Sunday October 1
EMMANUEL PAHUD
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Hamer Hall at 2:30 pm
Getting themselves into shape, the ACO begins with the Ricercar a 6 from Bach’s A Musical Offering; I doubt that it will be the enthralling Webern orchestration – just a bland, everyday transcription for strings. Pahud, here billed as ‘the world’s greatest living flautist’, will then play the C.P.E. Bach A minor Sonata, hopefully unaccompanied. The orchestra’s outing wouldn’t be complete without a string quartet transmogrified for their forces, and here comes defenceless Ravel in F. Another unaccompanied stand-by in Debussy’s Syrinx and Pahud finally joins up with the ACO in Franck’s Sonata for Flute and Strings, which is a misnomer: the composer wrote nothing for flute solo. This work is for violin and piano, one of the great duos and not that suited to the flute, even Pahud’s; but then, I didn’t think much of the Galway/Agerich recording, either. Tognetti has organised the piano part for strings which should provide a barrel of laughs for anyone who’s played the work in its original form.
This program will be repeated on Tuesday October 3 at 7:30 pm.
Sunday October 1
MENDELSSOHN’S OCTET
Melbourne Chamber Orchestra
Melbourne Recital Centre at 2:30 pm
The MCO has its own octet; not hard to achieve, considering the wealth of willing talent available. This afternoon, the title work is surrounded by the buoyant B flat Major Sextet by Brahms and a new octet by Douglas Weiland, the British composer, founding member of the Australian String Quartet, and a favourite voice of the ACO’s artistic director, William Hennessy who shared those early ASQ days with Weiland. The new work is called Winterreise, which sets up all sorts of expectations. The work comprises six movements, lasts about 14 minutes and was commissioned by Hennessy in 2015, was completed in August that year and is finally getting an airing here. It’s very welcome, of course, but the pairing of the Mendelssohn and Brahms scores was an inspired move: both youthful, glowing works but what a world of difference!
Tuesday October 3
WILLIAM WINNANT
Australian National Academy of Music
South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm
Continuing the Academy’s percussion festival, the California-based senior citizen of contemporary music-making leads three works by Lou Harrison, the centenary of whose birth is the fulcrum on which this series of concerts and recitals turns. First is Tributes to Charon from 1982 for three percussionists and alarm clocks, which Winnant requested from the composer for a 65th birthday concert; then, the 1987 five-movement Varied Trio for violin, piano and percussion; finally, the earlier (1973) Concerto for organ with percussion orchestra – about a dozen players – in five movements which will present some logistical problems, mainly in siting the solo instrument. As light relief come Henry Cowell’s Ostinato Pianissimo for Percussion octet, a pioneering piece from 1934 that lasts about 3 minutes – don’t blink; and John Cage’s Four6 from 1992, one of the great master’s late works and originally written for an unspecified (naturally) quartet. Like pretty well everything in these American Triptych events, the content is significant and still challenging.
Friday October 6
GLORIES OF THE FRENCH BAROQUE
Brenda Rae and the Australian National Academy of Music Orchestra
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30
While the Academy’s percussionists are being happily engaged in their US-inspired orgy, the organisation’s other instrumentalists will be working under conductor Benjamin Bayl to support the American soprano in this night of music by Rameau. I know nothing about Rae who is appearing here for the first time in Australia and tonight has the honour of launching the serious music side of this year’s Melbourne Festival. She will sing seven arias, which will be surrounded by overtures, dances and scene-setting interludes from the French composer’s operas, none of which we see today unless you’re lucky enough to live in Sydney: Les Paladins, Castor et Pollux (produced by Pinchgut Opera five years ago), Platee, Zoroastre, and two works from which you might have heard extracts: Les Boreades, and Les Indes galantes. Other Pinchgut Rameaux include Dardanus in 2005, then Anacreon and Pigmalion on a triple bill earlier this year. It’s a specialized field but just the sort of material that should be mounted at a festival because you’re unlikely to hear anything this concentrated very often. The musicologists among us will be happy; let’s hope the singer is able.
