserted a trio of more or less contemporary scores. In the first half, we heard Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No. 2 of 1987 in an arrangement (unacknowledged) for the available eleven players, who appeared to share the original four lines while the director spent a good deal of time indicating the bar-lines.. As a lead-in to the second half, the strings played Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Op. 9 Aria for string quartet from 1942, also amplified anonymously for the available forces. But the most recent composition on offer proved to be Paul Stanhope‘s Giving Ground, composed in 2021 to an ACO commission; this was based on the La Follia theme/bass and, at the conclusion to this program, leached into the Geminiani concerto/variations.

As the exercise progressed, you became aware of how much Gringolts was invested in everything, for all that the exercise lasted about half-an-hour less than normal. Naturally, he took the lead (only) role in Westhoff’s exercise in rapid broken chords; slowing down to break the 41 bars-worth rhythmic (and harmonic) monotony and varying his intonation between the bland and the rough; the piece giving us a chance to re-familiarise ourselves (Gringolts has toured twice over previous years for the ACO) with his individual voice which is a highly malleable one.

We moved straight into the solo Vivaldi concerto, D minor RV 237 published in 1716-17. After an initial bout of arpeggiating chords, the first movement’s solo part starts at bar 40 and runs through some familiar passage-work tropes with a rise in the interest level from bar 121 onwards for some athletic bouncing up to a high register in a neatly-packaged train of semiquaver foursomes. After an unassuming 32-bar Adagio which was an easy effusion for Gringolts and which he delivered without a trace of sentimentality, we arrived at the slightly elliptical Allegro finale which bounded past like a watery chablis that didn’t hit the sides. In the canon of memorable Vivaldi concertos, this one didn’t rank.

On to Gubaidulina’s challenging work which opens with a concerted examination of the note G, articulating it in several ways on various levels before moving to a more material-heavy second part and a brief conclusion. What made this performance more interesting than most was seeing the interweaving of individual players in the opening pages – an organizational feat of some distinction – before the more conventional later stages of the work. Still, Gubaidulina appeared to regard her score as the solution to a problem and, despite the finest efforts of insightful musicologists like Judith Lochhead and Joseph Williams, the work presents as more of a rigorous discourse than anything else, after its arresting opening.

As for the Tartini sonata (the composer alleged its composition date to be 1713; commentators suggest thirty years or so later), Gringolts began with an orthodox continuo of Martyn-Ellis, Yamamoto and the ACO principal cellist, Timo-Veikko Valve. I believe that the ACO’s other ranks started entering around the Tempo giusto but their efforts were all broad strokes filling out Tartini’s sparse texture. As you’d expect, the focus throughout this well-known work fell on Gringolts whose various modes of attack gave interest to these well-thumbed pages.

As you’re aware if you know the work, diabolic suggestions are non-existent. The piece proceeds in a respectably ordered path with some gymnastics for the violin in the Sogni del autore last movement. But you would have to be unusually susceptible to extra-musical suggestions to find anything but an assertive benignity across the composer’s canvas, especially in those euphonious trills that pop up to general satisfaction in the concluding pages.

Weinberg’s brief essay in chromatic slips and slides has its charms in quartet form; expanded, it somehow lost its harmonic interest, possibly because the inner workings sounded less striking when weighting had to be redistributed. But the great benefit was the timbral variety on offer with regard to those chugging quavers, especially a long passage for viola which here barely struck you as wearing even though the relentless chain of quaver thirds, fifths and sixths lasts from bar 33 to bar 53 in a piece that consists of only 63 bars.

The ACO’s principal violin Satu Vanska collaborated with Gringolts in the Vivaldi Concerto for Two Violins RV 507 from somewhere between 1713 and 1717. In this happy work – despite its brief E minor central Largo – the solo responsibilities are pretty fairly divided, except for the first Allegro where Gringolts had more of the running. For all the familiar sequence of harmonic steps and jaunty melodies, the chief interest here lay in the contrasting sound-colours of the soloists. Vanska’s output remained refined and lyrically eloquent but with an unflappable rigour, while Gringolts performed with more assertive verve.

You couldn’t call it brash or anywhere near coarse, but the visitor gave this rather unexceptional work an urgent vigour – just as athletic in treating the busy line as Vanska but offering a vital contrast in those frequent passages of close imitation, although he shepherded his dynamic when both soloists were in communal attack. Nothing here like the close similarity that David and Igor Oistrakh offered in the Bach D minor, or when Deller father and son worked through Sound the trumpet; rather, an unabashed juxtaposition of opposites.

Finally, we came to Stanhope’s clever set of variants on La Follia which seemed to be sticking to its harmonic last, except that it meandered off the prescriptive path easily enough and was able to employ sound-production techniques that wouldn’t have occurred to Corelli or Geminiani. You could tell when the Australian work ended and the Italian master’s 1729 concerto began but the blending was a deft move from Stanhope’s review of his opening bass-heavy scrapes to the spare statement that begins the older work.

Mind you, by the time Gringolts, Vanska and their forces reached the end of Geminiani’s 23 variations, I was all Follia-ed out and the later instances of vaulting virtuosity came close to wearing out their welcome. Not that you could find fault with Gringolts who maintained his enthusiasm until the end with an engrossing employment of dynamics and attack that exemplified what every musician has to do with these bare-boned scores: enrich listeners with an all-embracing view and find an emotional expansiveness to mine, rather than just work through the works’ outlines and only realize the notes. However, next time this excellent violinist visits, I’d welcome a lot more substance; fewer small bursts, no matter how pleasurable.

All over the place

cliveoconnell

MY HEART

Danae Killian

Move Records MCD 673

To be honest, I’m not on the wave-length of this Move Records CD from Melbourne pianist Danae Killian. Eight separate works provide the performer with plenty of material but seven of these break up the core of this presentation: a three-part construct by Killian called My Prussian Blue Heart. Originally written in 2017, then revised in 2024, this work is scored for pianist, tarot cards and piano – which strikes me as partly tautological in this case as Killian is definitely the piano performer and, I assume, takes on the pianist (speaker?) role, mainly because no other performers are listed on the liner notes/leaflet.

Exactly why the composer singles out that particular colour as a cardiac descriptor has me beat. Apart from its use by artists from the 17th century on, it also has strong medical applications; perhaps that’s a relevant association as the musical work could have some kind of therapeutic value for the composer/performer. Or it may have to do with Killian’s source of inspiration in German/Jewish poet Elsa Lasker-Schuler’s novel Mein Herz of 1912, an effusion of startling self-expression and revelation.

Killian’s first inter-leaver is Schoenberg, represented by his Drei Klavierstucke Op. 11 of 1909. This expressionist monument is followed by Mobius of 2012 by Melbourne writer Howard Dillon. Then, from another Melbourne resident, Christine McCombe‘s Asphyxed from 1991. After the middle movement of Killian’s composition, we hear some more Australiana in film-composer Amelia Barden‘s brief The Seventh Centre from 1992; and we stick with the Victorian region of the continent through senior jazz musician Colin McKellar‘s Birth Music of 2006 or 2008 or 2018, depending on your source.

Next, we make a temporary swerve geographically to Gregers Brinch from Denmark whose four-movement Two Minds suite dates from 2004. Then, just before the 39-second conclusion to My Prussian Blue Heart, back to home-base for Evan J. Lawson who appears through his Sikinnis III of 2015. He is the artistic director of the Forest Collective organization with which Killian is closely associated.

Another body that has proved a haven for several of these contemporary voices is the Melbourne Composers’ League, a body that has been operating for almost 30 years and is in the bread-and-butter business of presenting new music by local composers – although that categorization now stretches to include interstate and international voices, even if the avowed context of its presentations is covered by the term ‘Asian-Pacific’. As far as I can recall, my only experiences with this sector of Melbourne’s musical world has been through recordings, but it had an ardent advocate for many years in my erstwhile colleague-critic on The Age, Dr. Joel Crotty.

The first movement of Killian’s opus is a monologue which focuses on a single character: the pianist. You hear no music, from a piano or otherwise; just a pretty brief display of self-awareness on the narrator’s part. She appears to be suffering from an identity crisis but, to my mind, even if she fuses with the pianist figure, answers are a long way off. The second movement introduces piano sounds produced by striking the strings manually before settling into the orthodox note-production technique. Asa for the text, this has abruptly turned into a dramatic display bordering on sprechstimme but vehemently dramatic at its best, phantasmagoric more often in its imagery.

In fact, this long scena is highly aggressive, the piano’s innards a source of violent percussive attacks that reflect the narrator’s ramblings that present as a kind of image-laden narrative asking a good deal of the listener just to keep track of what’s being delivered. For all that, the admissions and self-observations move all too easily into the banal, both when concerned with mental states as well as physical. On top of this, we are treated to vocalizations of a hectic nature, yells and cries leading nowhere in particular. And the movement ends with a German text that could come from Lasker-Schuler, the whole singing to a final ‘Sterbe ich’ declaration – somewhat unnerving when you consider the previous indications of violent action.

As for the concluding phase of this work, it reverts to unaccompanied monologue, the pianist-subject in a happier place without any singing or piano scrapes – just a narrator reporting her current state of contented emotional stasis. Well, we’ve had a pianist as the focus of the work’s stages, and the middle segment features a piano in all its late 20th century glory. The tarot cards are mentioned but are irrelevant to this CD experience. Killian states that the full work also contains two interludes and a postlude; these interludes are apparently subsumed in the other composers’ music, and I assume the postlude disappears intro the ether.

