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
O'Connell the Music 