Sunday February 3
THE FLYING DUTCHMAN
Melbourne Opera
Regent Theatre at 5 pm
Continuing its underlying program of Wagner promulgation, the city’s opera company is heading for the first so-called masterpiece, the doorway in the received canon. We have seen this opera recently – three years ago, almost to the day, down at St. Kilda’s Palais presented by Victorian Opera with 3D scenery. A good way further back, I seem to recall the Victorian State Opera mounting the work at the State Theatre in 1987, following an earlier season at the Princess Theatre in 1978. The only controversy that hit any of these preceding interpretations was at the 1987 season when an attempt to present the opera in its original form – in one continuous three-act swoop – came up against union demands for consideration of the musicians on OH&S grounds, so that an enforced interval came just at the point where Senta and the Dutchman confront each other for the first time. Anyway, this production finds the company in the Regent Theatre and the enterprise will be conducted by Anthony Negus who directed last year’s Tristan from Melbourne Opera. British bass-baritone Darren Jeffrey has the most significant role of his career so far as the doomed hero. Lee Abrahmsen sings Senta, Rosario La Spina will probably take on Erik; Roxane Hislop brings years of experience to Mary, Senta’s nurse; and Steven Gallop takes up the challenge of Daland. For all its youthful status in the canon, this work is unforgettable for its brisk simplicity of action, mighty marine suggestiveness and intensely sympathetic vocal writing.
Tuesday February 5
THE ITALIAN GROUND: MUSIC FOR DANCING
Ludovico’s Band
Melbourne Recital Centre at 6:30 pm
As far as I can tell, the content of this recital comprises much of the CD that this ensemble produced for the ABC in 2007: suites by Sanz, Kapsberger and Gianoncelli; a set of three compositions by Ruiz de Ribayaz; Mudarra’s Fantasia in the Ludovico manner; Castladi’s Quagliotta Canzone; Alessandro Piccinini’s Chiaconna; Murcia’s Gaitas y Cumbees; and the anonymous work that gives this night its title. Still, it’s been 12 years or thereabouts since the recording was issued and ,although some of these pieces have emerged in Band outings across the intervening years, it’s always worth hearing the ensemble work through pieces that they have relished enough to endow with a sort of permanence.
Friday February 8
GERSHWIN & FRIENDS
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Sidney Myer Music Bowl at 7:30 pm
Back we come for the annual trilogy of free concerts under the stars, complete with picnics and light-hearted revelry on the lawn, while the senior citizenry takes its entertainment more seriously in the seating under the Bowl canopy. Tonight, Gershwin is the presiding genius with the effervescent raucousness of the Cuban Overture, that jazz-civilizing tone-poem An American in Paris, and Australian-based-in-New-York pianist Daniel Le taking the spotlight in Rhapsody in Blue, one of music’s great ad hoc amalgams that still jolts you with the arrival of each episode on the underlying train journey it depicts. The friends, apart from conductor Benjamin Northey and Le, also number Olivia Chindamo who will take part in her father Joe’s Fantaskatto, written for the singer and showcasing her talents at scat singing. Chindamo premiered this work two years ago at the Brisbane Powerhouse; it has been described as ‘a concertante work with jazz, contemporary and operatic flavours.’ A sort of thematic mix-up, then – which is a fair description of these go-with-the-flow nights that are usually packed out.
Wednesday February 13
TREBLE HELIX UNLOCKED
The Song Company
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm
The Sydney vocal ensemble which seemed to hold its members intact for many years, is tonight singing parts of the Eton Choirbook, a collection of Catholic liturgical music that survived the excessive destructive penchant of the longer-lived Tudor monarchs. The Song Company will position itself around a focal point and sing at each other; we are invited to watch and marvel. Of the 64 compositions available (well, 62: a couple are incomplete), we are promised a Magnificat (one of the 9 available), Richard Davy’s Passio Domini, a swag of motets and the Jesus autem transiens/Credo in Deum 13-part canon by Robert Wylkynson who was Master of the Choristers at Eton from 1500 onward. The personnel of the Company appears to have altered radically since I last heard them, but that was back in the Roland Peelman days; this ensemble has acquired a new director in Antony Pitts since Peelman hung up his non-existent baton in 2015. The night’s title is bound to be meaningful but all it suggests to me is the three-strands of English composition that the Choirbook contains.