As for the rest of the CD’s content, Killian’s reading of the Schoenberg piano pieces impresses for its strength of purpose. She is a stickler for observing every dynamic marking and is responsive to the frequent changes of pace across the composer’s free-flowing canvases. Very few details raise question marks, although the laid-back left hand entry at bar 45 of the second Massig seemed a puzzling choice. But the brisk oscillations between placidity and rapid outbursts that make the concluding Bewegt a sterling challenge for any pianist were unusually clear-cut and focused.

Dillon’s score lives up to its title by offering a repetitive cycle of individual notes and mini-chords that weave in and out of themselves in a pattern that seems like a moto perpetuo but allows for rubato moments – and a dead halt about half-way through. After which, Dillon appears to be considering his material in discrete fragments, as though the strip has become obstructed. Indeed, this meditative pattern remains with us for the remaining pages of the work as its world remains in a brooding ambience until the end, as though the performer realizes that the mobius construct leads nowhere.

By contrast, McCombe’s Asphyxed gives us a landscape of (mainly) single notes that creep slowly forward, interrupted at least twice by short, sharp gruppetti of chords and loud exclamation points. For all that, I don’t understand the title’s relevance nor the work’s intentions, even if Killian’s reading shows a willing sensitivity. What The Seventh Centre refers to escapes me also but in it Barden has constructed a soundscape as remote as McCombe’s, if one built on a clearer framework and employing a more obvious harmonic structure while occupying less than half the time-length.

Written around the time of his daughter’s birth, McKellar bases his work on a combination of bell-ringing charts and standard jazz progressions. He also has a penchant for single notes; understandable, given the nature of campanology in practice. Yet, for all the projected relationship between the two sources, Birth Music seems fragmented – possibly because of those single-note passages that are relieved by chords that have enjoyed permutation according to the bell chart being employed. We get idea after idea but it’s hard to find a focus.

Brinch’s first movement has the same title as his work and it cleverly proposes either two personalities or two aspects of the same consciousness. Each gets its individual say before the composer fuses them in concord and discord, although the les flamboyant mind has the last word – or does it? Reflective Intersections is less overt, although it opens with a meandering right-hand line supported by left-hand chords. As the piece moves beyond the half-way mark, the two intermesh and the texture becomes bass-heavy with whatever melody is left subsumed into sometimes gruff, other times brooding textures.

Third in this series, Homage, is something of a funeral march, especially in its later stages despite a florid upper texture. The piece opens with celebratory flourishes but soon settles into more sombre strophes. Of course, much depends on who or what is being paid homage and, being unaware of anything relevant, we are left to appreciate these pages as blanks, abstracts without context. Much of Drought is set at either end of the keyboard, so that initially I thought the low rumbles signified a protesting earth while the tinkles in alt were suggesting distant rain. But then, you wonder if Brinch’s drought is a physical one, or more simply a spiritual/emotional absence. Whichever it is, the writing is powerful and suggestive on its many disparate and (eventually) combined levels.

Last of Killian’s interstices is Lawson’s Sikinnis III, third (obviously) of a series based on a dance form from ancient Greek satyr plays. At the opening, I find this hard to fathom as the work’s progress is extremely slow, the composer celebrating the piano’s sustaining pedal with plenty of room for extended resonances. This composer is also a member of the single-note brigade that populates this CD. But then, the piece’s final pages are heavy with clangorous chords that enjoy a long fade to silence. It’s time for the less-aware among us to have a look at the lighter products of Aeschylus and Euripides to find some sort of footing for Lawson’s vision.

And that’s it. Killian has presented this collation in live concert for nearly a decade now and I suspect the exercise is more impressive in actual performance. I found individual works here very impressive but the whole strikes me as a collage of unfused parts – which you might say is what a collage is. Well, no: the craft comes in the fusion, as old Kurt used to say (and, if he didn’t. he should have). With My Heart, especially the disc’s focal work, I can’t detect more than a none-too-convincing melange.

Diary March 2026

cliveoconnell

JEAN-YVES THIBAUDET

Melbourne Recital Centre

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday March 3 at 7:30 pm

A popular visitor, the French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet has appeared here as soloist and fronting concertos. Apart from his craft, he brings to the stage a peacock’s couture. Does it make a difference that parts of him glitter? Not really; if you’re offended by such quiet flamboyance, you can always look at the Murdoch Hall ceiling or ponder the ushers perched on the side walls. Tonight he is playing all the Debussy Preludes (written between 1909 and 1912) and his expertise is unquestionable; after all, he has recorded the two volumes twice – in 1996 and notably in 2023 with a cover design by Vivienne Westwood. You’d have to anticipate that Thibaudet is going to take his time over the 24 pieces, as the Recital Centre publicity refers to a length of one hour 50 minutes. Even if that includes a 20-minute interval, we’ll have a leisurely view of these atmospheric studies. But that seems to be his way; where younger players take about 75 or 77 minutes in their readings of both livres, this pianist’s earlier recording brings them in at 82 1/2 minutes. Still, he’s getting faster: his 2023 double LP performances come in at 81 1/2 minutes. Full adult tickets range from $79 to $139; concession holders can get a $20 deduction in the middling-quality seats, while Under 40s can get into the same sections for $49. As usual, you face the Recital Centre’s sliding transaction fee of between $4 and $8.50 – the organization’s peculiar form of book-keeping where no books are involved.

2026 SEASON OPENING GALA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday March 5 at 7:30 pm

Starting the year proper after those Myer Music Bowl shenanigans, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra settles into staid mode under its chief conductor Jaime Martin. Tonight’s flavour is American, aiming for the popular jugular with the Star Wars: Suite for Orchestra by that Hollywood colossus, John Williams. It was published in 2000 when the composer was in the throes of coping with Lucas’ second trilogy and the melange of themes has become part of our consciousness. The evening’s guest is French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet who plays the solo role in Gershwin’s Concerto in F of 1925, which he recorded in 2010. Despite its creaking structural bones, especially in the final Allegro agitato, this score is appealingly brash and sentimental in turns with some energetic bravura passages for the soloist. To end, Martin directs Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances of 1940, the composer’s only work written completely in America. Always harking back to his past experiences, this three-movement construct is eventually a buoyant joy, showing the same high spirits as you hear in the Paganini Rhapsody. Tickets range from $81 to $139, with concession holders getting in for $5 cheaper. You also have a $7 transaction fee which always strikes me as particularly grasping when you consider the capacity of Hamer Hall. But you have to front up the cash to be sure of a seat as it’s bound to be a popular event.

This program will be repeated on Saturday March 7 at 7:30 pm.

MOZART’S SPRING

Australian Haydn Ensemble

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday March 11 at 7 pm

As far as I can tell, the Australian Haydn Ensemble is a string quartet comprising violins Skye McIntosh and Matthew Greco, viola Karina Schmitz and cello Daniel Yeadon. These members all appear to have their professional lives in Sydney and this recital will be their first collegial Melbourne appearance. Welcome, brothers and sisters, to town. What are you offering? Haydn? Oh, great. We’re to hear the Op. 33, No. 3 of 1781 nicknamed The Bird because of some acciaccaturas in the first violin part of the opening movement’s first bars. Nonetheless, it’s 19 to 20 minutes of sparkling C Major magic. Then Mendelssohn’s early E flat, written when he was a tyro teenager in 1823, two years before the superb Octet; it lasts for about 24/5 minutes. Finally, Mozart K 387 in G, nicknamed Spring although it was written in the Vienna December of 1782. The first of the ‘Haydn’ quartets, the work is a model of the composer’s genius at melodic curvature, and it comes in at a little under 30 minutes. All of which, even allowing for an interval, lies well below the specified two hours’ duration of this event. Perhaps we’ll have lots of talk; oh joy. Your tickets cost $60, $45 concession, or $55 if you’re a Senior which seems generationally odd. Also, you will cope with the Recital Centre’s graduated transaction fee – anywhere between $4 and $8.50 – if you book online. It might be worthwhile just showing up at the box office on the night.

ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday March 12 at 7:30 pm

Don’t know about you but I find the most energising part of Strauss’s long exercise of 1896 in musical philosophizing comes at the start when the orchestral tutti cuts out and you’re left with the full organ C Major chord. How they’ll achieve this effect in the organ-less Hamer Hall will be a delight to watch and hear. Even better will be the machinations to get a decent blast in Costa Hall. Anyway, it’s downhill all the way after that powerful opening as the composer tries to illustrate selections from Nietzsche’s rambling tome. Preceding this exercise, a less-swollen Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under chief conductor Jaime Martin escorts Maria Duenas through Beethoven’s Violin Concerto of 1806. A young Spanish musician, Duenas has recorded the work and may be playing her own cadenzas to the second and third movements. At the night’s start, for an overture we hear a 2020 work by Australian writer Melody Eotvos: her The Deciding Machine of 2020 which serves several purposes. It’s a memorial to the centenary of women’s suffrage, a celebration of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, and holds a titular reference to Ada Lovelace who wrote the first computer algorithm for Babbage’s projected ‘analytical engine’. Your standard tickets range from $51 to $142, with concession holders relishing a $5 discount. Children are charged $20 and you have to pay $7 if you book online or by phone. About this last, I wonder what would happen if you questioned exactly where this fee goes; e.g., which employee is paid for handling your credit card details, especially if you’re a regular client.

This program will be repeated in Costa Hall, Geelong on Friday March 13 at 7:30 pm and again in Hamer Hall on Saturday March 14 at 2 pm.

