Month: April 2019

A lesson in guitar-playing

cliveoconnell

FOREST OF DREAMS

Callum Henshaw

Soundset Recordings  SR 1103

Henshaw is a new name to me, although his main claim to local fame is winning the 2017 Melbourne International Concert Artist Guitar Competition.  As far as I can make out, this is his third recording and it covers an expansive territory, some of it concentrated on the near-contemporary.   He begins with a classic: Augustin Barrios‘ Un Sueno en la Floresta; moves to Australian Phillip Houghton‘s Stele Suite; follows with another Latin foray in Four Catalan Songs by Miguel Llobet.   Graeme Koehne’s A Closed World of fine feelings is listed in the Australian Music Centre’s catalogue as being written for voice, although its recorded performance from that same site seems to have been on carillon; Henshaw’s CD booklet claims the work was commissioned by Tim Kain who, last time I looked, was a guitarist.   Further, there seem to be two linked works in so far as one entry refers to the above title. while another adds on the phrase and grand design.  Yet another entry suggests the work is choral.  That’s the trouble if you start looking for definite information: confusion waits just around the corner.  Leo Brouwer‘s Sonata del Decameron Negro follows; and the CD ends somewhat strangely in Niel Gow‘s Lament for the Death of his Second Wife.

Is there a theme running through thus collection?   Well, does there need to be?   We have a Paraguayan composer represented by a piece written before 1918; Houghton, a revered figure on the local guitar scene, wrote his four-movement work in 1989; Llobet’s collection of folk songs was collated somewhere between 1889 and 1935; Koehne’s composition in its guitar format dates from 1997;  Brouwer is Cuban and his sonata was written in 2012.  The Dow Lament – a sort of inbuilt encore –  comes post- 1805, when the lady in question, Margaret Urquhart, died, and pre-1807 in which year Scottish fiddler Gow himself yielded up the spirit.

Henshaw has a sensitive ear for the demi-semiquaver work that dominates the Barrios work, once the composer stops loitering around the outskirts of the forest and gets stuck into the canopy of filigree that carries most of his piece’s interest.   I lost the performer after the second repeat at bar 120, catching up a little further on; probably the fault of my edition.  Still, this isn’t enough to disconcert any listener who is hard pressed to carp at the performer’s negotiation of this bagatelle which paints a delicate representation of South American greenery –  a very civilized environment, from  this showing.

Houghton’s work has some Greek connections, as in the opening Stele which refers to ancient memorial stones for the dead, the precursors of our modern-day gravestones.  It’s a clear-cut composition with an inbuilt fluency of material, yet it summons up no particular image of Greek mini-monuments; nothing but a certain spartan texture. Dervish is a 6/8 prestissimo with a few percussive surprises along the whirling route.  I assume its title refers to the well-known Turkish mystics although Houghton’s character is more of a will-o’-the-wisp than one of those stately clerics whose motion is hypnotic rather than frantic.   Bronze Apollo falls into two sections: Premonition, which is slow-moving, suggesting the silent eloquence of the god, and Arpeggio, which is just that – a basic pattern that increases its dynamic range if not much else.  A crescendo gives it propulsion but at the same time everything is measured, which is very Classical Greek, isn’t it?   Nothing in excess.   The final movement, Web, is another rapid moto perpetuo which builds its questing commentary over a repeated sextuplet pedal A.   I don’t know what Houghton was getting at here, although my mind automatically goes to the myth of Arachne; but, for all I know, he might have been referring to the state of pre-Pelopennesian War politics, or the proliferation of tourists throughout the Cyclades.  Whatever the case, the suite as an entity satisfies for its fluency and variety of colours, excellently brought into being by Henshaw’s deft talent.

Llobet’s folk-song settings are Canco del Lladre (The Thief’s Song),  El Mestre (The Teacher), L’Hereu Riera (The Riera Heir), and El Noi de la Mare (The Child of the Mother), the last of which was a Segovia special.   The first impresses for Henshaw’s subtle harmonics at bar 11, but even more so from bar 24 to 27 where, thanks to the composer’s skill and Henshaw’s delivery, they make melodic sense for once.   Even better follows in El Mestre, which is a model of elegance and clarity with no signs of that slovenly left hand work that disfigures movement along the fingerboard.   Henshaw doubles the length of L’Hereu Riera by playing it twice, which gives you the chance to relish his supple ornamentation that livens up a pretty straightforward setting.   Finally, El Noi is a simple lyric in a gently rocking 6/8 with the instrument’s lowest string tuned to provide a pedal D.

Koehne’s work is also in D Major with the lowest string again tuned down a tone.  A gentle ternary-shaped piece with a repetitive rising pattern of three chords in its outer sections with a more ‘filled-in’ central part that fleshes out the arpeggio shapes, this piece is calm and suggests nostalgia for a past world of simplicity and emotional candour.  It is, apparently, an elegy in which not much is being said, but the work offers an uncomplicated landscape without surprises.

The CD’s most substantial element is Brouwer’s sonata in four movements: Guijes y Gnomos (Elf-Goblins and Gnomes), Treno por Oya (Lament for the Goddess Oya), Burlesca del Aire (Burlesque of the Air Spirit), and La Risa de los Griots (Laughter of the African Story-Tellers).   Springing from an earlier work – El Decameron Negro of 1981 – this sonata’s first movement is based on a nervous alternation of major and minor 2nds that construct a mobile motif above chord work falling easily under the hand.  But it wouldn’t be Brouwer unless it had at least one eclectic touch; in this case, a quiet reversion to Renaissance lute sounds that begins a little after the 3 minute mark: an oasis of old-time certainty in the middle of modern-day nervous twitches.   For all I know, Brouwer could be citing a particular piece from that era; my knowledge of the repertoire has, alas, diminished with the years.