Saturday October 7
JAN WILLIAMS
Australian National Academy of Music
South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm
Finishing up the American Triptych celebrating the wealth of the Republic’s composers for percussion comes another senior figure in the field and long-time presence at the University of Buffalo. Williams leads four works by Lou Harrison, with a solitary stranger in the middle: Morton Feldman’s Instruments 3 for flute, oboe and percussion – 20 minutes of atypical activity. But the night opens with Song of Quetzalcoatl, a 1941 composition for four percussionists with an understandable emphasis on Mexican instruments. The brief 1939 Concerto No. 1 for Flute follows: also a trio, the woodwind solo is supported by two percussionists, although I’ve seen it played with only one handling the accompaniment. Like Debussy’s Rhapsodie, the ‘No. 1’ seems superfluous: I can’t find another. Post-Feldman, Williams takes charge of the Canticle No. 1, also from 1939 and a percussion quintet lasting about 4 or 5 minutes; don’t blink. The last Harrison work is the 1941 Labyrinth No. 3 for 11 percussion players and a relatively large-scale work, not just in the number of its executants but also in its four-movement length.
Saturday October 7
TURNING POINT
Australian String Quartet
Collingwood Arts Precinct at 8 pm
A further bullet in the Melbourne Festival’s gun-belt, this recital begins with a non-string quartet: Scarlatti’s Piece in 4 voices. Well, I say it’s not a string quartet but I could be wrong; the work might not be by Alessandro or Domenico but by some other member of the family. Or it could just be a keyboard sonata arranged for the ASQ instruments. Anyway, there’s no doubting the provenance of Bartok’s First String Quartet or the first Beethoven Razumovsky which sustain the bulk of this event. Also enjoying an outing is Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 3, Mishima: a six-movement work and part of the composer’s score for Paul Schrader’s film based on the Japanese author’s last day. The recital’s venue is a new one to me; from the directions given on the Festival website, it seems to be part of the old NMIT complex on the corner of Wellington and Johnston Streets.
This program will be repeated on Sunday October 8 at 6 pm, and on Monday October 8 at 7 pm.
Sunday October 8
MORE TELEMANN
The Melbourne Musicians
St. John’s Southgate at 3 pm
Finishing up for the year, Frank Pam and his chamber orchestra give Bach’s voluble contemporary a fair hearing, starting with his Canary Cantata, a compendium of four arias and recitatives on the death of a well-loved pet to be sung by soprano Tania de Jong. Pam himself takes the solo line in Telemann’s solitary and popular Viola Concerto in G Major, followed by Mark Fitzpatrick coping with the composer’s even-more popular, brief D Major Trumpet Concerto. As makeweights, de Jong will sing Handel’s Ombra mai fu – the only aria anyone knows from the opera Serse – and the afternoon concludes with the first two symphonies by Johann Stamitz, so-called Mannheim Symphonies the first of which is a questionable attribution to this fertile composer who had an impact on Haydn and Mozart.
Thursday October 12
MSO PLAYS BEETHOVEN 8
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Melbourne Recital Centre at 8 pm
They will eventually get around to playing the unassuming F Major symphony, but only after an odd collection of pieces, beginning with Dvorak’s Serenade for Winds. Written for pairs of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, with three horns, an ad lib line for contrabassoon and cello and double bass parts supplied to supplement the bass line if you can’t find a contra, this work belongs more to the MSO’s Sunday morning Iwaki Auditorium recital programs. Still, guest conductor Michael Collins will doubtless control proceedings from the first clarinet desk. The night’s other soloist will be Lloyd Van’t Hoff sharing the honours in Mendelssohn’s Konzertstuck on his basset horn while Collins takes the clarinet line; I just don’t know which one of the two that the composer wrote is to be played – the F minor or the D minor. And you’d assume they will use the orchestrated accompaniment instead of the composer’s clearer piano support. Elena Kats-Chernin’s Ornamental Air from 2007, a solid three-movement concerto for basset clarinet and chamber orchestra, could find either of the two Mendelssohn soloists under the spotlight.
This program will be repeated in the Robert Blackwood Hall, Monash University on Friday October 13 at 8 pm.
Friday October 13
BANGSOKOL – A REQUIEM FOR CAMBODIA
Rithy Panh, Him Sophy
Hamer Hall at 7:30 pm
Another Melbourne Festival offering, this is the result of a collaboration between film-maker Rithy Panh and composer Him Sophy. They have assembled a group of singers and instrumentalists to perform a hybrid lament for the agony of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. The hour-long piece combines the Buddhist Bangsokol ritual and the Christian requiem in a fusion of dance, film, song and speech. As the world now knows, there is a lot to grieve for; it strikes you even four decades on, principally the loss of two million lives as well as the near-annihilation of a culture = all made possible by a continuing wilful ignorance in the West. This collaboration is receiving its world premiere here before it is taken to New York and Paris.