SHANGHAI SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Friday March 13 at 7:30 pm

In a welcome display of camaraderie, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is presenting a large group of visitors in the form of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, conducted by music director Long Yu who has held this position for 17 years. Half their one-night stand is Chinese music, while the second part is a warhorse very familiar to Melbourne audiences: Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2 of 1907 – a big sprawling series of four canvases packed full of Romantic surges and emotional richness. Before that, we hear some selections from the ten-movement Chinese Kitchen: A Feast of Flavours, written in 2024 to a Shanghai Symphony Orchestra commission from 30-year-old composer Elliot Leung who has enjoyed remarkable success in China and the United States, bridging the Trump/Xi divide with aplomb. As for a soloist, the orchestra hosts pianist Serena Wang, a San Francisco-born 21-year-old talent who fronts the 2009 Er Huang Concerto by Qigang Chen, Messiaen’s last pupil. The title refers to a type of Beijing opera, Chen employing tunes from that art-form in a lavish orchestral palette. To hear these guests, you’ll pay between $81 and $139, concession holders enjoying a munificent $5 reduction; children get in for $20, but everyone faces the $7 transaction fee – a shameful example of grift generated by our dependence on credit cards and online booking.

THE DEVIL’S VIOLIN

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

Saturday March 14 at 7:30 pm

Back for the third time, violinist Ilya Gringolts takes the Australian Chamber Orchestra through a program that oscillates between the old and the new with an even hand. Clearly, the entertainment’s core is intended to be Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Violin Sonata in G minor which the composer said he wrote in 1713, even if those in the know claim it came from about thirty years later; what a dreamer. Scoring with two concertos is Vivaldi: first, with the RV 237 in D minor, possibly written in 1617 and notable for a sprightly third movement; and the C Major RV 507 for two violins that Gringolts gets to play with ACO principal Satu Vanska in a demonstration of canonic interplay and endless chains of thirds. Fleshing out the Baroque content will be Geminiani’s Concerto Grosso No 12, La Follia, which is an arrangement of a Corelli original and which keeps to the well-known theme throughout. Starting the program is Johann Paul von Westhoff’s Imitation of the Bells from his Sonata No. 3 in D minor, published in 1694 and consisting of 41 bars loaded with solo violin exercises intended to simulate a carillon. Moving to more recent times, Gringolts leads a string orchestra version of Gubaidulina’s brief String Quartet No 2 of 1987 which screams individuality from every bar, so having the ACO players handle it three or four to a line will be more than intriguing. Mieczyslaw Weinberg represents another facet of Soviet composition and we hear his 1942 Aria for string quartet, presumably organized for the ACO forces. As well, Paul Stanhope received an ACO commission for Giving Ground, written in 2020 and based on the La Follia chord progression, so that you have a traditional and a (pretty) contemporary look at this famous sequence. As usual with a hall the size of Hamer, prices range wildly and widely. You can start at $30 for a student and pay top adult for $148. The handling fee is $8.50, which is a tall order for your student struggler; probably why you don’t see many of them at these Sunday afternoon events.

This program will be repeated on Sunday March 15 at 2:30 in Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne, and on Monday March 16 in the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall at 7:30 pm.

TOUR DE FORCE #1

Corpus Medicorum & the Royal Melbourne Hospital Foundation

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Sunday March 15 at 5 pm

This bod of medical personnel trying their hands at taxing serious music here takes on two cornerstones of the Russian repertoire under regular conductor Fabian Russell. The Corpus Medicorum showed more than competence the last time I heard them, but that was some decades ago and you might reasonably expect that their achievement level would have risen. In any event, their cause is a noble one: raising funds towards the treatment of lung cancer patients at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. To this end, the organizers have gained the services of Alexander Gavrylyuk to take the main role in Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, written in 1909 and forever linked in Australian minds, for better or worse, with the names of David Helfgott/Geoffrey Rush/Shine. Partnered with this redoubtable work is Prokofiev’s most famous symphony, No 5 in B flat Major of 1944. As a Soviet-era score, this stands at the top of the pile through its inventiveness, integration and striking individuality. And it has been the subject of many recordings by eminent conductors, so you can easily familiarise yourself for comparative purposes with a score that was once as regularly heard as Shostakovich’s No. 5. Tickets for a full adult cost $70, concession holders enjoy a whopping reduction to $40, and students pay $30. But then you have the $4-to-$8.50 fee imposed by the Recital Centre if you book online or by phone. I’d be tempted to show up on the day; at the time of writing (February 28), there are about 450 seats available across the Murdoch Hall.

STRAVINSKY & CHINDAMO

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday March 19 at 7:30 pm

Happy company, then, for our own jazz master Joe Chindamo. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under principal guest conductor Benjamin Northey begins its work tonight with Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante defunte, from the year 1899 when the composer was studying with Faure. This exercise in introspective retrospection lasts a little less than 7 minutes. Stravinsky is represented by his epoch-making The Rite of Spring ballet that shocked the public – well, the Western part of it – at its premiere on March 29, 1913. Mind you, it wasn’t long before the world had a lot more on its mind than the not-quite-emigre Russian composer’s full-scale innovations. This lasts about 35 minutes. Which leaves a lot of space for Chindamo – the MSO’s composer in residence this year – to fill with his commission piece Are there any questions? which will involve the services of mezzo-soprano Jessica Aszodi and the MSO Chorus. I don’t have much information about this new composition, except that it takes its title from Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale novel, and it is a requiem. I’ve seen and heard Chindamo play only a few times over the years, even more rarely as a composer but his handling of large-scale forces will be a significant demonstration of his participation, from about 15 years ago, in serious music enterprises. Full adult tickets fall between $75 and $139, concessions are a ludicrous $5 cheaper, and children’s seats are priced at $20. You will add $7 an order if you try to book online or by phone. The alternative? Just come on the night, cash in hand.

This program will be repeated on Saturday March 21 at 7:30 pm.

THE POETRY OF PIANO DUO

Hoang Pham Productions

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday March 21 at 2:30 pm

Two doctoral graduates from the Manhattan School of Music, Allie Xinyu Wang and Daniel Le are combining their talents to present a 75-minute tour of some significant contributions to the duo piano repertoire. The musicians begin with some scraps from Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite of 1908, which most of us know better in an orchestrated form that came three years later. Then follows one of the repertoire’s masterpieces in Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn which came out in 1873 in two scores: piano duo and orchestra. Just like the Ravel, we know the orchestral version much better than the smaller-scale piece; a shame, as the latter is a joy to play and less orotund to the ear. Staying with the strength, Wang and Le give us Rachmaninov’s early Suite No. 1 from 1893, the composer being 20 at the time he wrote these four reactions to poems and which he dedicated to Tchaikovsky. We jump forward to Lutoslawski’s 1941 Variations on a Theme by Paganini which treats the Caprice No. 24 with respect (until the end) and an acerbic harmonic vocabulary. Finally, the musicians leap across the Atlantic for part of William Bolcom‘s The Garden of Eden: four ragtime stages in the Fall, originally written for solo piano in 1969, then transmuted for two pianos in 1994 (half of them) and 2006 (the other half). The extract we’re to hear is The Serpent’s Kiss which takes on fantasia qualities throughout its D minor length and is the longest in the set. Standard tickets are $62, concession $50, student $38 – this last, a strange number but nowhere near as odd as the Recital Centre’s universally applied fee of between $4 and $8.50 for labouring intensively over your credit charge use if you book online or phone.

CHOPIN PIANO RECITAL

Hoang Pham Productions

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday March 21 at 6 pm

Acting as both producer and artist, pianist Hoang Pham plays a 75-minute program of various pieces from the extraordinary larder that is Chopin’s contribution to piano music. He begins with the C-sharp minor Fantaisie-Impromptu, that favourite from 1834 that sets three against four (or six against eight) in a satisfying musical mesh. We then move to the Ballade No 1 in G minor of 1835, which is another very popular recitalist’s choice for its coruscating virtuosity and overt drama. The Two Nocturnes Op. 27 give any listener a welcome experience in tonal subtleties, the first in C sharp minor and the second in D flat Major, this latter showing the composer in 1836 already at his refined best with some astonishingly delicate fioriture. Pham then takes on the Ballade No. 4 in F minor, written in 1842 and a remarkably difficult piece to bring off, even for experts in this composer. The Two Waltzes Op. 64 of 1847 follow: another pairing of D flat Major (the so-called Minute Waltz) and that well-known C-sharp minor one used in Les Sylphides. Taking on another form that the composer made his own, the pianist offers us the Three Mazurkas Op. 63 of 1846, of which the last in C sharp minor may ring some bells. To end, Pham breaks over us with the Polonaise No. 6 in A flat: one of the most recognizable works by the composer and a test for every pianist with a battery of difficulties, including that energising Trio with its octave semiquaver bass-line. A standard ticket to this recital costs $68, with concession holders enjoying a measly and fiscally inexplicable reduction to $61.20 while students pay $34. Everyone who books online or by phone will also have to stump up the Centre’s $4-to-$8.50 ‘Transaction Fee’, in which extraction art is meant to make friends of the mammon of iniquity.

