Sunday October 2
Melba Quartet plays Schubert and Dvorak
Melbourne Recital Centre at 11 am and 2 pm
Who are they, you may ask? Why, they were the original members of the Australian String Quartet – William Hennessy, Elinor Lea, Keith Crellin and Janis Laurs. Here reborn under a new name, these venerable musicians are joined by Adelaide pianist Lucinda Collins in two steady-as-she-goes stalwarts of the chamber music repertoire: the 16-year-old Schubert’s String Quartet No. 10 in E flat and the Dvorak Piano Quintet No. 2 in A – a really substantial piece, packed with nationalistic colour and fervour. We’ve seen most of these performers continue in harness over the years but it will be a real ear-opener to hear them together again after a longer time than many of us would care to remember.
Tuesday October 4
Music of the Great Renaissance Chapels: The English Chapel Royal
Ensemble Gombert
Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm
Back in the Salon for the second of its two-part series, John O’Donnell and his singers have centred their activities – so to speak – on the late Tudors: Henry VIII and his daughters Mary and Elizabeth. Well, not so much on them as on the composers who helped to lift their blood-drenched reigns out of the gutter. Earliest of the contributors will be Robert Fayrfax, represented by one of his two Magnificat settings. William Mundy’s antiphonal motet Vox Patris caelestis stands in for the Catholic reversion of Mary’s reign. Robert Parsons’ well-known Ave Maria, the Lamentations of Tallis (the whole lot?) and three Byrd motets I’ve never heard flesh out the period and this slightly-over-an-hour-long recital which opens with an anonymous Salve radix setting.
Tuesday October 4
Speak Less Than You Know
Tinalley String Quartet
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm
With an updated quote from Lear’s Fool as its title, this program from the Tinalley ensemble has the country’s most noted Shakespearean actor as guest. The recital opens with Mendelssohn in A minor, Op. 13, but that’s not the chief course at this feast. Bell will be reading from Beethoven’s letters, escorted on his way with extracts from the Op. 18, the Harp, and Op. 131, 132 and 135 quartets. It’s a neat conjunction of two fine talents. Yet, for all his overpowering musical genius, Beethoven never impressed me as much of a verbal communicator; not even through the Heiligenstadt Testament which will, I fear, get plenty of attention on this night. Still, Bell is a glory to hear, as shown recently by his end-of-program Sir Thomas More recitation for the Q&A on Shakespeare – the ideal response to Hanson and her home-grown basket of deplorables. And these days the Tinalleys are working together with formidable strength.
Wednesday October 5
Amadeus
Australian Piano Quartet
Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm
I know three of this group’s members – violin Rebecca Chan, piano Daniel de Borah, viola James Wannan – but the APQ founder/director, cellist Thomas Rann, remains an unknown quantity, despite his having studied here at the Australian National Academy of Music. Given their program’s title, Mozart’s influence is heavy: the Piano Quartet in G minor K. 478 and an arrangement of the Quintet for piano and winds K. 452, presumably the one done by Freystadtler. Not that you have much to choose from: Mozart wrote only two works for this combination. Horizons are expanded for a piano quartet by Lachlan Skipworth, premiered last May in Sydney. The composer has not experienced much live play-time here, although he has had works played at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Metropolis series and also I seem to recall a performance of his light rain for shakuhachi/flute and string quartet at fortyfivedownstairs some years ago fronted by Lina Andonovska.
Friday October 7
La belle et la bete
Philip Glass Ensemble
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm
From the look of it, this year’s Melbourne Festival is going to be, once again, light on serious music but stacked with an abundance of forgettable trivialities. Here is a hybrid event at which Cocteau’s film gains a new sound-track, Auric’s original score superseded by Philip Glass who has made an opera-of-sorts by having the film play straight through, accompanying it with a small instrumental group (six, I believe) and four singers lip-syncing their recitative lines with the film’s actors. Why bother doing this? No answer, except that Glass has carried out a similar exercise with other films. All you can do is have a look at it on YouTube where the results are probably unfair to Glass; even so, the endlessly whirling orchestration is distracting and the dialogue suggests Massenet more than anything else. Mind you, the composer won’t be here to talk about his revamping exercise as he isn’t coming here for this presentation, which enjoys three airings – this Friday night, a 2 pm matinee and another 7 pm evening screening on Saturday October 8.