Oya is in charge of winds, lightning, storms, death and rebirth; quite enough for any deity to be getting on with.   Brouwer begins his mourning peacefully enough, moves into a habanera rhythm, which abruptly turns into a music of rapid-fire flurries with theatrical pauses and questioning hiatus points; the habanera returns, the activity momentarily rises and sinks away, while the delicate-stepping conclusion brings this schizoid lament – meditative and frenetic in turn – to a questioning conclusion.   As a scherzo, the Burlesca is ebullient in a muffled manner, packed with wry flourishes at either end and holding another surprise at about the 2-minute mark when the content moves into late 19th century Romantic guitar territory  –  just for a brief stretch but it serves to throw the brisk humour of its surrounds into high relief.    Brouwer’s finale is a rondo after a slow introduction.   It follows a simple enough format with two lengthy slower episodes and a slower-paced coda that rounds out the sonata with a sort of defiant flamboyance.   What it has to do with griots and their traditions is beyond me; with its sophisticated rhythmic chopping and changing, it suggests Latin America more than anywhere else.

But the sonata has an impressive vivacity throughout, Henshaw milking it of its timbral interplay with exemplary skill and that gift of insight which cuts to a composer’s particular chase without faltering,   It helps that the work is a gift for anyone brave enough to take it on; that’s not to lessen this interpreter’s insight and clear sympathy with its language and intent.

Finally, the Gow Lament rounds off proceedings.  This is a fine melody in two strophes, both of which Henshaw repeats and in the process shows himself a dab hand at slight inflections and quicksilver grace notes, informing the lyric with a generous vibrato in its warmer, lower-register moments.  I suppose it can be viewed as fitting in with the disc’s content through an expressive honesty and a chameleonic folk tint that emerges all over the place.   After the Brouwer with its acerbic harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary, its naive orthodox simplicity serves as a sort of emotional solace.

May Diary

cliveoconnell

Wednesday May 1

MEDITERRANEAN FEAST

Songmakers Australia

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

Of the seven elements in this sometimes-Mediterranean recital, three are by Rossini, that superlatively cosmopolitan European composer who was never content to be a homebody.   We are also to hear a Massenet piece, a scrap from Turina, and two true oddities:  Habanera by the great 19th century soprano Pauline Viardot, and Perche due cuori insieme by the 19th century Italian/British conductor Michael Costa.   Soprano Merlyn Quaife, mezzo Christina Wilson, guest tenor Brenton Spiteri and bass Nicholas Dinopoulos will enjoy the accompaniment of Songmakers stalwart Andrea Katz.  Two of the Rossini pieces are for all four voices (I assume Wilson will take one of the tenor lines in Cantiamo, ridiamo, che tutto s’en va) while the other is a duet; Viardot’s piece is either a solo or a female duet; the Massenet Chansons des bois d’Amaranthe comprise five accompanied vocal settings – a duo, two trios and two quartets; Costa’s product is a complete unknown and untraceable; Poema en forma de canciones by Turina consists of four solo songs (probably for soprano) preceded by a Dedication for solo piano.   Sounds like fair shares all round.

 

Thursday May 2

METROPOLIS NIGHT ONE

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

This year’s MSO Metropolis concerts feature works by Dutch contemporary master Louis Andriessen who is celebrating his 80th birthday.  We haven’t experienced much of this composer’s music in live performance here, although his influence has been spread by means of some of his students  –  Damien Ricketson and Graeme Koehne  –  who are familiar names in Australia.   The focal point of this opening concert in a surprisingly long-lived festival of new music is Andriessen’s . . . miserere . . . : a string quartet, later arranged for string orchestra and having some formal connection to Allegri’s only well-known choral work.   Supplementing this come three Australian pieces: a new score by Barry Conyngham; Koehne’s three-movement Capriccio from 1987  for piano and strings where the soloist will probably be the composer’s countryman, Ralph van Raat; and another one-time Andriessen pupil, Kate Moore’s freshly-minted Magenta Magnetic which showcases the talents of percussionist Claire Edwardes.   This two-concert bundle from the MSO is conducted by American musician Clark Rundell, Professor of Conducting at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.

 

Saturday May 4

METROPOLIS NIGHT TWO

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

The second Andriessen-honouring program concludes with a collaboration between the venerable Dutch master and this night’s conductor, Clark Rundell; well, more of an arrangement.   The new work, enjoying its first Australian performance, is based on Andriessen’s 1999 opera, Writing to Vermeer.  The work, Vermeer Pictures, is a suite based on the opera but without any sung component.   As for the preludes to this, the evening will go all Cybec.  Last year’s MSO Young Composer in Residence, Ade Vincent, has collaborated with vocalist Lior to create Forever Singing Winter into Spring, an art/pop song cycle in four seasonal sections which involves electronics as well as your regular symphony orchestra; and this year’s Composer in Residence, Mark Holdsworth, presents his new Cri de coeur which boasts no other resources than a plain orchestra; just how plain remains to be seen.

 

Monday May 6

THE ART OF FUGUE

Brodsky Quartet

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

With a new first violin on deck in Gina McCormack, this estimable British ensemble is playing a wide-ranging miscellany that includes two parts of Bach’s magnificent edifice: the single fugue Contrapunctus I and the counter-fugue Contrapunctus VI.   Having dispensed with this calling card, the group then moves into later explorations, first with Mozart’s Bach tribute: the stern Adagio and Fugue.  Mendelssohn follows: the 4 Pieces for String Quartet – Andante, Scherzo, Capriccio, and Fugue.   For those not already fugally sated, the Brodskys will outline Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge.  Back to Bach for the  solo Violin Sonata No. 3 in C with its massive second movement fugue; you’d have to assume that McCormack would be performing this ultra-demanding score, although the group’s original second violin Ian Belton might put up his hand for the task.   And the feast concludes with Shostakovich: his String Quartet No. 8 which begins fugally and reverts to the form’s techniques as its two finale largo movements sink into total despair.