ART OF THE SCORE: JAMES HORNER

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Friday March 27 at 7:30 pm

Yet again, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is hitting the film score theme, although this time the players will not be providing the soundtrack to a full movie. The aim is to celebrate the career of American writer James Horner who died over ten years ago in a plane crash. Across his career, this composer wrote music for a large number of films, some of which even I know: Aliens (1986), Apollo 13 (1995), Braveheart (1995), Jumanji (1995), Titanic (1997), The Perfect Storm (2000), Troy (2004), and Avatar (2009). Nicholas Buc will be conducting suites and individual excerpts from Horner’s oeuvre stretching (according to MSO publicity) definitely to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), The Rocketeer (1991) ‘and many more’, some of which have been mentioned in my list of familiarities. I’m assuming that these extracts won’t be accompanying specific scenes from the various films; if that’s the case, it undermines the whole purpose of the music itself which only lives in the power of its suggestiveness. All credit to Horner but I can’t think of a single theme from any of the films I’ve seen for which he wrote the soundtrack – except that Titanic number. Taking fans through the program, two presenters/hosts will negotiate the narrative path: Andrew Pogson, the MSO’s Special Projects Manager, and Dr. Dan Golding, Professor of Media at Monash University. Obviously, my lack of recall/filmic insight means nothing because there are plenty of people for whom the Horner music must be memorable; the MSO has scheduled three concerts in a row to celebrate his music. Mind you, the balcony in Hamer Hall is unavailable for these concerts; further, at the time of writing (February 28), plenty of seats are available. Standard price comes in anywhere between $93 and $150; concession holders pay a whole $5 less, if they can be bothered; everyone faces the objectionable $7 transaction fee if booking online or by phone. As I say, it’s a month away but nobody seems to be rushing to get in.

This program will be repeated on Saturday March 28 at 7:30 pm and on Sunday March 29 at 2 pm.

SOUVENIRS: BRAHMS AND TCHAIKOVSKY STRING SEXTETS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Iwaki Auditorium, Southgate

Sunday March 29 at 11 am

A day after presenting this program at the Castlemaine Town Hall, musicians from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra come back to town with the rarely-heard Brahms Sextet No.1 of 1860, and the much more well-known Tchaikovsky Souvenir de Florence Sextet, written in 1890 after several years of difficult gestation and followed by an uneasy revision/afterbirth. Even so, the Russian composer’s nervous energy makes his work an illuminating pleasure: an excellent coupling of sophistication and (in the later two movements) simplicity. The Brahms is another matter, soaking in warmth right from the broad opening cello statement to the same instrument’s tenor clef melody of the concluding Rondo‘s initial bars. Coupling these scores was a happy inspiration for someone (Michelle Wood, it would seem from the advertising bumf) in the MSO and these players will have just as large a chance of success as anybody, permanent string sextet combinations being few in number. They are violins Kathryn Taylor and Emily Beauchamp, violas Katharine Brockman and Aidan Filshie, cellos Wood and Anna Pokorny. Part of the organization’s long-lasting Chamber series, tickets cost $55, concession holders still only getting an insulting $5 reduction. And you have to engage with the booking platform to find out that the orchestra will apply its customary $7 transaction fee at this recital; probably unavoidable because these events are highly popular – which makes this example of fiscal greed all the more contemptible.

New voices not modern

cliveoconnell

STARBURST

Omega Ensemble

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday February 18, 2026

David Rowden

Back for another year of Melbourne endeavours, the Omega Ensemble, a Sydney-based contemporary music group, opened its 2026 account with a 90-minute-long program that began with an American work and ended in an Australian composition. Neither of these spoke a convincingly modern language but both found favour with this audience which reacted positively after each. In the middle came two concertos: Gerald Finzi’s Concerto for Clarinet and Strings of 1949, which has clearly been on the musicians’ minds since the visit last year of Michael Collins, a noted exponent of this work, here fronted by Omega artistic director/founder David Rowden; and the 1933 Piano Concerto No. 1 for Piano, Trumpet and String Orchestra by Shostakovich which featured Omega stalwart Vatche Jambazian taking on the keyboard role while the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s principal David Elton negotiated the brass line.

As a preliminary foray, a string nonet – which constituted the Ensemble for this evening – played the concert’s title work by Jessie Montgomery which has proved one of the composer’s more popular works, I’d suggest, because of its sunny, festive nature. Written in 2012, the composer specifies a minimum requirement of 3/3/3/2/1 for participant numbers; in this case, she got two cellos and a double bass, but had to be content with two each of the upper strings.

Listening to or watching recordings of this work gives you some insight into contemporary music playing in the US as compared to the UK and here. While the American orchestras approach this score with caution, a body like the Philharmonia gives it a vigour and elegance of execution that elevates the music above a kind of plodding insistence. Just so with the Omega group which gave a vital and involving execution of a work that is strong on ostinati and semiquaver runs while short on rhythmic or harmonic innovation.

Add a significant virtue in that the work lasts just long enough and the conductor-less performers made Starburst into an initial burst of energy which was carried on to the Finzi concerto. Just as well that Rowden pitched his dynamic to the accompaniment because the composer has most of his forces playing divisi at some point, particularly the cellos in the first Allegro and, with the best will in the world, one player per line is stretching your volume requirements a long way. This lack of depth also meant the movement’s big moments, like the peroration up to the clarinet’s entry at Number 1 in the Boosey & Hawkes score, the triple forte outburst seven bars before Number 5, those insistent Gs from everybody before the cadenza, and the last eight powerful maestoso bars, came over as light imitations of the real thing.

A similar difficulty infected the following Adagio which was impossible to linger over, senza rigore, because of a lack of full-body timbre. You couldn’t say that Rowden rushed through it but the ritardando and ritenuto moments, apart from that before the clarinet’s first entry ad lib., were hardly spacious enough for this eloquent, elongated lyric. Still, the combined forces rose to the occasion of the movement’s powerful highpoint at Number 5 where the main theme is given in an unexpectedly vehement voice. As well, you would be hard of heart not to be moved by the last pages of this section, Rowden’s progress to the last F finely balanced.

Finzi’s finale, a folk-tune reminiscent allegro, passed without making much impact, apart from its melodic fluency and the soloist’s flexibility of articulation. It strikes me as a stop-start series of pages where striding certainty peters out regularly for ‘busy’ work, interrupted by a hard-to-ignore flavour of the Introduction and Allegro in the strings’ ritornello before Number 8. At the end, you’ve have to say this was a worthy outing for the score but one deficient in gravity and variety of timbre, particularly as the string body is responsible for the carrying-forward of the score; more so than the soloist, I’d suggest.

For the Shostakovich, Jambazian played the keyboard with his back to us and without a lid on his instrument. What followed was inevitable: his sound flew up to the Murdoch Hall ceiling and the biting attack of the composer’s pianistic brilliance was dissipated. Mind you, with such small string forces, that had its compensations but it gave Elton’s trumpet an unusual prominence. As with the Finzi work, this one also suffered from insufficient strings; not in the soloists-absent (for a short while) stretches, like the Allegretto in Movement 1, but when piano and strings are operating imitation around Numbers 21 and 22 (also in a Boosey & Hawkes edition) – you could see the gestures but the output sounded faint.

Even with the muted piano, you could hear that Jambazian was in control of this score; quite obviously in the Lento with its outer casing of a mournful slow waltz holding some highly dramatic pages. Elton’s treatment of the solo starting at Number 34 in tandem with Jambazian generated an impressive elegiac moment or two, if muted in timbre and nature. But it’s a startlingly fraught segment in a concerto where the emphasis is emphatically on hectic jollity.

Again, the Moderato interlude gave Jambazian the opportunity to be heard clearly in the solo that opens these pages; welcome after previous showings, the whole not helped by some hefty employment of the sustaining pedal. Our string nonet gave a forceful account of the lament that breaks from them, mutes off, a bar after Number 45, bringing another tragic undercurrent to this chameleonic score.

Which reaches its apex in the breakneck finale and found both soloists in fine fettle. Jambazian’s solo contributions at the upper level of his instrument travelled well enough but the two solos sounded muddled, especially that starting in F minor at Number 76 which sounds like a Hungarian Dance gone wrong. It’s hard to misfire with the ongoing exhilaration that fills these pages and, while the strings were often completely subsumed by the pianist’s ferocity, they were at least able to make their points during the intervening commentaries – and supporting Elton who maintained a cogent and expressive line to the insistent final bars.

Last came a new concerto written for Rowden and Elton, commissioned by the Omega Ensemble: A Turning Sky. The composer is Lachlan Skipworth from Western Australia who has here favoured the traditional three-movement format; as well, he employs an unadventurous rhythmic foundation and a harmonic scheme that delights the ears of the groundlings but does little for any soul in search of a 21st century language.

You’re left in no doubt that Skipworth has a facility for well-constructed melody and he negotiated flamboyant roles for both his soloists, although Elton enjoyed more of the limelight, especially in concerted passages for both soloists. But I’m afraid this style of writing makes me impatient with its hankering for the past and by its following a path that has been travelled by too many other feet. I’ve said something similar before – frequently – but I don’t think you can ignore the entire progress of 20th century music and pretend that Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg, Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti and a collection of American and British masters never existed.

We’ve come too far in the development of advanced vocabularies to turn back the clock and find inspiration in the tropes of popular music. There are excuses trotted out regularly for the pursuit of beauty through diatonicism once more, that we need old-fashioned tunes, that there is still much good music to be written in C Major. Well, for this last, perhaps there is but it will require a brilliant talent to accomplish it. In faith and hope and love, I’m still waiting.

The answer is: don’t look

cliveoconnell

A WINTER’S JOURNEY

Musica Viva Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Monday February 16, 2026

Allan Clayton

Here we are again with an updated Winterreise. British tenor Allan Clayton is collaborating with pianist Kate Golla on a Musica Viva Australia tour of Schubert’s song-cycle that started in Perth and moves to Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Adelaide over the coming fortnight after its two-night stint here. This version has been semi-staged by director Lindy Hume, with a background of Fred Williams’ paintings/drawings screened on a large pair of walls by David Bergman‘s video design, the whole lit by Matthew Marshall.

All right: that takes care of the credits. As for the experience itself, you were left with no little admiration for the singer’s embrace of the required theatrical action and the manner in which he tailored his output to the 24 situations that Schubert’s manic wanderer enjoys/endures. You could find little fault with Golla’s realization of the accompaniments, although that term is something of a diminution of the pianist’s responsibilities in this score.