Saturday October 8
Star Trek
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Myer Music Bowl at 7 pm
We’re promised 50 years of Star Trek‘s musical achievements in this show where the MSO will provide the backdrop for what I suppose will be extracts from the series and its spin-off film extravaganzas. Yet another music element in the Melbourne Festival’s meagre line-up, this event brings outdoors what the MSO has been doing for some time at the Plenary in the Exhibition Centre complex at the start of the year: Dr. Who extravaganzas, Wallace and Gromit, etc. Last year, the January spectacular was J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek film; this is a sort of amplification of the same principle, one with which the orchestra has enjoyed popular success: the audience gets to see the big-screen spectacle while the musicians play the soundtracks in real time. It could be entertaining but I have to say that the sheen is wearing off the exercise for me.
Saturday October 8
Ballet Mecanique
Australian National Academy of Music
South Melbourne Town Hall at 7 pm
Some esoteric music-making distinguishes this night. Soprano Justine Anderson, percussionists Tim White, Gary France and Peter Neville, and pianist Timothy Young – along with the ANAM percussionists and pianists – present three works of great interest. That one-time Angry Young Composer George Antheil produced his best work early, his most famous score the Ballet Mecanique which began with extensive sound-source requirements and was revised down in later performances; this, I suspect, will be the form adopted here – percussion, four pianos, and an airplane engine (recorded, presumably). Ginastera’s Cantata para America Magica asks for a soprano, 13 percussionists and two pianos; unlike the familiar ballet scores and the sparkling Variaciones concertantes, this piece uses 12-tone methodology. Young has made his own arrangement of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring ballet for two pianos (the composer did that himself) and percussion (that’s a new idea). A program with plenty of hits and, one hopes, not many misses.
Sunday October 9
Schubert Quintet
Melbourne Chamber Orchestra
Melbourne Recital Centre at 2:30 pm
Always a pleasure to hear the moving C Major Quintet, one of chamber music’s summits. The players are drawn from William Hennessy’s Australian Octet who also busy themselves with Dvorak’s String Sextet, a work that gets left behind in the wake of Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Schoenberg – unfairly so. The ensemble also offers a world premiere: Graeme Koehne’s Nevermore – also an octet and maybe indebted to Poe’s poem . . . but who can tell? I’ve not heard the octet play, although the members must be MCO regulars; given that background, you’d have to expect a pretty high standard. This is the only Melbourne performance of the program.
Tuesday October 11
Cyborg Pianist
Zubin Kanga
Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm
The Melbourne Festival is giving the London-based Australian pianist two programs in its schedule. For this one, he is working in association with Benjamin Carey who will provide live electronics – are there any other kinds? The program available is light on details, although one piece that is named – Patrick Nunn’s 2014 Morphosis for piano, sensors (attached to the pianist’s hands) and (naturally) live electronics – has been recently recorded by Kanga with the composer’s collaboration. The Festival blurb promises a wealth of physical experience – drones and horror-films in the mix. The reassuring factor is that Kanga is a fine exponent of the unfathomably modern.
Wednesday October 12
Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes
Zubin Kanga
Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm
Tonight, Kanga goes all classical, taking us into the prepared piano universe of America’s timeless apostle of musical freedom. The collection of 16 sonatas and 4 interludes remains one of Cage’s most striking constructs 70 years after he began putting the work together. It offered a strikingly original sound-world to my generation; the audacity of turning the piano into a gamelan – and an unpredictable one at that – impressed mightily, particularly if you heard a solid, non-flamboyant performance. At the time, Cage was interested in Indian music and its philosophical basis, but the actual sound and movement of this cycle suggests Indonesia – a locale with more inbuilt colour and temporal stasis, and a good deal less sonic brilliance and physical excitement in execution. It was the perfect music for its time and place; these days, an extended exercise in nostalgia.