Wednesday February 13
CHINESE NEW YEAR
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Hamer Hall at 7:30 pm
The MSO has ventured its arm in many ventures over the years but this night promises an exceptional welcome to the Year of the Pig. The Mongolian group Hanggai is advertised as a ‘traditional-meets-rock band’, one which adapts folk tunes for a modern format. Now, even with no knowledge of the music of the steppes, I’m prepared to guess that numbers like Swan Geese and Horse of Colours could be traditional songs; about The Transistor Made in Shanghai, doubt rears its none-too-credulous head. But, as usual, what do I know? It’s probably been sung for decades across Ulaanbaatar and in trend-setting yurts for miles around. Tan Dun conducts, of course, and introduces us to his Double Bass Concerto, The Wolf Totem, with MSO principal Steve Reeves the soloist, and the composer’s Cellphone Symphony Passacaglia (Secret of Winds and Birds) which involves the audience playing an app of birdsong which we have all downloaded prior to the concert and which turn on at a specific point in the work. Audience participation indeed, and a neat turning of the tables on those morons who cannot conceive of existing socially, even in mid-concert, without the assistance of their own audio-visual life-support systems.
Wednesday February 13
Grigoryan Brothers and Wolfgang Muthspiel
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm
This recital was to have involved Muthspiel, Slava Grigoryan and Ralph Towner, but the last-named master-guitarist has had to cancel – hence, the substitution of the other Grigoryan guitarist, Leonard. Not much detail has been published about what the trio will play; nothing as dreary as a set program. But we are assured of a variety of guitars and lots of improvisation, which is all to the good. Still, Cassandra-like, I predict that the extempore stuff will be very predictable and you can forget any experimentation of a challenging nature. Don’t believe me, then. But Muthspiel is a fine jazz musician and he works within that genre’s limitations, which have become more and more obvious since the 1960s.
Saturday February 16
SATURDAY NIGHT SYMPHONY
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Sidney Myer Music Bowl at 7:30 pm
The second of the free Myer Bowl concerts from the MSO features the organization’s assistant conductor, Tianyi Lu, and violinist Leon Fei who is, I think, 14 years old. This program has no symphony on its bill of fare, but a bewildering sequence of the popular and the unknown. The menu, that originally was to open with Berlioz’s Le corsaire overture, now starts with Saint-Saens’ Samson and Delilah (no, it can’t be the whole thing – I suspect we will hear the Act 3 Bacchanale only). Faure’s Pelleas et Melisande Suite is the solitary French work of the night, which originally included Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres-midi d’in faune and his orchestration of one of Satie’s Gymnopedies. The rarely heard Pohjola’s Daughter tone poem by Sibelius enjoys an airing; complementing this Lapland vision is Iain Grandage’s Deep: A Silent Poem for Sir Douglas Mawson that memorializes the explorer’s 1912 solo Antarctic trek. Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture enjoys yet another Myer Bowl performance and the night centres on The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto by He Zhanhao and Chen Gang, with Fei as the soloist.
Saturday February 16
PURCELL’S KING ARTHUR
Gabrieli Consort & Players
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm
For this tour, the ensemble comprises nine singers and seventeen instrumentalists under director Paul McCreesh who co-edited the edition used of Purcell’s opera-of-sorts. I can only recall one performance of King Arthur from the distant past; I believe it was at the National Theatre in St. Kilda and vague memories also stir of Richard Divall directing the pit operations. Regardless of the reliability or otherwise to these memories, here we are with a concert performance which may approach the superlative quality of Les Arts Florissants working through Dido and Aeneas; or it may be very authentic and as interesting as an exegesis on Pascal from Barnaby Joyce. This will be the Gabrielis’ first Australian tour and, for all one’s reservations about getting tangled up in the scholarship, you can hardly imagine a body better placed to illuminate this score which holds the effective Act 3 Frost Scene as well as the aria Fairest Isle towards the end. The original has a considerable amount of dialogue from Dryden which you’d expect to be excised here.