With the Williams’ art, I’m not really convinced by the stated aim of finding common ground between three geniuses – poet, composer, painter. Not that the background distracted from the cycle’s progress; indeed, Williams’ work presented as a sober complement to some of the songs, even if there was one unexpectedly vehement painting exemplifying the later Romantic musical direction of sturmisch bewegt that I couldn’t trace in the supplied list of the artist’s works employed on this occasion. But while you could accept the Kosciusko depictions from the mid-1970s as mildly credible support for Gute nacht, the later landscape dots of vegetation looked centuries remote from anything in Muller’s poems.

Hume made an excellent start and ending to this enterprise, having Clayton isolated on left-stage, from which he moved into the central raised section holding Golla’s piano and the two walls around her, V-shaped towards the audience, with the Williams images imposed on them. This was the position he eventually re-occupied when left alone (so to speak) with the Leiermann at this work’s bitter end. In between, he raced around the raised platform, coming to rest and curling up about the Auf dem Flusse point, then finding another resting place somewhere near Der Wegweiser.

Fortunately, Clayton steered clear of too much pantomime, although he did use his long-coat, I seem to recall, to mimic Die Krahe. But you were spared the full mimesis for lieder that could – and have – been physically illustrated by the singer. I still have memories, fortunately fading, of Simon Keenlyside presenting a choreographed reading of this cycle in the State Theatre at the Melbourne International Arts Festival of 2004; on that occasion, too many textual cues were seized upon to ram the verbal messages down our communal throat.

My reaction was not shared by a gaggle of fellow critics who found inexplicable merit in this exhibition and bestowed that Winterreise with a critics’ award on odd grounds that had nothing to do with Schubert, and little connection to Muller although one of the plaudits came from an accompanying husband who found the singer’s German to be ‘very good’. Recalling this whole situation still leaves me thinking: Was it for this the clay grew tall?

Another reading of this cycle that proved more pleasing, although generating no little confusion in some of the songs, came from soprano Louisa Hunter-Bradley and pianist Brian Chapman who recorded this work on the Move label in 2006. Having the work’s central character change gender requires a good deal of interpretative latitude on the listener’s part but at least the score was given straight, without deviations from a normal recital format . . . insofar as you can have such a thing on CD.

Isn’t that enough, though? Why is it necessary to dress up a work which was intended to communicate directly with the listener, without any distractions? One of the reasons given for providing supporting illustrative matter is that audiences don’t understand the words; not everyone is familiar with the texts, let alone with German. Yes, but surely that deficiency can be covered by surtitles? They were employed on this night; even if we didn’t get a full translation of each line, sufficient was provided to communicate the songs’ emotional gist.

What you can do is, of course, close your eyes, as I did for a good deal of the time. Many of us have an admiration for Williams’ work, egged on by the 1980 hagiography produced by Patrick McCaughey which brought the artist into the mainstream, sponsored by the country’s most well-known art curator/academic/historian. But even this measure had its problems as, if you looked at the stage between songs, some striking scenes were on show, some of them with little input as to what we’d just heard.

In the end, Clayton and Golla enjoyed a rapturous reception which they deserved despite the visual salad behind them. The pianist demonstrated a fine responsiveness to Schubert’s piano writing, my only query a soft right-hand output during Mut, e.g. the piano’s muffled commentary in bars 9-10 coming straight after Clayton’s clear account of the melodic contour. But then you encountered Golla’s intensely moving account of the following Die Nebensonnen, with a lucid reading of that song’s bass-heavy accompaniment.

And you could find similar examples of subtlety across the work’s spread, Clayton’s dynamic palette a continuing source of delight in lesser-known pieces like Letzte Hoffnung as well as the all-too-familiar extracts like Der Lindenbaum. In fact, the hallmark of this interpretation came through its attention to shadings from both musicians, Golla establishing a scene with admirable directness and following Clayton’s line with excellent fidelity. Next time, we could do without the visual input, OK?

Soloist sparkles in brittle fabric

cliveoconnell

RACHMANINOV’S RHAPSODY

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Sunday February 8, 2026

Dejan Lazic

Beginning the year with a rather short program, the Australian Chamber Orchestra visited Melbourne for its regular three appearances across as many days, of which this Sunday concert was the middle. Richard Tognetti led his regular 17 musicians (with the addition of percussionist Brian Nixon for the last number) through four works, one of them a new ACO commission enjoying its premiere: John Luther Adams‘ Horizon, which deals with two levels of perception and attempts to contrast the aspect we see from our current positions and that which is visible in open spaces like the desert or the sea.

What Adams gives us is a music-picture of these dual horizons. My problem is that I can’t tell the difference because, after one hearing, my sense is that the enclosed horizon is not depicted in the score which begins and ends in the same fashion: low didj-like drones from the bass strings, everybody else entering independently and making their own contributions to the sonorous melange of layers and twittering that comprise the work’s forward motion.

Several performers seem to stand alone to a certain extent throughout the performance, although two cellists and Maxime Bibeau‘s double-bass sat/stood together at the rear of the stage. In front of it all, Tognetti led a string quartet that could have been serving as a fulcrum body; if so, its function proved ultra-discreet because the members appeared to have the same freedom of delivery as everybody else in the ACO group. Which was probably not as great as I’m suggesting because the surges of crescendo and ebbings of decrescendo sounded well-organized across the score’s length.

You’d be hard pressed to find much more meat in Horizon than its shifting colours, the general texture changing all the time but not markedly. Lines become prominent for a moment, then recede into the over-arching texture – a kind of glimmering sheen, like visible heat-waves off the Outback’s sand surface or a mobile sea mist. You find yourself being wrapped in a sonorous cocoon, without events interfering to break you out of a pleasant torpor, least of all when players start dropping out of the mesh, replaying Haydn’s Farewell practice, if not actually leaving the stage.

And what dropped into this luminous silence? A phone going off, in the middle stalls on the right-hand side of the hall. Yet another inconsiderate swine demeaning a carefully prepared and staged moment. Only in Melbourne? Only in an elderly audience? If only. Still, the work had achieved its effect of depicting something close to an austere monumentality, putting Adams in a chain of US writers starting with the can-hardly-stand-still Ives, alongside Ruggles, Harris and Hovhaness – all, to some extent, concerned with nature, the environment, and unanswerable questions.

A complete change in pace arrived with Stravinsky’s Concerto in D ‘Basle’ of 1946; one of only two works I’m aware of for string orchestra by the composer (along with the ballet Apollo from 1927). Is this the first time the ACO has played this piece? The composer doesn’t loom large in the ensemble’s discography; in fact, I can’t find him at all, even if this type of whip-smart writing is ideally suited to these players.

That’s what they gave us: a reading that showed precise, clear-cut and impressive for its ensemble, requiring minimal direction from Tognetti in its opening slightly febrile Vivace which begins with a clash between Major and minor mediants and maintains its bitonal flavour all the way through its neo-classical byways. An admirable smoothness emerged in the following Arioso with its melodic leaps of 9ths and studied courtliness, while the concluding Rondo, in an unchanging 4/4, enjoyed a brilliant outlining delivered with the inimitable ACO panache.

This Stravinsky is a music that suits this ensemble and you’d have to look far and wide to find anything approaching the interpretation given here. It probably helps that much of the score is clever-clever, even the central movement studied in its sentiment. But the outer segments illustrated the poise and uniformity of control and output that the ACO produces on its best days, right down to the final, almost-tonal, nearly uniform D Major double- and triple-stop chord.

After a long interval, we moved on to the program’s second novelty, here enjoying its Australian premiere. Lithuanian writer Raminta Serksnyte wrote her De profundis in 1998 as a Bachelor’s degree graduation piece, scored for a string chamber orchestra, slightly larger than the ACO forces performing it this afternoon. Gidon Kremer made an extravagant claim for this work – ‘the calling card of Baltic music’ – but I found it only moderately interesting. Serksnyte begins with a wealth of activity in a rapid-fire light barrage of sounds, after which we come to what might be considered as a real plaint, justifying the title.

But the composer is not interested in the religious or liturgical suggestions of Psalm 130; rather, she sees it as a kind of hook on which to hang her tableau of a young soul migrating to experience, discovering life’s realism after youth’s exuberance. I suppose ‘Growing up’ doesn’t carry the same suggestion of elevated concepts as a Latin tag. In any case, the language changes back to the original Allegro/vivace flurries and chitterings, which reversion suggests a circularity of experience if not informed by subtle depths. Its impact speaks to a lively mind at work, but is this really the best of Baltic?

At last, we came to the program’s title work: the Russian pianist/composer’s brilliant 1934 set of excursions based on Paganini’s Caprice No. 24. For prime interpreter, we heard an ACO friend in Croatian-born Dejan Lazic who proved both sympathetic to the work’s spiky Romanticism as well as its richly flamboyant strain. All right, it’s a hard piece to get wrong in terms of technique: you either have it or you fumble, obviously so. But finding each point of equilibrium as it turns up – from the assertive opening, through the Dies irae mini-phantasmagoria, into the middle etudes-tableaux excursions that arrive finally at the soulful apex of that melting moment Andante cantabile in D flat, concluding with the spiky final set of six variants that eventually bring to mind every lush piano concerto finale, up to the finishing in-my-end-is-my-beginning quirk – that is demanding, a series of challenges that Lazic met with high success.

Indeed, in this 20-odd-minute journey, Lazic showed an impressive mastery of material, relishing each abrupt turn and wholly prepared to give free rein to the usually dour composer’s high spirits and what amounts to an emotional elation that permeates this most appealing of his piano-orchestra scores.