The program will be repeated on Saturday October 14 at 7:30 pm.
Saturday October 14
Joep Beving
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm
Beving is an amateur pianist from the Netherlands who has made a splash with two CDs and is appearing under the aegis of the Melbourne Festival. I’ve listened to about ten tracks from these and the best that can be said is that it constitutes fairly harmless musical doodling. The titles of his works might be different but Beving’s music is tediously similar, an aimless meander around the keyboard that betrays a harmonic gaucheness and melodic stasis. It makes you long for the going-nowhere-quickly ambience of the American minimalists. This recital is scheduled to last 75 minutes; for some of us, that’s over an hour too long.
Tuesday October 17
DOUBLE MANUAL
Peter de Jager
Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm
Another pianist on the Melbourne Festival roster is this remarkable musician who is mounting a one-night stand featuring only music by Iannis Xenakis, the Romanian/Greek/French composer whose immersion of composition in mathematics set challenges – some of them impossible to surmount – for even the most willing and adventurous musicians. De Jager plays three of the major piano pieces – Herma (1961), Evryali (1973) and Mists (1980), which was written for Roger Woodward. For variety, he will also play the composer’s only two solo harpsichord works: Khoai (1976) and Naama (1984). The performance of one Xenakis keyboard work is a rarity because preparation requires a very long time . . . but five? Unless you attend with scores in your hand, there’s no way you can testify to de Jager’s precision, especially in the earlier piano works which show what wimps Stockhausen and Boulez turned out to be. But for some of us, this 70-minute stretch could turn out to be one of this year’s high-water marks.
Thursday October 19
‘ROUND MIDNIGHT
Emanuele Arciuli
Melbourne Recital Centre at 8 pm
Third of our Festival’s three solo pianists is the Italian-born expert in contemporary American composition for his instrument. Making his Australian debut, Arciuli goes all the way, beginning with China Gates by John Adams, a brief bagatelle from 1977. Then he plays Judd Greenstein’s First Ballade, a jump of thirty years in chronological time but a retrograde step in modernity; the piece stays in the same harmonic loop for most of its duration and you can see why he gave it this title. Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik: Ruminations on ‘Round Midnight by Thelonious Monk by George Crumb requires an amplified piano and is a nine-section construct commissioned by Arciuli himself 16 years ago. Sound Gone was written in 1967 by Stephen Alexander Chambers before he converted to Sufism and changed his name to Talib Rasul Hakim. Arciuli winds up his hour with Rzewski’s pounding Constructivist revival, Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues.
Arciuli presents a second program at the Deakin Edge, Federation Square on Friday October 20. Works include Cage’s In a Landscape, Louis Ballard’s Four American Indian Piano Preludes, the ‘Round Midnight Suite variations on a Thelonious Monk theme by Rzewski, Babbitt, Torke, Harbison and Daugherty, and Phrygian Gates by John Adams.
Friday October 20
HOWARD PENNY: FROM THE CELLO
Australian National Academy of Music
South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm
Head of Strings at ANAM, Penny takes control of the organization’s strings in a breezy night’s work that begins with Two Pieces for String Octet by Shostakovich, a prelude and scherzo dating from the composer’s student years and written concurrently with the startling Symphony No. 1. The forces reduce a tad for the warm, aspiring Brahms Sextet No. 2 in G Major; you can go years without hearing either of the composer’s works in this form, then they both turn up within weeks of each other (see above, Sunday October 1). Quite a few more players will be needed for Bartok’s Divertimento of 1939; in fact, 22 is the prescribed minimum, the composer having a keen eye for the weight needed when he divides the players which happens regularly, although he’s more happy to play off principals from each section against the main body in the best concerto grosso manner; always an exhilarating journey, if a brief one.
Friday October 20
PATH OF MIRACLES
Tenebrae
St. John’s Anglican Church, Malvern East at 7:30 pm
A 15-year-old British choir making its debut in the Melbourne Festival, Tenebrae is presenting a single program at two different venues. The works to be given are Owain Park’s Footsteps and Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles, both of them recently recorded together by these singers. Which makes you wonder why they’d bother bringing them so far and making them the only offerings available. Talbot’s four-movement work, for 17-part a cappella choir with a few crotales thrown in for atmosphere, follows a pilgrim’s route from Roncesvalles, through Burgos and Leon to Santiago and the shrine of St. James; it lasts a little over an hour and is a Tenebrae specialty because the director Nigel Short commissioned it. But then, so he did for Park’s work that presents images of a tiring traveller in a little over fifteen minutes. All well and good and the few performance extracts provided sound effective, but again: why come all this way to sing a record?