 

Tuesday May 7

NEW PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

ZOFO

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

It may be that with this presentation Musica Viva is moving into areas where its less limpet-like followers will not follow.   Still, full marks for novelty.   ZOFO comprises pianists Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi, both playing on the one instrument in the best 19th century domestic music-making format.   Their program comprises an update of Mussorgsky’s solo piano masterpiece; they commissioned pieces from a wealth of composers from 15 different countries to accompany a visual art works, one that each individual composer selected for treatment.   You probably know some of these composers but to me all but one is a stranger: Australia’s own Carl Vine.  There’s Frenchman Gilles Silvestrini, Israeli Avner Dorman, Poland’s Pawel Mykietyn, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh from Azerbaijan, Chinese-American Lei Liang, Jonathan Russell from America, Indonesian-New Zealander  Wayan Gde Yudane, Kenji Oh from Japan, Cecile Marti from Switzerland, Iranian-American Sahba Aminikia, Russian-Briton Gabriel Prokofiev, American Samuel Adams,  Pablo Ortiz from Argentina, and Keyla Orozco from Cuba.  Each composition is discrete, separated from its companions by a Promenade, the whole prefaced by a Mussorgsky-mimicking Introduction.   Played at MOMA last year, the piece lasted about 75 minutes and I assume that, as then, the work will be given tonight without interval.

This program will be repeated on Saturday May 11 at 7 pm.

 

Wednesday May 8

LOVE & DEVOTION

Selby & Friends

Tatoulis Auditorium, MLC at 7:30 pm

And so it is, with one of the great marriages, pseudo-adoptions and worshipping-from-afar in music history, actually verified by a chain of historical data.   The love and devotion are best exemplified by the relationship between Clara and Robert Schumann, a dedication on his part that lasted from their first meeting to the sad ending in the Endenich asylum; and, from her, an unwavering loyalty to his work and memory that endured across the 40 years of her widowhood.   Then came Brahms, who adored both husband and wife from his first encounter with them in 1853 but maintained a platonic relationship with Clara up to her death, a year before his own.   Selby and her friends for tonight – violinist Grace Clifford, cellist Timo-Veikko Valve – present one work by each of these three composers: Clara’s Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Robert’s Piano Trio No. 1, and the Piano Trio No. 1 by Brahms – all written within a seven-year span.  While respecting the Schumann family products, it’s the Brahms work that moves the spirit – one of chamber music’s highest glories.

 

Thursday May 9

PIANO PICTURES

Australian National Academy of Music

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

Back in Melbourne for yet another expose on what’s taking up attention on the contemporary piano scene, Lisa Moore is partnering ANAM’s resident piano-meister Timothy Young.   Together they will play Hallelujah Junction, John Adams’ two-piano composition from 1996 – no, not that contemporary but representative of a happy mind-set, and welcome for that alone.   Some of the ANAM pianists will join in the fun for Steve Reich’s Six Pianos of 1973, which makes it a pretty venerable objet d’art although it shares an obsessive predilection for phasing with the Adams work that kicks off the night.   Reich wants six upright instruments so the players have closer access to each other.   Another 6-piano work follows in Benjamin A. Wallace’s Fryderyk Chopin’s Psychaedelic Technicolor ‘Lectro-Funk-Core Superstarlit Ultra-Throwdown on Op. 28 No. 4, which bases itself on the Largo E minor Prelude and is only two years old.    Finally, using the sextet of pianos once more, we hear an arrangement by New York-based American musician Paul Kerekes of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition which I’m assuming has not been rejigged and so comes in as the night’s senior guest at this pianistic wedding, dating as it does from 1874.  Perhaps referring to ‘contemporary’ was not the best program descriptor.

 

Friday May 10

ROMEO AND JULIET

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 7:30 pm

It’s a Slavic night, if not totally Russian.   Conductor  Stanislav Kochanovsky hails from St. Petersburg; born in 1981, he’s making a solid reputation for expertise in  orchestral and operatic works, particularly those of his home country.   His 2017 performances with the MSO of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2 pleased everybody except me.   He leads off tonight with the original version of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, a product that the composer’s mentor Balakirev criticised severely; sadly, Mussorgsky never heard this work, least of all in the revision by Rimsky-Korsakov which has become standard on concert programs.   The night concludes with excerpts from Prokofiev’s great ballet; not one of the three suites, then, but possibly a captain’s pick by Kochanovsky.   In between, Russian pianist Julianna Avdeeva, the Chopin Competition Prize Winner of 2010, is soloist in that composer’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor.   Squaring the ledger for any age-information egalitarians, Avdeeva is 33.

The program will be repeated on Saturday May 11 at 7:30 pm, and on Monday May 13 at 6:30 pm.

 

Saturday May 11

RIGOLETTO

Opera Australia

State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne at 7:30 pm

It’s back.   Elijah Moshinsky’s scenic updating of Verdi’s psychologically ugly opera is here to thrill us again.   Not that the mise-en-scene matters overmuch; what you come for, to a very familiar work like this, is the singing, isn’t it?   Well, you’d never know from the reviews by most of my colleagues who spend a large part of their time talking about the sets or costumes or lighting or dancing; it’s easier than having to make an informed judgement on the voices and whatever was happening in the pit.   The title role is to be taken by Amartuvshin Enkhbat, a Mongolian baritone who has a vast experience in this role – Kiel, Naples, Verona, Genoa, Parma, Palermo, Monorca, Salerno, and Turin; he goes on after Melbourne to sing the role in Macerata and Florence.  That’s a helluva lot of Italian houses, so he’d have to be more than passable.   Our own Stacey Alleaume sings Gilda, and the plum role of the Duke of Mantua goes to Armenian tenor Liparit Avetisyan. Filling out the last act’s quartet is OA regular Sian Sharp as Maddalena.  Most of the minor roles have also fallen to familiar quantities: Gennadi Dubinsky as Monterone, Luke Gabbedy as Marullo, Virgilio Marino as Borsa, Christopher Hillier as Ceprano, Dominica Matthews as Giovanna; the only unfamiliar name is Roberto Scandiuzzi who sings Sparafucile.   Andrea Licata conducts.  Watch out for the dancing: it’s woeful.  Raise a cheer for the final act’s car, the set designer’s sad salute to De Sica.