As was the case last year with the ACO’s attempt at Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, I missed the usual orchestral voices to a significant degree. Bernard Rofe‘s arrangement for piano, percussion and strings proved serviceable enough; as far as I could tell, Lazic wasn’t required to carry out anything but his own role and Nixon provided discreet additions to the texture (but did he have the complete set of the original score’s instruments, including glockenspiel and bass drum?). We missed a harp and ten each of both woodwind and brass.

Naturally, it’s beyond the ACO’s budget to carry 21 or 22 extra musicians around the country on an 11-concert operation, even if this particular tour covered only cities on the eastern side of the mainland. And I’m sure plenty of patrons would rather hear a truncated-in-forces version of this welcome work than not. But at certain moments, I missed individual and group timbres, the absence of which came as a cross between surprise and disappointment.

Even from the introduction, without the brass punctuation starting at Number 1 in the old Boosey & Hawkes score, you knew that you weren’t going to enjoy the usual environmental sparks; not to mention the clarinet/bassoon semiquaver slide three bars before Number 2. And on it went: the burbling clarinet gruppetti at bar 9 and bar 1 before Number 15 in Variation 6; the wind triplets that give a piquant edge to the Variation 9 texture at Number 26; the brass blazoning at Number 28 in the middle of Variation 10; the sprightly march that opens Variation 14 quasi Tromba in the woodwinds which reaches its bombastic best at Number 37 when all the brass enter wholeheartedly.

And still it continued: the plangent oboe at the start of Variation 17, followed by the first clarinet two bars after Number 45 – a brilliant complement; that energetic build-up of powerful bass layers under the piano’s full-blooded chords from Number 63 to two bars after Number 64; the vital pointillism in the woodwind starting Variation 24; and the hefty pesante of the brass hurtling out the Latin chant at Number 78.

You’d say that there’s no use crying over what couldn’t be done. I’d query why you’d bother doing something half-cocked. Even more so than with the Gershwin, you could sense the underdone nature of this effort, despite the soloist’s excellent demonstration of expertise and interpretative skill. Needless to say, Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody received enthusiastic applause from a pretty full house which clearly didn’t mind the thin orchestral fabric. De gustibus non est disputandum . . . except for mine, which are impeccable.

A startling clarity

cliveoconnell

BACH’S MOTETS

Bach Akademie Australia

St. John’s Lutheran Church, Southgate

Thursday February 5, 2026

Madeleine Easton

The image above is inaccurate, for this recital specifically. Madeleine Easton is founder/violinist with Sydney’s Bach Akademie Australia but on this night she was directing a few musicians only from her ensemble of expert players: cello Daniel Yeadon, double bass Pippa MacMillan, and two organists in Neal Peres Da Costa and Nathan Cox (who seemed to be giving the major contribution in this area). Her main focus beyond this functional continuo line-up, was the Song Company, another Sydney group but familiar here, thanks to its Melbourne Recital Hall appearances in recent years.

As I remember it, the Company numbered six singers, although it expanded when necessary. As for this mammoth bout of Bach’s seven motets, now that Ich lass dich nicht has been (finally) admitted into the canon. Some faces/voices are familiar: soprano Susannah Lawergren, tenor Timothy Reynolds, bass Andrew O’Connor. Others are new to me: soprano Michelle Ryan, alto Hannah Fraser, tenor Christopher Watson and bass Tom Herring. One other is new to the country: guest alto from the Netherlands, Iris Korfker.

Naturally, you need at least eight voices to negotiate the double choirs required for all the motets except the first one treated on this night: Lobet den Herrn which burst on us with unexpected vehemence. It was the original Song Company’s nature to sing forcefully; you were the only negotiator of a particular line, for the most part, and so no point was served in holding back in timbre. When you have four lines being treated by two singers each, used to individual projection, the results are powerful. Forget the solemn, respectful treatment from the British university college choirs, or even the bravely confident approach of German choirs these days. We were in for a night of dramatic exhalations and this opening gambit proved dynamically potent.

A slightly distracting sight was that of a soprano conducting herself ever so slightly. This might be a nervous performance tic but seemed unnecessary, given the fluency and directness of Easton’s gestures, which revealed a sterling familiarity with all of the night’s material. It also stuck out because nobody else did anything similar, all of them focused on their conductor as the sole fount and origin of their output.

Da Costa emerged for the following Komm, Jesu, komm, written possibly about 1731-2. His function on a chamber organ, like the efforts of Yeardon and Macmillan, was straightforward and based on the supposition that Bach might have employed a continuo group, as well as the two choirs that actually feature in his score; I haven’t been able to trace an edition of this work which has a written-out continuo line. Easton managed to elicit a deft balance from both forces in this consolatory construct, although Reynolds’ output proved clarion clear, dominating the mix at certain stages to an inordinate degree.

Giving us what was probably intended to be a modern leavening, possible latter-day imitations/homages to Bach, Easton and her company programmed two contemporary works, the first of which was written by Brisbane-based musician Sandra Milliken for a 2025 Bonhoeffer Project which interwove a Mass text with extracts from the Lutheran pastor’s writings while a prisoner of the Nazis. The composer arranged her original Herr Jesus Christus for eight-part choir and the results were amiable enough; not strikingly contemporary – indeed, it seemed to be couched in G minor, with minor 2nds thrown in, but couched in the English choral tradition, those discordant touches brightening an orthodox vocabulary. The metrical set-up sounded stolid, as did the rate of modulation where the home tonality moved into the major (E flat?) half-way through. Oddly enough, the last bars held a taste of the glee club about them, the parts moving with glib facility.

Two more motets preceded interval. First, the brief Ich lasse dich nicht which starts out in straight statement/response format, then moves into four-parts at the change of metre with the sopranos steeling the chorale melody over a restless quaver support from the lower voices. Indeed, musicologists have warred over the piece’s stages of composition, the first part coming from 1713 or earlier, the second section dating from 1735 or earlier. This latter section struck me as one of the more collegial sections of the program where personalities subsumed themselves for once.

Da Costa relieved Cox at the organ for Der Geist hilft of 1729 where basses O’Connor and Herring enjoyed plenty of continuo reinforcement, which was probably original as Bach orchestrated the piece with separate timbres for each of the choirs. The whole built to an alarming stridency at the height of the fugue that starts at sondern der Geist before it settles into doubling the parts (except the sopranos, of course). Still, the complex ended with a deliberate and considered reading of the chorale Du heilige Brunst with its superb text by Luther and Bach’s abruptly touching first Halleluja!

Back after the break, our singers gave Furchte dich nicht of 1726, or possibly over ten years earlier, which has instruments allocated to the vocal lines, even if none of them are specified. This was also striking for its animation in attack, which came as a relief, given the amount of textual repetition in the work’s main body. Even though Reynolds cut through the mix at some points, the whole body involved us in the action which seems to resolve itself, but doesn’t, when the sopranos take up the chorale tune Herr, mein Hirt and the complications are reduced to three lines, not six.

Yeadon then generated a thrusting version of the Prelude to Bach’s D minor Cello Suite, his fabric solid and informed by a clear articulation that wobbled only on a handful of occasions, although I was perplexed by the length of time he took over the dominant chord caesura at bar 48. You could find no fault with his negotiation of the concluding triple/quadruple-stopped chords, those sinewy strong pillars that anchor the movement’s restlessness.

Next came the large-framed Jesu, meine Freude of possibly 1723, even more possibly 1735 or thereabouts. In this 11-movement glory that oscillates between four and five parts, we hit the theatrical early with a feisty Es ist nun nichts, Easton making obvious points with the forte/piano oscillations and heightening the tension to a point that reminded us of the Sind Blitze, sind Donner eruptions from the St. Matthew Passion. Some of this fire came over even in the following (usually) sedate chorale with its klacht und blitzt with some Holle schrecken thrown in.

Light, mainly non-competitive relief arrived with the brief sopranos+alto trio Denn das Gesetz before we returned to the hit-outs of Trotz in five parts, again notable for its biting drama and percussive attack. In contrast, the work’s central fugue was generated with uniform clarity, attention focused on the linear interplay rather than any potential for vocal shocks; not that you can find many of these in one of the two drier texts that Bach employed, arguing for spiritual as well as physical commitment to Christ.

Another real pleasure came in the trio So aber Christus which I think featured Reynolds, O’Connor and the visiting alto, Korfker; whatever its composition, the group intrigued for its mixture of vocal timbres, here pitched at comparable dynamic levels and carefully articulating the second theologically practical text in the motet, again decrying the value of the body as compared to the soul – fair enough, for a believer. The lighter texture continued with a lightly-stepping Gute Nacht, without basses, an alto and a tenor. But I was taken aback by an unfortunate soprano solo at the end of So nun der Geist which stuck out from the smoothly accomplished five-part handling of this semi-reprise of Es ist nun nichts.

To follow, another contemporary interlude in Scottish writer James MacMillan’s O Radiant Dawn: one of the composer’s more well-travelled contributions to choral music and part of his 2007 Strathclyde Motets set. The Company probably enjoyed this ‘easy’ music after Bach’s complexities and the outstanding feature of the work, those ‘snaps’ or accacciature in bars 2, 4 and in the tenor for the work’s final chord (bar 45), even if these all sounded atypically faint, even given the forte direction at the opening and a piano dynamic prevailing in the chain of six Amens that MacMillan inserted along with an Isaiahan prophecy, negotiated by the ensemble’s female voices with excellent fluency.