Friday October 14
The Secret Noise
Ensemble Offspring
Arts House, North Melbourne at 7:30 pm
It’s a catchy name that this group owns but what they actually do remains a closed book to me. Spearheaded by Damien Ricketson for this Melbourne Festival program, the 20-year-old Sydney ensemble is promising ‘sacrosanct sounds’; whether this is Festival bumf or the ensemble’s own self-evaluation, the adjective seems at odds with the projected entertainment into oddities, explored through a ‘catacomb’. You get the feeling that the words don’t matter, that talking-up the project is the name of the game. Still, there’s no telling where the Masonic/Opus Dei connotations of the event’s title will lead audiences. Music, performance, installation: that’s what you get for your money. The program is repeated twice on Saturday October 15 – at 2 pm and 7:3o pm
Saturday October 15
Musical Maverick
Melbourne Conservatorium of Music
Melba Hall at 2 pm
Here beginneth a series of recitals spread across two weekends and dealing with Percy Grainger. Performances start today at 2 pom with the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music Percussion ensemble performing some of the Free Music, as well as other works not listed; God knows they have a wide repertoire to choose from. At 4 pm today, soprano Cleo Lee-McGowen and tenor Michael Diminovski, with the Vocal Company, go for the folk-song component, amplified by some Dvorak and Bartok. Sunday October 16 has three events: at mid-day, 2 six-hands pianos play The Warriors ballet; 2 pm sees the MCM guitar ensemble play Random Round alongside new works by Ethan McAlister and Jacob Donohue; at 4 pm the MCM Wind Symphony plays some of those works that at one time seemed to be the Eastman Rochester’s preserve. Saturday/Sunday October 22/23 shuffle these five programs into a different order. Maybe this strikes you as old-hat, compared to Zubin Kanga’s Cyborg adventures, but Grainger’s sheer prodigality remains a singular marvel of this country’s musical accomplishment, all the better demonstrated by enthusiastic students from the Conservatorium and National Academy rather than jadedly slick professionals.
Saturday October 15
Baroque Brilliance
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm
Young soprano Julia Lezhneva, last heard here in 2014, is back with Richard Tognetti and his excellent orchestra to sing works you probably haven’t heard; well, I haven’t. Porpora’s florid motet In caelo stelle clare appears to have been resuscitated by Lezhneva, who has recorded it to many plaudits. Vivaldi’s opera Ottone in Villa holds the aria Leggi almeno; the soprano has also contributed to a full recording of the opera. Alongside these are two Handel brackets: the three-movement Salve Regina and excerpts from the opera Alessandro, a 2012 Decca recording of which – you’ll be happy to know – had Lezhneva as a participant. She is contributing four arias from this opera to the evening which caps a great effort from a vocal soloist – seven ornate pieces in total – while the ACO will have a relatively placid time working through Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 1 and a Handel B flat Sonata a 5.
Wednesday October 19
Serenade
Ensemble Liaison
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm
Well, you can’t say fairer than that: Serenade is the recital’s name and it kicks off with one. Danish composer Emil Hartmann’s Op 24 in A from 1877 is tailor-made for the Ensemble’s personnel – David Griffiths’ clarinet, Svetlana Bogosavljevic’s cello, Timothy Young’s piano – . and its three movements are as agreeable a Romantic era work as you could want with its echoes of ruminating Brahms and all-join-hands Dvorak. Young gets to play actual Brahms with some extracts from the intermezzi, romance and ballade that make up the Op. 117 and 118 collections. Guest Fiona Campbell sings the ineffably fine Brahms Op. 91, two songs for voice, viola (Griffiths’ clarinet?) and piano. Campbell also contributes Mahler’s Ruckert-Lieder, either accompanied only by Young or by what must be a remarkable arrangement involving the four instrumentalists available here. Ingolf Dahl is rarely encountered in chamber music programs these days. The American composer had a varied life which took in quite a few musical occupations. His 1947 Concerto a tre employs the unusual combination of clarinet (Benny Goodman at its premiere), violin and cello, its three sections forming a unified whole.
Thursday October 20
A Voice for the Silenced
Australian National Academy of Music
South Melbourne Town Hall at 7 pm
The subtitle of this event is Composers lost to the Terezin & Sobibor Camps. Despite a revival of interest in Jewish composers who perished in the Holocaust, you rarely come across a full program of their music; at least, rarely in this country. Two of the writers are familiar: the Czechoslovakian Erwin Schulhoff and his countryman Pavel Haas. The former is represented by his oboe+clarinet+bassoon Divertissement, a spiky collation complete with a Charleston alongside a theme with variations plus fugato. Haas’ Wind Quintet of 1929 contains a Prayer and a Ballo Eccentrico at the core of its four movements of Janacek-influenced optimism. Gideon Klein’s Divertimento for eight wind instruments was written in 1940, a year before he was deported to Terezin. Leo Smit, a luminary between the wars of the Dutch musical world, wrote his jazzy, wrong-note Sextet for wind quintet and piano in 1932 and it brims with the spirit of France at the time of Les Six. The brunt of the work in these performances will fall to flute Silvia Careddu, clarinet Paul Dean, oboe Nick Deutsch, bassoon Matthew Wilkie, and french horn Johannes Hinterholzer with some ANAM musicians’ help in the Smit and Klein scores.