Further performances will follow on Wednesday May 15, Wednesday May 22, Saturday May 25, Monday May 27 and Wednesday May 29 – all starting at 7:30 pm – and a matinee on Saturday May 18 at 12:30 pm.

 

Sunday May 12

BRANFORD MARSALIS

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 2:30 pm

Two of the Marsalis family visiting Melbourne  in one year!  A few months ago, Wynton brought his Jazz at Lincoln Centre ensemble to town for a collaboration with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; now big brother Branford is appearing with the ACO under Satu Vanska in a catholic program that will feature some heavy saxophone contributions.   Alongside two concertos – well, a fantasia by Villa-Lobos, and British composer Sally Beamish’s own arrangement of her 2006 viola concerto, Under the Wing of the Rock – there is a fair amount of dross.   Piazzolla enjoys a fair innings with the Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (each indistinguishable from the other) and the over-exercised Libertango.   Two movements of Ginastera’s Concerto for Strings will be played, the middle scherzo and adagio omitted in favour of the flashy outer pages; not one of the composer’s finer efforts, being cobbled together from his own String Quartet No. 2.   Villa-Lobos gets a second run with the Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5; no mention of a soprano soloist or of where the ACO will source the requisite 8 cellos.   Osvaldo Golijov continues the Latin flavour with the first movement of his two-part Last Round, dedicated to the memory of Piazzolla as a street-fighter.   Starting the whole thing are Stravinsky’s 1919 Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet (preferably the performer will have both A and B flat instruments on hand) – presumably, this features Marsalis down-sizing.   Catholic, indeed: all over the place.

This program will be repeated on Monday May 20 at 7:30 pm.

 

Tuesday May 14

PIERS LANE PLAYS BACH AND CHOPIN

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6:30 pm

The notable expatriate Australian pianist is certainly playing those two composers – the Well-Tempered Clavier‘s staid Prelude and Fugue No. 14 in F sharp minor from Book 2, then an uneven Chopin bracket in an impromptu, a waltz and the B flat minor Piano Sonata.  That out of the way, Lane offers a Russian group to finish: the Op. 21 Six Pieces on a single theme of Tchaikovsky, dedicated to Anton Rubinstein and neglected by him in the composer’s lifetime almost as much as they are by pianists these days; and Stravinsky’s Three movements from Petrushka, written for another Rubinstein  –  Arthur  –  who, oddly enough, failed to record them.   This last is an odd choice for this polished musician to include in an otherwise urbane evening’s music; I’m sure he has it firmly under control, but it has brought many another pianist to grief, especially those who enter its Shrovetide Fair finale with a determination to pound.   I’d pin my expectations for the best Lane on the all-embracing Chopin Impromptu No. 2 and the Tchaikovsky suite.

 

Thursday May 16

LUDOVIC MORLOT: A NIGHT AT SEA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 7:30 pm

 

Morlot, leaving his moderately substantial tenure as music director of the Seattle Symphony this year,  is the sole focus of this watery exercise.   He opens with a bon-bon and ends with a marvel.   Liadov’s Enchanted Lake was a regular stocking-filler for orchestral programs half a century ago, holding a place that the MSO preferred to occupy with Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila Overture.   Before the inevitable Four Sea Interludes from Britten’s opera Peter Grimes, the conductor presents a rarity from Sibelius: The Oceanides tone poem where nothing seems definite but the score surges with assured magniloquence to its muted conclusion.   Before reaching the evening’s apogee with Debussy’s La mer, after which other musical waters sound tepid, we hear La source d’un regard from 2007 by Marc-Andre Dalbavie, a former pupil of Boulez and habitue of IRCAM.   It starts out sounding a touch like Britten’s Sunday Morning interlude but settles into a dazzling chain of timbral patterns and super-impositions.  What it has to do with water escapes me, even given the opening noun in the work’s title.

This program will be repeated on Friday May 17 in Costa Hall, Geelong at 7: 30 pm.

 

Friday May 17

MOZART PROJECT 2

The Melbourne Musicians

Tatoulis Auditorium, MLC at 7:30 pm

Continuing its three-program focus on some of Mozart’s piano concertos, the Musicians will escort Elyane Laussade through the delectable F Major K. 459: without question, my favourite in the whole series for its uncomplicated sophistication and a slow movement – actually an Allegretto, so not too slow – that  boasts an appealing unsentimental eloquence.  Frank Pam concludes this night’s operations with the Haydn Symphony No. 49, La Passione, written 16 years before the Mozart concerto.   Some lesser Mozart prefaces the major works: 12 German Dances, being given their premiere.  They could be the K. 586 set but these call for an odd orchestral format  –  two each of the four woodwind, pairs of horns and trumpets, timpani, and violin with double-bass.  It’s quite possible that these brief pieces might not have gained the attention of any Australian orchestra so far.    And the Haydn is preceded by Dittersdorf’s Symphony in F Major, a four movement construct of no great pretensions with a rondo second movement and the same format for its finale, only needing pairs of oboes and horns to complement the usual Musician strings.