And we ended with the joyous Singet dem Herrn (possibly 1727), Da Costa back at the organ; the Barenreiter edition (acting as God disposing) proposes ‘Instrument ad libitum’. Once again, tenor Reynolds’ timbre dominated proceedings, soaring over his peers in the opening chorus and reinforced by Watson when the tenors doubled each other from about bar 103 to bar 128. Mind you, the further into this opening gambit we go, the less energy seems to come from its hard-worked negotiators. It’s all a magnificent complex, if an aural assault that resolves itself into a four-part fugue for the final Alles, was Odem strophes which mirrored the jaunty bounce we heard at the evening’s start.

In the end, an extraordinary test of stamina for the performers, an unexpected demonstration of vocal clarity for us listeners in a series of performances that startled for their directness of address. Which I’m coming to believe is a Sydney characteristic; I can’t think of any Melbourne choir that would have infused these motets with similar bite and dynamic heft. Many thanks to these generous visitors.

The lady’s not for twelve-toning

cliveoconnell

HOMEGROWN

Rebecca Cassidy and Alex Raineri

Move Records MCD 664

That’s just what they are: art songs by nine Australian composers, one of whom gets a double dip (Lisa Cheney) and another also represented by a piano solo, performed with enthusiastic rhapsody by Alex Raineri. His associate, soprano Rebecca Cassidy, moves through a pretty wide spectrum, even if the greater number of these writers share a brand of lyrical vocabulary that doesn’t move much beyond Debussy at its most sophisticated and Vaughan Williams at its simplest. Alright, let’s say Cyril Scott or John Ireland or possibly Duparc – well-trodden paths, whatever the derivation.

The earliest piece on this Move Records CD is a John Fletcher setting by Peggy Glanville-Hicks that dates from 1931. Next is Miriam Hyde’s 1933 Dream Land to a Christina Rossetti poem, with her piano solo – Brownhill Creek in Spring, dating from 1942. Then comes Dulcie Holland whose Hope in Spring from 1953 is here receiving its first recorded performance. For some reason, there’s a near-forty year break before we come to Betty Beath who, in 1991, wrote her River songs cycle, from which we hear River – Mother, River – Child. A year later, Mary Mageau produced Son of Mine to a poem by Oodgeroo Noonuccal, which is also enjoying its first recording here. Finishing the 20th century is Linda Kouvaras with Distant lullaby from her 1999 cycle Art and Life.

The first Cheney song comes from 2006, a simple Lullaby in its first recording, as are the rest of this CD’s contents. Melody Eotvos features here with one of her Wakeford Songs of 2014; By Train. Penultimately, Deborah Cheetham Fraillon appears with a 2022 commission written for Raineri’s Brisbane Festival: Crepe Myrtle Sky. The finish comes through Cheney’s second contribution, the most substantial on the disc: Gratitude and Grief, written last year and a substantial contribution to the form, even if the vocabulary applied is conservative.

Does that matter? Should we regard the similarities between Glanville-Hicks’ quick lyric and Cheney’s maternal eulogy as evidence of an inner consistency of language and employment of the form? Not as close as nearly100 years apart, I would think. You might find explanations for Glanville-Hicks, Hyde and Holland but the other six writers are working well after a massive explosion of technical and emotional language became available to Australian writers for several decades before, for example, Beath’s product of 1991. Such a discarding of advances in language speak to an undercurrent in the CD’s title where the writers use a compositional vocabulary that was tried and true, well established before most of them were born and which they are obviously happy to re-employ in these latter days of a current reductio ad absurdum in serious composition (see Eurovision or the ABC’s rage for relentless instances).

Cassidy and Raineri give a genteel reading of Glanville-Hicks’ setting of Fletcher’s two-stanza lyric which taxes nobody because of its clarity – one might say, its simplicity. The composer begins in G Major and stays in that key throughout with not a single extra accidental employed. The little prelude provides the initial material for the singer and the postlude reflects the piece’s beginning. Glanville-Hicks wrote it before leaving for England and it shows an 18-year-old making the most of what she has come across by way of instruction in 1930s Australia.

Showing a more adventurous attitude to tonality, Miriam Hyde’s treatment of Rossetti’s four stanzas shows an awareness of chromatic passing notes on its lush Brahmsian A Major path and the composer treats the vocal line as a continuous sheet rather than four repetitions while Raineri arpeggiates and moons soulfully with semitonal droops across the canvas. But I can’t help thinking of Amy Woodforde-Finden’s Pale Hands I Loved of 30 years earlier because of a similar hot-house emotional restraint and a similar vocal curvature, although Hyde’s choice of text makes for a refreshing dash of introspective brilliance.

As for Hyde’s piano piece, this also luxuriates in its A Major neo-Impressionism with some Debussy Arabesque-style arpeggios to begin over a left-hand melody that employs a flattened leading note, leading to a development/elongation of the set material, before a less active section – less full of Jardins sous la pluie or Jeux d’eau – moving more slowly, before a return to water imagery and a quiet coda. The images here are European; probably understandable because the photos I’ve come across of Brownhill Creek are of a lush landscape, even more so than the Esmond George watercolour that inspired it. Raineri has had this music in his repertoire for a few years now and holds its quivering sensibility in the palms of both hands.

With Holland’s love song (to her own text), we have a further reach back into the past, to an almost Victorian mode of communication. Also couched in A Major, its three verses operating in an A-B-A ternary mode, this is a fluent example of limited rhapsody, its emotional language operating inside strict bounds, the excitement limited to a concluding sustained vocal A, the whole typical of this popular writer’s craft in action. Cassidy and Raineri make an elegantly-paired combination in facing its few challenges.

Now we make the forty-year leap to the 1990s and Beath’s setting of a Jena Woodhouse poem which also could be using A Major as its base but is written in neutral tonalities with a kind of prevailing ambiguity, possibly arising from the composer’s time in Bali and Java. Still, there are passages where Europe still holds sway, e.g. bars 15 to 18, and bars 24 to 26; in fact, anywhere that the texture changes from the open-sounding 6/8 quavers set up at the opening. But it manages to avoid the predictable character of this CD’s earlier samples through its angularity and rhythmically varied vocal and piano lines.

Setting this country’s best-known Aboriginal poet is a daunting task, even for an American expatriate. Mageau achieves a good deal in her Noonuccal setting, keeping up a steady A octave bass drone-support for most of the three stanzas, with some grinding dissonances in the pivotal chords underpinning the central quatrain. Despite the poet’s attempts to lift the spirits of reconcilers in her final lines, Mageau maintains the accompaniment’s grimness under the composer’s arioso-type vocal line. The whole exercise reminds me of Schubert’s Leiermann, probably because of that persistent bass and its added notes like Schubert’s use of the appoggiatura.

Both poet and composer change the tone for the work’s central lines which detail some of the crimes committed against Aboriginal people, causing Mageau to break into a confronting discordant piano part that heightens the outrage being communicated, the harmony having moved to C minor, if you take the soaring vocal line into consideration. It makes for grim hearing, but then, the poet was intent on holding her mirror up to white failures – which I think come across strongly in this musical realization.

Distant lullaby is the concluding song in Kouvaras’ six-part cycle and is emphatically tonal from start to finish; I believe it starts and ends in C Major with some moves into the flattened submediant – two of them – that would recall Schubert if the general texture and message of the piece weren’t plain. Art and Life traces a woman’s infatuation with an artist, the baby they have, a growing disaffection, her militancy in the face of abuse, her action (murder?) in facing down the violence against her, and this lullaby sung from her incarceration.

Kouvaras is an academic at Melbourne University but her composition practice comes from a different source than the sophisticated technical bravura prevalent in her workspace. You might find it effective in achieving its end, showing a pretty widespread emotion – love of a child – in a simple consolatory expression but, for me, it’s naïve. Yes, I know that’s the nature of a lullaby but this simplicity sounds inconsistent with our times – too much Richard Strauss, not enough Janacek.

Furthering the trend towards simpler times of yore, Lisa Cheney’s Lullaby stays in a 3/4 metre throughout, I think. Certainly, the key is B flat minor and there are few deviations from it. There’s a lilt and folk-song gentleness about this piece which eventually reduces Raineri’s function (in the third stanza?) to little more than a few supporting notes or chords. Probably the only surprise comes in the presence of a flattened supertonic at the end of a stanza or two; for the rest, the New Simplicity strikes again.

Suddenly, we come to a composition that sounds totally contemporary in Eotvos’ striking lyric which details World War One nurse Muriel Wakeford’s arrival in Cairo prior to heading for Gallipoli (which she survived). By Train is part of a five-song cycle on texts extracted from Wakeford’s diary but the other songs are difficult to come by. Anyway, this composer has a complex vocabulary and puts both her interpreters to the test, particularly Raineri with flurries of notes meant to represent the train itself. Still, the vocal line is in parts jagged, with difficult leaps and it’s rhythmically demanding as the piece operates in a free-flowing ambience. Nevertheless, despite the high chromaticism at work, I sensed an undercurrent of G minor beneath the abrupt forays and excursions from both musicians.

We hit show-tune territory with the Cheetham Fraillon creation. The song’s text – as with Holland, Hyde and one of the Cheneys – was written by the composer and can’t be found online. Neither can you find access to any part of the music, although that doesn’t matter so much because the proportions and content are easy to fathom, often to the point of being predictable. The song appears to begin in an ambiguous C Major (most of the Bs are natural) but ends in a definite F Major. It only strays from these possibilities twice, the second deviation more solid, but you are confronted by a pleasant vocal line that could have found a place in a Sondheim musical.

And so to Gratitude and Grief which is a mixture of scena and meditation with motherhood as its subject. This song is the only one to enjoy any sort of exegesis in the CD’s accompanying leaflet and it’s a backgrounding from the composer on her embrace of the existence of her two young daughters. The text comes from New Zealand poet Jessica Urlichs and, although it does nothing for me because of an innate sexism and misogyny typical in men of my age, the words find a gifted setter in Cheney and evoke a lucid response from these musicians.