This program will be repeated on Sunday February 17 at 2 pm.
Wednesday February 20
PARSIFAL
Victorian Opera
Palais Theatre, St. Kilda at 4:30 pm
Hard to imagine, isn’t it? The month begins with the earliest of Wagner’s works that is part of every opera house’s repertoire and, a few weeks later, we can experience the last product from the composer’s pen. This slow-moving interpretation at several removes of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s poem has rarely been played in Melbourne and should be an unmissable undertaking for those dedicated to the Wagner myth. If it weren’t for the venue, I’d be happy to pay my way but parking is impossible, the locals inspire no confidence, and you can’t be enthusiastic about walking along Marine Parade to get your car after 10:30 pm. The title role is taken by German tenor Burkhard Fritz, who sang the first Parsifal in China and goes from here to sing the same role in Munich. Incidentally, he looks nothing like any of the figures shown in the VO publicity. Katarina Dalayman (Kundry) has recorded her role and has a veteran’s experience in it. British bass Peter Rose also brings a wealth of experience to one of opera’s masters of tedium, Gurnemanz. Amfortas, the endlessly complaining, will be sung by Australian-born baritone Peter Roser. Derek Welton, who has sung the part at Bayreuth, is Klingsor and Teddy Tahu Rhodes makes a welcome appearance as old Titurel, presiding over the whole welter. Company artistic eminence Richard Mills conducts to Roger Hodgman’s direction and the Australian Youth Orchestra will welter around the slow-moving, sonorous edifices that delineate the work’s geography.
This opera will be repeated on Friday February 22 at 4:30 pm and on Sunday February 24 at 3 pm.
Wednesday February 20
A SYMPHONIC CELEBRATION
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Sidney Myer Music Bowl at 7:30 pm
The MSO administration is once again wielding the symphony label, and tonight’s program gives justification for this. It all concludes with the Saint-Saens Symphony No. 3 which requires an organ. I don’t think that they’re going to ship in a true instrument with actual pipes for Calvin Bowman to use for those big blazoning chords that open this work’s finale, used to devastatingly mundane effect in Chris Noonan’s 1995 film Babe. What’s the betting on an electronic sound-source? Before this grand finale, Benjamin Northey takes the p[layers through Dvorak’s Carnival Overture, Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and A Hero’s Journey by the MSO’s Cybec Young Composer in Residence, Mark Holdsworth; oddly enough, this last work is listed on the composer’s own website as Fanfare, although the two titles aren’t mutually exclusive even if the latter points to a short career. The night’s soloist is violinist Veriko Chumburidze, a 22-year-old Turkey-born musician from Georgia who won the Wieniawski Competition in 2016. She is taking the brilliant and fun-filled leading line in Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy.
Wednesday February 20
Satu Vanska and Kristian Chong
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm
This is the opening gambit in the Recital Centre’s Great Performers series, the specific Great being applied to Vanska, one of the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s leading violinists. She’s enjoyed a couple of solos with the ACO and they’ve been worthy enough but you’d be hard pressed to put her up there with Ehnes and Vengerov. The collaborating artist, Chong, is apparently not great; nevertheless, he’s more than capable of dealing with this program. Lutoslawski’s 5-minute Subito was written for an American violin competition and lives up to its title by swerving from one episode to another. Vanska then performs the first half of the Bach G minor solo Violin Sonata and fleshes out her night with the complete Beethoven A Major Sonata Op. 30 No. 1 and Ravel’s sprightly G Major. Before the rousing, sophisticated crudity of the Tzigane finale, Vanska performs another solo: Kaija Saariaho’s . . . de la Terre which involves atmospheric electronics.