 

Saturday May 18

ENGLISH BAROQUE WITH CIRCA

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

Why does this work?   I don’t know.   The questionable combination of circus and Baroque music (not always strictly adhered to) has produced two memorable events in recent times.   It isn’t really a balanced business: the gymnastic feats of the Brisbane-based troupe attract your attention much more easily than the instrumentalists and/or singers, but it’s not too lop-sided; indeed, the last Spanish-inflected concert on 2017 worked to great success,  Paul Dyer’s assembled pieces complementing the physical action effectively.  This year, the music comprises works by Dowland, Purcell, Handel, Corelli (well, his works permeated Europe, so why not England?) and the Neapolitan-born (probably) Nicola Matteis who enjoyed a splendid career in late 17th century London.  Fleshing out the Renaissance and High Baroque bookends will be some folk-songs including the Gartan Mother’s Lullaby from Donegal and Hole in the Wall which has somehow become associated with Purcell’s Abdelazar.   Singing the Lullaby and assorted other treats – Dowland’s Behold a wonder here, Thanks to these lonesome vales from Dido and Aeneas, Handel’s Gentle Morpheus – is Sydney-born soprano Jane Sheldon.

 

Saturday May 18

COSI FAN TUTTE

Opera Australia,

State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne at 7 pm

When the Eastern Metropolitan Company was still operating, it produced a version of this opera that has stayed with me for years.   At the end, the lovers reconcile in Mozart’s scenario; the EMO producer had his cast play this as an unpalatable outcome, neither pair happy and the men as bad-tempered and disgruntled as pretty much all the male participants in the recent season of Married at First Sight.   Here is a new production which transposes the action to pre-World War One, hopefully still set in Naples.   The cast is mainly local: Jane Ede (Fiordiligi), Anna Dowsley (Dorabella), Taryn Fiebig (Despina), Samuel Dundas (Guglielmo), and Richard Anderson (Don Alfonso).  The one import, Pavel Petrov, is a young Belarusian tenor (Ferrando) whose exposure to this role starts here; I thought he might be in Australia for his experience in the Rossini opera that follows this one in the national company’s Melbourne season, but no: his Cavalier Belfiore from last year’s Graz Opera is not wanted.   Canadian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson is making her Australian debut tonight; the director is David McVicar; the all-important set and costuming are the responsibility of Moritz Junge.

Further performances will take place at 7 pm on Saturday May 18, Tuesday May 21, and Thursday May 23.  A matinee will; be given on Saturday May 25 at 12:30 pm.

 

Thursday May 23

LES ILLUMINATIONS WITH EMMA MATTHEWS

Ensemble Liaison

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

Britten’s song cycle was written for soprano/tenor and strings.   Tonight’s version will be an Iain Grandage arrangement; the Ensemble has the necessary soprano in Matthews but what can you make of the Ensemble’s clarinet/cello/piano personnel to take the place of the composer’s highly idiosyncratic instrumental textures and attacks?   Not quite as challenging is the last movement from Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 where Matthews summons up an odd vision of Heaven, sadistic and gluttonous with a self-congratulatory conclusion.   Still, the text comes from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which collection the composer found hard to leave alone.   The recital begins with Britten also: Three Folk Songs (take a guess which of the 61 we’ll hear).   Falla’s Suite Populaire Espagnole is also promised, presumably in the arrangement by Maurice Marechal for cello (Svetlana Bogosavljevich) and piano (Timothy Young).   New Zealand composer John Psathas adds to the mix with his 1996 Three Island Songs which don’t ask for a singer but the Liaison configuration of cello, piano and clarinet (David Griffiths).   I’m very fond of these musicians but is there enough here?   The Psathas lasts about 13 minutes; the Falla Suite possibly the same; Britten’s cycle about 17 minutes; the Mahler lied, 10 minutes at a stretch; and most of the folk-song settings are pretty brief – on average, between 2 and 3 minutes each.   Say about an hour in all; mind you, to me, that’s an ideal length as long as the missing minutes aren’t made up for by rambling explanations and verbose statements of the obvious.

 

Friday May 24

IL VIAGGIO A REIMS

Opera Australia

State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne at 7 pm

It’s a fair drive these days from Plombieres-les-Bains, where this opera takes place, to Reims toward which town most of the main characters are aiming in order to attend the coronation of Charles X in 1825; about 300 km, which would have been a fair hike at the time.   It’s no news to relate that nobody in the opera got to the big smoke, which means they were all saved from an extraordinary celebration for an unpleasant man.   Still, that wasn’t Rossini’s problem, since he couldn’t predict how unpopular the last of the Bourbon top rank would make himself.   It’s the composer’s last opera in Italian, which is something, I suppose.   Or it would be if Rossini hadn’t thought so little of it that he didn’t see it lasting more than a few performances and later rifled it as source material for another work.   This production’s main claim to fame is its use of art – as backdrop and as clothing/masks for various characters.   Well, you need something to distract from the inane plot and a plethora of showy, pointless arias.   The cast is a large one but, like the company’s current Cosi, contains mostly local artists: Lorina Gore (Corinna), Emma Pearson (Contessa di Folleville), Julia Lea Goodwin (Madama Cortese), Sian Sharp (Marchesa Melebea), Shanul Sharma (Conte di Libenskof), Warwick Fyfe (Barone di Trombonok), Teddy Tahu Rhodes (Lord Sidney), Luke Gabbedy (Don Alvaro), Conal Coad (Don Prudenzio), John Longmuir (Don Luigino) and Christopher Hillier (Antonio).  The imports are: American soprano Jennifer Black (Maddalena), making her first essay at this opera, as far as I can tell; Juan de Dios Mateos (Cavalier Belfiore) which role the Spanish tenor has sung in Barcelona as well as negotiating three minor roles in a more recent Viaggio production at Deutsche Oper Berlin; Italian baritone Giorgio Cauduro (Don Profondo) also seems to be a Viaggio virgin.  Australian conductor Daniel Smith makes his debut with the company after a prestigious career so far in Europe during which he conducted Il Viaggio in Pesaro and St. Petersburg.   The original director was Damiano Michieletto, whose function is here fulfilled by Meisje Barbara Hummel.  The opera is in three acts, but the company has scheduled only one interval.   In this ludicrously brief ‘season’, do we really have to put up with this inconsequential frivolity?