The piece rises and falls like a long arc, climaxing in the words ‘I’m still learning to breathe under this waterfall of gratitude and grief’ which are sung with conviction by Cassidy while Raineri evokes an emotional cascade in a fierce wash of notes. On either side is a calm that eventually resolves into a limpid vision of the new-born as infinite but knowable, which is about as consoling a realization as any parent can come to and which mercifully doesn’t tip over into self-congratulation.

Here also, there are traces of the show-tune sentiment in the melodic phrases and that peculiarly American mode of confessional declamation that has its origins in Rodgers and Hammerstein heroines. But Cheney isn’t alone in this penchant for the soulful and accessible, offering the most sustained instance in this CD of a contentment with trusted tropes.

I assure you that the order in which I’ve commented on the4se songs is not that of the CD’s tracks, which jumps all over the shop temporally. For some of us, the album is light-on, coming in under 45 minutes; balance that with exposure to two fine talents who invest their talents and sympathy into each composer that they benefit here with their art.

The flute as we now know it

cliveoconnell

SHIFTING LANDSCAPES

Kathryn Moorhead

Move Records MCD 672

Adelaide-based flautist Kathryn Moorhead plays nine pieces of contemporary music in this, her latest CD for Move Records. She ranges between recently-deceased American Alison Knowles’ Proposition #2: How to Make a Salad from 1962, and two works from 2016: another American and a flautist herself, Nicole Chamberlain‘s Lilliputian for piccolo and music box, and the Pimento study for solo piccolo by British writer Edmund Joliffe, best known for his TV scores.

In between come species of flute-writing covering a wide spectrum: difficult Brit Brian Ferneyhough‘s Cassandra’s Dream Song of 1971, L’ombra dell’angelo by University of Mantua academic Paolo Perezzani from 1985, our own (sort of) Andrew Ford‘s 1993 Female Nude for amplified alto flute, East-and-West fuser American Elizabeth Brown‘s Acadia for flute and shakuhachi (Anne Norman) written in 1999, Laveringar of 2001 by senior Swedish writer Daniel Bortz, and Brisbane-born Damian Barbeler‘s 2006 Confession 2 for piccolo and electronics.

Despite this half-century time-span and variety of instrumentation, Moorhead’s CD is undersized, coming in at 54 minutes. Longest in the list is the Perezzani, almost 12 minutes; the shortest is Pimento which settles itself at a trifle over 80 seconds. The flautist takes on the very challenging Italian work first. This sets up a very physical angel’s shadow ambience with a lengthy sequence of trills from all over the instrument’s compass, giving a brilliant aural image of restless flight partly through the abrupt ‘fill-in’ flights between trills

The attack modes also involve the listener in what sounds like a violent series of curvets, often initiated by a burst of air as the player moves into the territory of over-blowing, although it’s mainly resulting in semi-harmonics rather than Bartolozzi-style multiphonics. What comes over impresses for its ferocity which is contrasted with almost inaudible soft phrases, so that you get some sense of the ethereal as lightning-fast which, in the later stages of the piece, flattens out into long sustained notes with a strange vibrato in the upper register that is produced by using a key (God knows which one) to generate a throbbing, like a wing in fluent action.

Barbeler follows. His piece features a meandering motif from the piccolo which acts as the voice of the confessor while the electronic tapestry that underpins the live instrument’s tale serves as a sort of subterranean admission of deeper deeds. And that presents the listener with a dichotomy in the best botanical sense. The live instrument dilates its opening material – a scale pattern coming down a 4th, then up a 2nd – while the backdrop moves from sustained sound blocks, across to burbling action, then to a concluding combination of both – in line with the composer’s aim of having his confession operate on two levels: the overt and the secretive.

Mind you, I don’t believe that you can achieve anything of the kind in music without words. You might want to believe that the flute represents a sinner/offender and the electronics stand in for the surrounding ambience or morally debilitating environment, but the intellectual construction involved reaches well beyond the probable. Barbeler might tell us the impetus behind his work but he gives us no pins on which to hang his metaphysics, just as Strauss fails to convince us in his score that Nietzsche’s Zoroaster spoke any of the ideas that populate his invigorating tone poem.

In similar fashion, Andrew Ford’s Female Nude for amplified alto flute with vocalisations probably conveys a lot to the writer but any listener would be hard pressed to find anything suggesting the title in this rather monomaniacal obsession with the note A that the composer keeps returning to after a few flights of angular modernity. Moorhead is required to articulate individual consonants and vowels on that same A (or occasionally, its neighbour) in medias res, which makes for a deft display of legerdemain from the performer, generating these noises while playing a rhythmically complex instrumental part which every so often asks for a fusion of voice and flute with some heavily forced notes to leaven the mixture.

As for Elizabeth Brown’s Acadia, the performers present an unnerving mirror of each other in their performance which at various points blurs any distinction between the two sound sources. As we have come to know and love from exposure to Riley Lee’s craft, the Japanese flute can bend notes significantly; in fact this elision process makes Norman’s shakuhachi melodic contour highly distinctive. In this reading, Moorhead can do something like the same on her orthodox Western instrument. In fact, the two lines intermesh with unusual ease and deceptiveness.

The title refers to a national park on a Maine island and probably has some reminiscences for those who know the place. For the rest of us, I’d suggest, our minds inevitably turn to the Japanese archipelago, the less populated parts with suggestions of bird calls and remoteness. Brown’s language proposes a juxtaposition of the two instruments’ timbral possibilities but something more profound than this in that the flute and shakuhachi become more than complementary, but rather inextricably linked so that only the occasional high note from the flute or a breathy near-overblow from the shakuhachi allows for some momentary distinction to be made. A remarkable exhibition from players and composer.

Cassandra’s Dream Song, which remains one of the outstanding flute solos of (nearly) our time, enjoys a spirited reading from Moorhead. The score itself is fearsome, evidence of Ferneyhough’s nomination as an (the) outstanding member of the New Complexity school – which term has always struck me as odd because, although it might be complex, it’s not really new, is it? You can trace the modernization of the flute throughout 20th century decades and find pieces presenting just as many challenges as this one, not least the attention to detail that the composer sets out in his page of sound-manufacture description.

Leaving the order of line performance to the interpreter is not that much of a risk because you will wind up hearing an entity rather than a series of fragments. Further, as an American academic has pointed out, one of the standout performances of the work has not changed over time, the interpreter sticking to his original choices across the years. Not that this matters too much because the piece itself is a nightmare to play and experience; the prophetess is prefiguring the disasters that happen to her home city, its inhabitants, and her own fate when Agamemnon brings her back to Mycenae. Moorhead accounts for the breaths, splutters, note suffocations and piercing bursts of clarity with impressive authority, making a dramatic scenario that does justice to Aeschylus’ doomed concubine.

We move back to a child’s world for Nicole Chamberlain’s gesture towards the Part One of Swift’s novel. The music-box is set up beforehand by the performer punching out the requisite roll, then presumably playing along with it. As far as I can tell, the 6/8 piece in F minor doesn’t move outside that rhythm or key and the results would be quite suitable for a Play School sound track. But it sits uncomfortably in the shadow of the previous track on this CD with only a small downward bend on the last note to queer the surface orthodoxy.

Laveringar‘s subtitle is Tinted Drawings, and is the plural (in Swedish) of the painting term lavering, referring to a wash or thin coat. This is another substantial solo which initially oscillates between urgent upward rushes of demisemiquavers and clarion calls, then quiet moments of near-stasis with long semibreves to calm the action. Bortz also has an initial penchant for bending notes but soon leaves them alone until his final staves. In fact, he embarks on a narrative path that I find hard to follow.

This is in part due to the composer’s quite proper view of his laverings as differing from one painting to another; he isn’t confining his washes to one type or genre but is splashing his colours around with lavish abandon. Which means he can follow his own fancy, of course, as can every writer, but it means that the piece must be, by the act of lavering, inchoate. As the painter allows his/her wash to spread or constrict in alignment with whatever constitutes the standard of composition (if s/he has one), so Bortz’s musical lavering can lead anywhere. To her credit, Moorhead follows each sprouting of colour with enthusiasm, giving each furioso as much care as she does every corresponding piu lento.

The third piccolo piece on this CD, Joliffe’s brief bagatelle, gives a musical picture – as far as one can – of the sweet pepper named in its title. It is very active, a sort of rapid toccata, with variable time signatures and some quirky sound production changes about half-way through. But the piece is quite brief, just long enough to raise your estimation of Moorhead’s precision and agility.

To end, an instance of music in the everyday. Knowles instructs the performer/s to engage in the cutting, slicing, dicing, scraping and mixing that are the aural concomitants of making a salad. This performer makes the required sounds for about 2 1/2 minutes. As with most of these presentations, it’s more engaging to see than to hear, as I found way back when first coming across similar efforts from Cage and Stockhausen (in his later years) where the event had nothing to do with written music but concentrated on (usually minimal) instructions on making sounds and noises that became music, in the best Fluxus sense. Nothing too hard about that; the interaction between art and everyday has become a long-standing (well, several decades off a century) practice in many fields of art.

Yet I feel that this finale to Moorhead’s album will wind up being the least heard of the nine tracks she offers. A nice idea and an unexpectedly relevant celebration of Knowles’ passing less than three months ago, yet Proposition #2 doesn’t quite fill out the spaces after a preceding sequence of works that offer more meat on the bone. Nevertheless, this CD makes a welcome addition to the faltering number of recordings that deal with the flute as it is used in our time.