The program will be repeated in the Melbourne Recital Centre at 8 pm on Saturday October 21.
Saturday October 21
SOUND TEXT
Charles Gaines
Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm
This recital concludes an exhibition, The Score, which runs from August 1 to November 5, and a series of seminars held throughout the Melbourne Festival at the Ian Potter Museum. The recital is a combination of art and music put together by American conceptual artist Charles Gaines with music supplied by Opera Povera’s Sean Griffin. The musical content ranges from Reconstruction-era spirituals (were there any?) to French Revolutionary ballads. The art itself seems to revolve around musical scores that lurch out into visual and linguistic areas; something like the stuff we were all writing back in the 1960s, except that this has intimations of holding more of an emphasis on politics. It all sounds promising and there’s some hope, as it’s Festival time, that the occasion could be confrontational.
Tuesday October 24
THE END OF TIME
Ensemble Liaison
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm
As soon as you see this night’s title, you immediately think of Messiaen, don’t you? And you’re spot-on: the climax of this recital is the famous quartet with guest Dene Olding coming in for the work’s violin line. Before that long sequence of visions spiritual and a leetle bit temporal comes Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro Op. 70 which could feature either Olding or Svetlana Bogosavljevic’s cello, but certainly Timothy Young’s piano, and certainly not the original score’s horn. As well, the group presents the premiere of Australian writer Samantha Wolf’s Splinter for an as-yet unspecified instrumental combination; and, to begin, Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale in the composer’s own version for violin, clarinet (David Griffiths, on this night) and piano. We are promised a lighting design from Paul Jackson, so the night’s colours won’t be only instrumental.
Wednesday October 25
SOUVENIR DE FLORENCE
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm
Once again, a real chamber recital from the ACO and exclusively for Melbourne, it would seem. As well as Tchaikovsky’s athletic string sextet to bring down the curtain, the visiting ACO personnel will also indulge us in Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – hopefully for just the original four strings – and Shostakovich’s Two Pieces for String Octet, performed just five days previously by Howard Penny and his ANAM forces (see above, Friday October 20). Carrying the torch for frequent collaborator Olli Mustonen, Tognetti and his colleagues will play the Finnish pianist’s eight-movement Nonet No. 2 from 2000 for two string quartets and double bass: a work that the ACO hastened to present in the following year and of which I can’t recall any trace.
Friday October 27
MSO PLAYS SCHUBERT 9
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Hamer Hall at 8 pm
Back in the old routine, this event shows the MSO back in the well-worn saddle. Finishing off the program, the strings will suffer from an extended bout of RSI with the Schubert Symphony No. 9 which is Great, as its nickname claims, but draining for the performers who endure page after page of scrubbing. British conductor/musicologist Andrew Manze starts off with Beethoven as well – the dour Coriolan Overture – and Isabelle van Keulen is soloist in Prokofiev’s rapidly accomplished (20 minutes or so) Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major. Van Keulen was the Eurovision Young Musician of the Year in 1984 but has been much more than a flash-in-the-pan popular success; the pity is that it has taken her so long to get to these shores.
This program will be repeated at 8 pm on Saturday October 28 and Monday October 30 at 6:30 pm.
Saturday October 28
JACOBEAN COMPOSERS IN THE LOW COUNTRIES
Ensemble Gombert
Xavier College Chapel at 8 pm
John O’Donnell begins this journey into another historical byway with an organ work by John Bull, Prelude on Laet ons met herten reijne; probably written while the composer saw out his exile in Antwerp after having to escape from the law in England for the unmusical talents of fornication and adultery. The Gombert singers come on to the scene with selections from Peter Philips’ Cantiones sacrae, apparently picking material from both sets for five and eight voices; this composer had a more high-flown reason for living in the Netherlands and Belgium as he was a Catholic. The main part of the program will probably be consumed by Richard Dering’s first book of Cantiones sacrae quinque vocum; here was another Catholic who nevertheless managed to get back to England when appointed organist to that crazy, resentful royal, Queen Henrietta Maria. A last chance to hear this excellent choir before its final-for-the-year Christmas celebration in the same venue on Saturday December 9.
O'Connell the Music 