 

Friday May 24

BEETHOVEN & BRUCKNER

Australian National Academy of Music

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

Principal conductor of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Nicholas Carter returns to his former finishing school to conduct the latest crop of ANAM musicians in  two symphonies, both the fourth in the composers’ catalogues.  The Beethoven B flat Major Symphony is not well-known, sitting with Nos. 1 and 2 as pretty neglected.   But it radiates good humour and benevolence once the opening Adagio has been dismissed – which it is in splendidly brusque style.   The work asks for pin-point precision in the outer movements and a wide range of inflections during the substantial Adagio.   Bruckner’s Romantic Symphony in E flat Major, one of the composer’s most congenial sprawls, asks for a rich depth that is a doubtful quantity in the Murdoch Hall.   As usual in Bruckner, the symphony also requires a fearless choir of four horns who are front and centre from the third bar onward, not least during the bounding Scherzo with its rapid-fire triplet chords.  Here’s hoping the orchestra has staying power; that last movement all too often becomes an effort-laden test of stamina rather than the composer’s intended magnificently warming sonorous tapestry.

 

Monday May 27

MOORE BEETHOVEN BRAHMS

Australian String Quartet

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

You can’t beat these ASQ program titles for maximum information in the shortest possible space.  For this leg of the group’s annual series, we are to hear two solid repertoire stalwarts.  The Beethoven is No. 4 of the master’s first set of six string quartets, Opus 18; despite its numbering, this score was the last in the set to be written and is the only one in a minor key with a generous emotional underpinning in its outer movements of restlessness and standing as a harbinger of the fierce intensity that the key of C minor would come to have for Beethoven.   Brahms took a long time to publish his first quartet, the Op. 51 No. 1, but he had the crazy idea that a work in this format needed to be polished up to its best advantage.   Also in C minor, the work is informed by its own brand of restlessness, a turbulence of spirit but still constrained.   Kate Moore’s new work, enjoying its world premiere at the ASQ hands, is apparently her third string quartet.   I can’t find mention of her first two, although there is Sketches of stars from 2000, as well as Violins and skeletons from 2010   –  which could well be her Nos. 1 and 2.   What little I’ve heard of Moore’s music has not lingered in the memory but there’s always hope.

 

Wednesday May 29

SLAVIC PASSION

Seraphim Trio

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

This fine ensemble  –  violin Helen Ayres, cello Timothy Nankervis, piano Anna Goldsworthy  –  has been working for 25 years now.   For the first program in its all-too-short recital series for 2019, the trio performs an ever-welcome standard: Smetana in G minor.   Written, as the composer admitted, as a result of personal tragedy, the work is a searing elegy, encapsulating the Czech composer’s honesty of expression.   As a preface, the Seraphims will play Suk’s Elegie, 5 minutes’ worth of slender late Romanticism and a less scorching memorial than that by Smetana.  Tucked in the middle of these passionate Slavs comes Richard Mills, whose Piano Trio is a new commission and is, I assume, the Portraits and memories work that the Seraphims will play at the Art Gallery of Ballarat the day after this Potter Salon event.   Whose portraits, what memories have yet to be revealed.

 

Wednesday May 29

MOZART SYMPHONY NO. 29

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

The MSO’s principal viola has charge of this night and will probably follow an established track carved out on previous similar enterprises by both directing and playing.   The night opens with Part’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, one of the Estonian composer’s most popular works and always effective if the audience can refrain from its customary expectorational outbursts.   Moore then moves us to the memorialised himself with Britten’s Rondo concertante for piano and strings; a product by the 17-year-old student composer; I’ve never heard it and have gleaned only that it is in two parts.   Stefan Cassomenos is the lucky pianist to reveal this work to us.   As well, Cassomenos is the central figure in Britten’s Young Apollo for piano, string quartet and string orchestra which comes from 1939, the composer’s first year in America.    Mind you, it’s not very long – about 5/6 minutes – but it is almost insistently flashy.   Two Mozart works bring the program to a happy conclusion: the endearing A Major Symphony, of course, preceded by the splendid Serenata notturna  –  Eine kleine Nachtmusik for the Thinking Man –  which asks for timpani as well as strings, as the Part opener requires one tubular bell to give atmosphere to its remorseless violin scales.   By the way, this is another ‘short’ program; as far as I can tell, the combined offerings add up to about 70 minutes.

This program will be presented again in the Robert Blackwood Hall, Monash University on Friday May 31

 

 

 

The Mass as opera, but who cares?

cliveoconnell

VERDI’S REQUIEM

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Chorus

Hamer Hall

Saturday April 13, 2019

                                                                         Okka von der Damerau  

My father, like many other Catholics of his generation, never warmed to Verdi’s Requiem Mass; he persisted in the unoriginal assertion that it smacked too much of the theatre and distracted from the purpose of a  true requiem.  But then, he wasn’t much taken by Gounod’s amiable St. Cecilia Mass when out local Pymble choir used to present it back in the late 1950s.   Faure was more his measure, even if that benign musical oasis fell outside the strictures of the 1903 motu proprio from Pius X, Tra le sollecitudini.  Sadly, I was never able to call the Berlioz Requiem to his attention: I didn’t know it in those years and, in any case. who wants to give scandal to musical innocents?

Sixty years on, the appraisal decrying Verdi’s secularization of the Requiem form is close to irrelevant when you consider contemporary practice in the Church’s music, let alone the outright vulgarities committed during services held by younger Christian sects.  Getting into any discussion about this topic has become increasingly futile in an era when church musicians have to cut their choral cloth to suit their congregations’ intellectual width.   As the unarguable directive goes, He that has ears to hear, let him hear.  If that means you feel constrained to take on the Verdi work as simply a historical anomaly, so be it.