Thursday October 20
A German Songbook
Christiane Oelze
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm
One of the MRC’s Great Performers, the gifted soprano is accompanied on this occasion by Eric Schneider, with whom she has enjoyed a solid association at European and American festivals and in the recording studio (Strauss lieder, Forbidden Songs). Tonight, the artists work through five brackets: Schubert (including Auf dem Wasser zu singen, Du bist die Ruh and Rastlose Liebe), excerpts from Mahler’s Ruckert-Lieder (but the program lists all five of them!), selections from Eisler’s Hollywood Songbook (Schneider has recorded all 46 in the set with baritone Matthias Goerne), five extracts from Schumann’s Liederkreis Op. 39 (a bit less than half the cycle), and four solos by Weill, including the inevitable Alabama Song. A nice spread of German art-songs moving from the sentimental to the ironic: a field of endeavour that Oelze has made her arena of specialization.
Friday October 21
Melvyn Tan
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm
For serious music-seekers, here is the last gasp from this year’s musically anorexic Melbourne Festival. Tan has been a successful visitor here in recent times, although most of my sightings have been of concerto performances. This recital begins with Beethoven Op. 109, the E Major Sonata No. 30 with its unforgettable sequence of theme-and-variations at the end. Tan also performs Chopin’s 24 Preludes. That’s about 50 minutes’ worth and incontestably fine music, although why Tan should have chosen either is a mystery; they’re not what you’d call festival fare. More interesting is the ‘international premiere’ (does that mean first time in Australia?) of British composer Jonathan Dove’s Catching Fire, written for Tan and premiered three months ago at the Cheltenham Music Festival. As far as I can see, this is Dove’s first work for solo piano – a change from his better-known canvas of opera; as well, this is what you expect to hear in a festival context; recycling the over-familiar is an easy-programming way out.
Friday October 21
Holst’s The Planets
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm
Benjamin Northey, everyone’s favourite Proms conductor, fronts the MSO for this night of classic hits – of a sort. We begin with Vaughan Williams’ The Wasps Overture, a sprightly sample of British jocundity with a Chestertonian walking theme (if the author could in fact walk that quickly) as its main matter and a contrasting melody that summons up wide-arching vistas of the English countryside – worlds away from Aristophanes’ bickering about the law and filial duty. Australian pianist Andrea Lam plays the solo in Chopin’s Concerto No. 2 (like Beethoven, this second is really the first); here’s hoping she can cut through the cloying pseudo-scholarship surrounding interpretations of this composer and find a Perahia-like directness. The MSO Chorus – females only – join in for the Holst astrological round-up which begins with the most gripping depiction of war in music and ends with the wordless chorus fading away in a remarkably prescient vision of the timelessness of space.
Monday October 24
Metamorphoses
Australian String Quartet
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm
This fine ensemble plays a straight program of Mozart, Ligeti and Ravel. Of course, the title refers to the middle work, the Hungarian composer’s String Quartet No. 1, Metamorphoses nocturnes, written in 1953-4 during the years of Soviet occupation and not heard until the composer left his homeland for Vienna. It’s about 20 minutes in length, divided into 17 sections – which means that it is singularly mobile; the night changes are as active as Bartok’s. The ASQ’s Mozart is K 590 in F, his last in the form and invested with a prominent cello part for its intended dedicatee, Frederick William II of Prussia. Ravel’s 1903 quartet is an early work but an always welcome experience, unusually warm in its emotional content and less self-observant than some of the composer’s later chamber music.