Sunday February 24
3MBS DVORAK MARATHON
Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra et al
Melbourne Recital Centre at 10 am, 12 pm, 2 pm, 4 pm, 6 pm, 8 pm
This appears to be following the same pattern as last year’s Bach orgy sponsored by the radio station. Along with these six major concerts, some others are occupying younger patrons in the Primrose Potter Salon space. For an opening comes the Stabat Mater from the RMP forces under Andrew Wailes. Mid-day has the Streeton Trio in the Dumky, Calvin Bowman performing the 8 Preludes and Fugues for organ (on what instrument?), three of the Slavonic Dances in two-piano format, and the delectably nationalistic Op. 100 Violin Sonatina. At 2 pm, the Sutherland Trio with violist Christopher Moore play the Piano Quartet No. 1, Dindin Wang and Rhodri Clarke outline the Op. 11 violin/piano Romance Op. 11, Benjamin Martin gives us the Eclogues, and the Orava Quartet play the American in F Major. Next, an all-star cast takes on the Piano Quintet No. 1 – pianist Stephen McIntyre, violinists Wilma Smith and Elizabeth Sellars, violist Caroline Henbest and cellist Christopher Howlett; the Australian Children’s Choir sing five brief melodies; then ANAM musicians and Arcadia Winds will bound through the Serenade Op. 44. At dusk, Stefan Cassomenos plays the hour-long Poetic Tone Pictures for piano, members of the Australian Octet following up with the A Major String Sextet. Finally, Elyana Laussade airs the twelve short Op. 8 Silhouettes, soprano Zara Barrett sings Rusalka’s Song to the Moon with the Corpus Medicorum under Keith Crellin, orchestra and conductor bringing the marathon to a close with the E minor Symphony.
In the Potter Salon, a youth program is also on offer; introductions to Dvorak at 11 am and 12:30 pm, followed up by masterclasses at 2 pm, 3 pm, and 4 pm.
Monday January 25
ORAWA
Orava Quartet
Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm
The boys from Brisbane form part of the 2019 Southbank Series and aim for an exemplary purity in Haydn’s Op. 33 No. 1, the first and less well-known of the composer’s two quartets in B minor. Later, in this hour-long Salon event, we hear Mendelssohn In F minor. an elegy for his recently deceased sister Fanny and his last major composition. In the centre the group plays Orawa, Woljchiech Kilar’s string orchestra work of 2001 reduced for quartet and from which the group took inspiration for its name. Kilar was best known as a film composer and you can discern the travelogue elements in this tri-partite vision of the Tatra Mountains and River.
Tuesday February 26
NATALIE CLEIN & KATYA APEKISHEVA
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm
To start Musica Viva’s subscription series this year, the combination of cellist Natalie Clein and pianist Katya Apekisheva offers two programs that teeter on the brink of over-familiarity. I don’t know Clein and wonder if she has played here previously; a superficial bit of research revealed that she has played in Perth as a member of the Belcea Quartet but is not listed on their bio as a former member. She has certainly performed in New Zealand but, for the most part, her activities are pretty home-grown and English. Moscow-born Apekisheva is a close contemporary but also a novice to Melbourne; neither artist seems to have had close connections with the other in the past. Whatever, they start tonight with Kodaly’s Sonatina, then a new work by Natalie Williams for these artists commissioned by Musica Viva, which is followed by the last Beethoven sonata in D Major and Rachmaninov’s G minor Sonata
Clein and Apekisheva will play a second program on Saturday March 16 at 7 pm. Natalie Williams’ new score will be repeated; the Beethoven is the D Major Sonata’s Op. 102 companion in C Major; another novelty comes in the vignette-length Six Studies in English Folk-Song by Vaughan Williams. Bloch looms large with the 1956 Suite No. 1 for solo cello and the inevitable From Jewish Life, written over 30 years prior. And patrons will also hear British composer Rebecca Clarke’s Sonata for Viola or Cello and Piano of 1919.