Saturday’s performance from the MSO Orchestra and Chorus proved to be more than acceptable, conductor Lawrence Renes overseeing a generously ample version of the work in which nobody rushed unduly, the soloists generally kept to the prevailing metre, and the sonorously lavish moments were given full measure.   Each of the four solo voices showed positive qualities, although I was most taken by alto Okka von der Damerau, right from a formidable Kyrie entry, through an initially quavering Liber scriptus that settled into artfully spun phrases, up to a moving, transparent introduction to the Lux aeterna movement. To be sure, this singer proved well aware of her line’s potential for emotional heft, as in her decreasing dynamic intensity on the repeats of the word ‘nul’ at the end of her Sequence solo.

To her credit, soprano Leah Crocetto showed a dynamic sympathy with Damerau during the Recordare and Agnus Dei duets although she took many another opportunity to dominate the ruck when all four solo singers were involved.   At the start, her hefty vibrato surprised during slow-paced passages, although any initial dissatisfaction had worn off by the conclusion of the Recordare pages that impressed as one of the performance’s highlights, thanks to the female soloists’ empathy and avoidance of sentimentality.    Crocetto underplayed the monotonic drama of the Libera me opening recitative, a moment that a singer of Vishnevskaya’s calibre could make spine-tingling with passion and scarcely bridled fear.  But you could not fault the tension of Crocetto’s Tremens factus sum ego solo: a passage where those long-time accusations of theatricality garnered heavy support.

Tenor Issachach Savage invested the opening to the Kyrie with panache and a clarity of production that he maintained until the end, although it seemed to me that he was labouring under some physical difficulty towards the work’s conclusion.  Still, his most exposed solos, the Ingemisco and Hostias, came across with clear definition and a rousing, powerful upper register if the final ascending scale of the former sounded slightly abridged after the top B flat.   Bass soloist Nicholas Brownlee made stately rather than histrionic work of the Mors stupebit verses but impressed more when he came to the Confutatis maledictis section – a fine demonstration of musical and textural clarity.

Carrying out their work to maximum effect, the MSO Chorus kept up with Renes’ tempi and showed very creditably in nearly all the a cappella segments from a stalwart Te decet to the final movement’s Requiem aeternam support of the soprano soloist; certainly more assured than the preceding section’s Cum sanctis tuis trio from three soloists.   As well as relishing the explosive Dies irae outbursts with which Verdi gratuitously peppers the Mass process, the Chorus did their best in the Tuba mirum explosion; as usual, you could see the physical motion but the voices were drowned.  Matters might have been improved if the large body of sopranos on the side gallery had been slanted to face the audience rather than singing into the orchestral space.   But the male singers gave good value to the enterprise, the basses tending to extra prominence in the opening pages but the tenors present and secure in the choral texture.

Very little miscarried in the instrumental forces, the exercise carried along by a clear expertise from both wind and strings.   For the first time in my memory, the gallery trumpets melded in with the ground-level action, to the point where the communal fabric sounded as it should: a heightening of the texture, rather than a superimposition from discrete groups.  In fact, the brass choirs acquitted themselves with distinction: no lagging behind the pulse, a laudable balance in output, general precision in exposed chords. In the Dies irae strophes, the bass drum sounded over-hefty but the player was just responding to Verdi’s request for a delivery that is ‘dry’ and very loud.  In fact, the whole ensemble gave a confident reaction to Renes’ direction, even compensating during its less assured phases.

A satisfying and cogent reading, then, of this score that, despite what you think of its ecclesiastical suitability, is packed with melodic riches.  And that, I suppose, is the end point of all the fuss.   The message is overdrawn, the chances for musical pictorialization all too readily seized, the canvas very lavish emotionally, if not as coloured as some others.   Yet it has an emphatic certainty of utterance that carries you along each time you hear it.   You can regret, like my father, the work’s disruptive surface, one that does not really allow for contemplation, and the flights of virtuoso singing that it holds, surging glories that bring your attention to the performers’ craft.   But what else would you expect from the 19th century’s second-greatest opera composer?   Of course, there are oddities, like the choir’s fugal treatment of the Libera me text, yet the work as a whole is invested with an enthralling mixture of high tension and taut consolation, solidly delivered on this night.

Keen work from stand-ins

cliveoconnell

MOZART’S CLARINET CONCERTO

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday April 4, 2019

                                                                                Michael Collins

This program ran for two nights, the first of them a house-full affair.  Yes, it’s true that the chance of hearing Mozart’s last concerto from a famous performer will bring in a crowd, and it is much easier to fill the Murdoch Hall than the MSO.s much larger usual stamping ground.   Further, the cake was sweetened even more by the addition of Beethoven’s A Major Symphony, a work that can elate you with its sheer bravura of expression  no matter how many times you hear it.

Fortunately, both of these staples enjoyed remarkably clear and vivid renditions, the overall fabric remarkably present, even cutting, in this fine space where every layer of the Beethoven score could be discerned, even if the winds took on greater prominence than usual.    Conductor/soloist Michael Collins made do with fewer desks of strings than are normally involved in the symphony, but those he had at his direction sounded united in their attack and finish.   All the more remarkable, then, that quite a few of them were guests, not regulars.   For example, the player list involved seven visiting violinists, including concertmaster-for-the-night Helena Rathbone from the Australian Chamber Orchestra.  That’s an impressive swag when you consider that the two violin groups numbered about 14 in total.   Even better came in the double bass ranks where three out of the four participants were irregulars.

For all that, the symphony sounded imbalanced in the outer movements, especially when the dozen wind operated as a unit.   Passages where the violins held melodic primacy were occasionally lop-sided dynamically and some sentences loaded with scrubbing semiquavers showed us plenty of furious activity going on but, even from close up, it was a case of often filling in mentally for sounds that you knew were there but just didn’t travel with sufficient weight.