Thursday October 27
Space Jump
Sutherland Trio
Melbourne Recital Centre at 6:30 pm
I know many people admired Felix Baumgartner, the man who jumped from the stratosphere 39 kilometres back to Earth in 2012 – a great physical feat, they say. Such a pity,though, that the man opens his mouth. One fan is Fazil Say, the Turkish musician whose piano trio gives this recital its title. It begins with deceptive folksy charm, like Shostakovich on a day off, but moves about a third of the way through into more gravitationally hurtling territory. The ensemble – violin Elizabeth Sellars, cello Molly Kadarauch, piano Caroline Almonte – land back on their feet with the Brahms Trio in B Major – emotionally if not physically transporting – and Beethoven’s Trio No. 9; an E flat Major manuscript found only after the composer’s death, this short three-movement work has a dominant piano part. Filling out the hour comes a world premiere from Mary Finsterer, presumably suited to the available personnel but currently still labouring under the all-purpose title new work – or perhaps that’s its real name.
Friday October 28
The Giants in Music
Duo Chamber Melange
Melbourne Recital Centre at 6:30 pm
No complications here. The duo – violin Ivana Tomaskova and piano Tamara Smolyar – are performing Mozart’s two-movement G Major Sonata K. 301, the second of the mature-age series. The duo finishes their work with the Strauss E Flat Sonata, both exuberant and controlled with an intriguing middle Improvisation: Andante cantabile which erupts into a maelstrom of piano activity in its centre and where, despite the promising title, everything is written down – improvisatory in mood, not in reality. Noel Fidge, who celebrated his 80th birthday last month, is a retired Australian biochemist who also studied music at Julliard. Between the Mozart and Strauss, he is to enjoy the premiere of his violin-and-piano Fantasy.
Saturday October 29
Clarinet Heaven
Melbourne Chamber Orchestra
Linden New Art at 4:15 & 6 pm
One of the MCO’s smaller-scale events, this pair of recitals brings to an end a roving program that began in Mount Beauty, moved to Pyramid Hill, Bendigo, Elmore and Heathcote before winding up here in St. Kilda at the same time as the Linden gallery’s Postcard Show. Violins William Hennessy and Caroline Hopson, viola Merewyn Bramble and cello Josephine Vains collaborate with the clarinet of Lloyd Van’t Hoff in a quick-change sequence. Beethoven’s String Trio in C minor is the last of the composer’s five works for that combination, gifted with an excellent Adagio. Weber, the clarinet composer par excellence, is represented – briefly – by the 6-minute last movement of his Clarinet Quintet. Australian writer Nicholas Buc, an MCO favourite, is presenting a new score; no details so far. Then there’s the focal work: Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. This is one of those masterpieces best experienced at close quarters, like in the Linden gallery, and with absolute trust in the performers to live up to its inbuilt limpid beauty.
Sunday October 30
Beethoven and Britten
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Iwaki Auditorium Southgate at 11 am
A day after the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra’s revival of the Beethoven C minor String Trio, here it comes again, this time from the MSO musicians. The personnel involved are all principals: Dale Barltrop and Matthew Tomkins leading the two violins corps, Christopher Moore who heads the violas, and long-time cello first-desk David Berlin. As well as the Beethoven, all four will present Britten’s String Quartet No. 1, a product of his American years and commissioned by that lavish arts patron, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Both works last about 25 minutes which means patrons are getting a well-focused two bouts of entertainment. Still, you have to wonder why the authorities are insisting on inserting an interval. Custom? Aesthetic relief? Time-filling?
Sunday October 30
Slava, Rodrigo, Beethoven VII
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Hamer Hall at at 2:30 pm
Yes, it’s that poor bloody Concierto de Aranjuez once again. Slava Grigoryan, now as familiar to Australian audiences as John Williams used to be, is fronting this venerable piece yet again. But we should be happy that at least here’s one guitarist who can play the thing. Richard Tognetti will lead another Beethoven symphony, No 7 in A – although I can’t help thinking that we’ve heard this work before from the ACO. Even so, it’s always a gripping 40 minutes of muscle-flexing to experience, particularly if the Allegretto is treated properly and not as a funeral march. Melbourne audiences get to hear a world premiere of So dream thy sails by Gordon Kerry, taking its inspiration from a Hart Crane fragment, The Phantom Bark. This is formally a violin concerto and will feature Helena Rathbone, one of the ACO’s principal violins, as its soloist.
The program will be repeated on Monday October 31 at 7:30 pm.
O'Connell the Music 