Wednesday February 27
HAYDN WINKELMAN SIBELIUS
Australian String Quartet
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm
Cellist Sharon Grigoryan is still away on parental leave and her place is being taken tonight by the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s principal Timo-Veikko Valve. As with the Orava Quartet’s program from two days ago, the ASQ is beginning with Haydn Op. 33; in this case, No. 3 yclept The Bird. To end, the players take on Sibelius in the Voces intimae score, the solitary product in this form from the composer’s mature years. As is becoming the practice with chamber music recitals, the ensemble deviates from the norm in the program’s centre. Here, they will play Papa Haydn’s Parrot by Helena Winkelman, a Swiss-Dutch violinist who has composed a paraphrase in 8 movements on the Haydn work that precedes it in this night’s offerings. For a violinist, Winkelman has an impressive catalogue of compositions; my loss, probably, but I’ve heard none of them. You’d anticipate a paraphrase in the style of Liszt on Rigoletto. But can you carry it on for so many movements? Here’s hoping for something more substantial than simple-minded frivolities.
Thursday February 28
QUARTET FRIENDS
Flinders Quartet
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm
Here’s yet another example of what I just referred to in the previous entry. The Flinders group starts with Haydn, Op. 64 No. 3 in B flat – one of the Tost group in the process of being composed as the composer finally left Esterhaza. The night’ conclusion comes in Schumann’s last in A, by which the composer ended his brief (month-long!) labours in the string quartet form – all three of them. Between these solid poles comes a new work by Matthew Laing, commissioned by the Flinders players. Speaking of which, the personnel appear to have changed yet again. Helen Ireland and Zoe Knighton continue in viola and cello spots respectively; first violin is Thibaud Pavlovic-Hobba who was for a time to be seen among the Australian Chamber Orchestra desks; second violin, Nicholas Waters, is a recent ANAM habitue but has been integrating into the Flinders sound for a few years now.
Part of this program will be played in the Collins St. Baptist Church at 1 pm on Tuesday February 26. Laing and Schumann remain; Haydn disappears.
Thursday February 28
JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTRE ORCHESTRA WITH WYNTON MARSALIS
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Hamer Hall at 7:30 pm
Another of the talented Marsalis brood comes to town, not hiding out in a subterranean bar in authentic 1950s fashion but taking to the concert hall and using the services of the MSO. Trumpeter Wynton has not been here for 20 years, so his return is big news; on top of which, he is bringing his JLCO musicians with him. As usual, I’m unsure who is playing what. We are scheduled to hear some Duke Ellington selections – from both bodies or only one is unclear. More definitely, we will enjoy Bernstein’s 1949 Prelude, Fugue and Riffs which will feature the JLCO and some guests from the MSO. But the focal point of the night is Marsalis’ own Symphony No. 4, The Jungle, which is a portrait of New York, has six movements, and is of Mahlerian length. Yet another fusion of jazz and classical, the symphony has generated generally amiable reactions from American audiences and writers. Given its predecessors on this night, it faces a huge amount of competition.
This program will be repeated on Friday March 1 at 7:30 pm and on Saturday March 2 at 7:30 pm.
Thursday February 28
JOVIAN WORLDS
Melbourne Chamber Orchestra
Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm
As for Jove, the MCO is going for the pantheonic jugular with Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, the Classical period’s main justification for the key of C Major. Conductor Michael Dahlenburg, a young man set on an ultra-demanding task, has charge of this interpretation. As well, the concert begins with a Tchaikovsky scrap: the Moderato e semplice first movement from the String Quartet No. 1 with its rocking first subject syncopations. We’ll hear it in a string orchestra arrangement (don’t know whose). In this conservatively shaped program, the centre-piece concerto is Tchaikovsky in D with soloist Andrew Haveron, concertmaster of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; seen here at least once a year in Kathryn Selby’s chamber music recital series at MLC in Hawthorn. It’s a large work for the MCO to take on, asking for a woodwind octet, a brass sextet and timpani as well as a solid soloist-competitive string corps. There’s a touch of the Jovian about the concerto, particularly in those brave polonaise-suggestive tutti outbursts during the first Allegro; also more than a suspicion of the Mercurial in the finale, with a few shadings of Saturnine grumpiness, not to mention an ongoing Venerian languor in the melting, muted outer stretches of the central Canzonetta. Sorry: can’t find the Martial, Tellurian, Uranic or Neptunian . . . obviously not looking hard enough.
This program will be repeated on Sunday March 5 at 2:30 pm in the Melbourne Recital Centre.
O'Connell the Music 