A little of this reared up in the Mozart as well, although here the wind component is only half as large as in the Beethoven score.   However, what impressed in this version was the bold elegance of this concerto’s outer Allegro movements which displayed a sinewy vigour that prefigured Beethoven’s early athleticism.   Playing on what I think was a basset clarinet,  Collins produced a compelling reading of this work’s solo line, pliable when it was to the purpose and admirably regular in his bubbling passage work.

In his handling of the well-loved Adagio, Collins demonstrated admirable dynamic control, his piano reprise at bar 60 excellently shaped and in no danger of revealing production flaws.   This security might have had something to do with the extra sounding length of the instrument; whatever the cause – even if it was partly physical – the results made for a beguiling interpretation, one where the low notes stayed where they belonged and where the clarinet could be heard carving its path through the orchestral surrounds, even in the final tutti bars of the finale.   If you were looking for faults, you might have found one at the conclusion to the Adagio, bar 94 to be specific, where the violins gave a sloppy account of their quaver-semiquaver downward slip; but this is nit-picking compared to the band’s confident realization of the work, particularly as their director was, for the most part, engaged on his own business.

It was easy to appreciate the energy that Collins invested in the Beethoven symphony.  He didn’t unveil any surprises or over-stress the dynamic vibrancy that gives three out of the four movements their essential character.   But this wasn’t your usual 7th in which vitality gives way to doggedness; the score radiated that ebullience and galumphing energy that distinguishes it among Beethoven’s major creations while it stands as a vital pillar of optimism and all-too-human light in the pages of European musical achievement.   Even in the minor-key Allegretto, Collins set a forward-looking pace, although the brace of horns pulled the tempo back at the movement’s first fortissimo tutti.

So far, so unexceptionable: a great concerto and a mighty symphony, cornerstones of a conservative decades-old MSO program pattern.   Thursday night’s real attention-grabber came in between with a new clarinet concerto from the organization’s Composer in Residence for 2019, Paul Dean, the composer appearing as soloist under Collins’ direction.  Contrived in two movements, each is further sub-divided into four sections which might become completely discernible on a second hearing; as it was, some parts bled into each other, for which you can’t blame Dean and which became more obvious once you came to the realization that individual segments varied remarkably in length.

Right from the opening, you’re confronted with atmospheric vehemence in the form of a set of slashing quickly arpeggiated chords across the orchestra, almost fully percussive in nature and  intentionally confrontational with the added unsettling colour of the upper strings (all of them?) playing sul ponticello.  Out of a tense unpredictability emerges a cantabile line for the soloist and this juxtaposition of calm and abrupt bursts seems to make up the operating arena for the first movement’s Introduction.

I haven’t been able to find out the work’s orchestration details and from my seat it was difficult to see into the interstices of the assembled ensemble.   Robert Clarke operated from what looked like a drum-kit but one that sounded heavy on drums and short on cymbals; I believe a pair of bass clarinets participated; a contrabassoon was certainly in play; an extra desk was added to each of the string bodies after the chastely populated Mozart.   But the performance’s chief focus, as you’d expect, fell on the solo clarinet which gave a vital and brilliant exhibition, with a particular emphasis on the instrument’s highest reaches, every so often recalling the piercing soprano in alt work of James Morrison.

Following the sort-of-slow Introduction, a sudden vault led to a Scherzetto in 6/8 time (possibly) which in turn transformed into a Burlesque although the dividing line escaped me.  At about this time, Dean initiated a hectic solo over a striking brass/timpani base that gave notice of a transformation into something more urgent than a little scherzo, the texture notable for large washes for brass and woodwind.  Concluding the opening half came an Adagio with slow sustained notes/chords for the strings and a Mahlerian leap to denote the opening to the solo clarinet’s extended melody.   Up to this point, you could have categorized the composer’s vocabulary as atonal but the pizzicato bass line to this Adagio at some points struck me as old-fashioned, reminiscent of a chaconne.   This section rose to its apogee through a piercing high-note from the soloist before a brief resolution.

Movement 2 began with a trademark quirky sonic squiggle, bandied between Dean and various orchestral members; in effect, the rapid action served as a pertinent sonic illustration of this segment’s sub-title, Out of the blue  –  a passage of play climaxing in yet another frantic clarinet solo which took the rest of the ensemble on a Pied Piper chase.  After some time, you became aware that the scheduled Waltz had started, folded into the preceding motion-sickness pages with deceptive deftness.  Actually, it was difficult to find the steps to this dance as the composer didn’t so much shift the rhythmic goalposts as move the emphasis so that your expectations were partly met and just as often side-stepped.   It could have been intended as a deliberate distortion, in the finest Ravel tradition, but the segment’s later pages impressed as long-winded.

Dean’s Cadenza followed the usual rule of pronouncing a set of technical display flourishes, rapid-fire runs peppered with intense high notes which made you wonder at the actual upper range of the instrument.   The following Finale served as an actual coda – no sooner had it broken in on the Cadenza than it was over.   This brought an end to a concerto that showed individuality of voice, a superlative command of the solo instrument’s resources – even if you were left wondering if another player could have brought the composer’s vehemence and hard-edged brilliance to the task – and a rigour of development and resolution that I, for one, found engrossing.

Will we hear this new score again?   It’s safe to say: not with the regularity that applies to its companion pieces on this night.   But Dean’s new work has an immediacy of impact and what can only be described as a generosity of expression that drags it out of the institutional graveyard of many another clarinet concerto of these times.   I had the general impression that its first audience was nonplussed by its processes, particularly its abrupt conclusion; still, Dean was warmly applauded if possibly more for his voluble virtuosity than for the strident power of his score’s most compelling moments.