Thursday July 4
LANG LANG
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Hamer Hall at 7:30 pm
Lang Lang came here many years ago in the first flush of his success to play with the MSO: Tchaikovsky No. 1, I think. Rapturous applause but I was unmoved; a player with full mastery of the tricks but no idea what he was dealing with. Packing a lot more exposure and experience, he’s back in yet another of the administration’s by-the-book programs. No, that’s not fair. It may follow the overture/concerto/symphony format of yore but not slavishly. Conductor Kirill Karabits opens this celebration with the incomparable lightness of being that is The Marriage of Figaro Overture; thrown off hours before the premiere, according to legend. But it’s still barely 4 minutes’ worth of festive greatness. The guest pianist dis/continues the prevailing strain with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24, the overture’s companion in Kochel’s catalogue and a C minor harbinger of Beethoven. Among the final flurry of the composer’s piano concertos, it sticks out like a sore thumb for its intransigence of expression (except for the amiable middle Larghetto) and is a real test of Lang Lang’s interpretative strength. For us old-timers, the work is a deviation: 40 years ago, a celebratory gala with a focal Mozart concerto would have been hard to imagine without the presence of a superstar like Haebler in town. Ditto for the symphony, which is not the Rachmaninov No. 2 – an MSO favourite – but the No. 3 which I’ve heard the orchestra play twice. More concise than its predecessor, this score is another splendid canvas for the performers to unveil. Karabits remains an unknown quantity; all his work so far appears to be Eurocentric.
Saturday July 13
LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Hamer Hall at 7:30 pm
What do you think will happen when Sir Andrew eventually leaves his chief conductor post with the MSO? Will this annual observance fall into abeyance? We can only hope. I can’t be the only one who thinks that, with these Last Night events, you might just as well leave at interval because the second half is as processed as a ham-and-cheese roll from Coles. The pre-Brexit chain-rattling of imperial reassurance will echo across the decades with the usual Elgar/Wood/Arne/Parry predictables. Before this prolonged excuse to roll out the Union Jacks, patrons get some familiar works and a handful of unknowns. Violinist Lu Siqing, the MSO’s Soloist in Residence, will vault through Saint-Saens’ rollicking Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. And then, presumably, go home. Soprano Greta Bradman has more to do, beginning with two operatic favourites: Una voce poco fa from Rossini’s Barber of Seville, and poor Leonora’s D’amor sull ali’ rosee just before the Miserere in Verdi’s Il trovatore. The MSO Chrous will be given the chance to animate Parry’s Blest pair of sirens where Milton comes in for the Pax Britannica treatment. Bradman returns with an odd brace in Horn’s Cherry Ripe juxtaposed with a work by the singer’s grandfather: Sir Donald’s Every Day is a Rainbow Day for Me which stems blamelessly from the Victorian music hall – melodious and four-square. To conclude the interesting if scrappy first half, Michael Hurst’s Swagman’s promenade offers a medley of Australian tunes (among the Irish and English ones that have been smuggled past customs) calculated to make you nostalgic for the brain-dead Menzies era.
Sunday July 14
HEROIC BEL CANTO
Victorian Opera
Hamer Hall at 5 pm
What’s so heroic here? Well, primarily, the music is most taxing and not the kind of thing we hear from any organization. The first half is all-Rossini and he is also a main contributor to the program’s second part. It looks like the company is preparing for a production of Semiramide: we hear the Overture, Arsace’s Eccomi alfine in Babilonia, the heroine’s Bel raggio lusinghier, the mother-and-son Ebben . . . a te; ferisci duet. Intertwined with these four will be two scraps from Ciro in Babilonia, the lesser-known of the composer’s two Lenten operas: Avrai tu pur vendetta for the tenor role Arbace, and Chi disprezza gl’infelici from the mezzo confidante Argene. As well, we get a reminder of the company’s recent essay at Guillaume Tell with Arnold’s famous Asile hereditaire. After interval, the composer’s massive catalogue gives us two arias from the delicious L’Italiana in Algeri – Isabella’s Act 1 cavatina, Cruda sorte! and the slightly later Ai capricci della sorte – and the night ends with the concluding trio and finale from Le comte Ory. Bellini scores one guernsey – the overture to Norma – and the company offers four Donizetti pieces: the heroine’s entrance from Linda di Chamounix, O luce di quest’anima; Deserto in terra from Dom Sebastiano (the same as the eponymous hero’s Seul sur la terre from the original Dom Sebastien); O mon Fernand, Leonore’s big self-sacrifice from La favorite which so accurately prefigures the work’s final curtain; and Livorno. dieci Aprile from Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali, a dramma giocoso about which I know nothing – but one of this night’s singers will be an expert: soprano Jessica Pratt recorded the work 8 years ago for La Scala. The other singers will be mezzo Daniela Barcellona, tenor Carlos E. Barcenas, ‘and guests’. Richard Mills conducts what one hopes will be an evening of revelations.
Sunday July 14
The Melbourne Musicians
St. John’s Southgate at 3 pm
Out of the regular MLC series, this program takes the Musicians back to their former seat of operations. To say its appeal is catholic is an understatement. Frank Pam conducts two Bach violin concertos: the A minor BWV 1041, with Anne Harvey-Nagl as soloist; then the E Major BWV 1042 in a transcription featuring Justin Kenealy’s soprano saxophone. Mozart’s bracing, magnificent Sinfonia concertante partners Harvey-Nagl with violist Sally Clarke. But the fun comes with tenor Lorenzo Iannotti and his bracket of Caro mio ben, Schubert’s Ave Maria, and O sole mio. In fact, you can find nothing to argue with in most of this afternoon’s work. The Bach works are spiritually cleansing, although you’d have to have reservations about Kenealy’s timbre in this close space. You’d hope Pam will supplement his strings with pairs of horns and oboes for the majestic Mozart. As for the Italian/Latin songs, I’m predicting a popular success, even though the tenor is an unknown force to me
Sunday July 14
PATRIOTS CONCERT 2
Corpus Medicorum
Melbourne Recital Centre at 5 pm
An orchestra of medical people – practitioners and auxiliaries – that I’ve heard once before. It’s conducted by Keith Crellin who occasionally revisits his trademark viola but is now more firmly linked with the baton, directing this and other orchestras in Adelaide. The program involves only two works and one of them is calculated to stroke the plumage of a certain kind of patriotism: Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony No. 3 with its broad-bosomed chauvinism serving as an advantage throughout an atypically happy construct. Preceding this, violinist Markiyan Melnychenko and cellist Michael Dahlenburg front the Brahms Double Concerto which has suffered a poor critical reception for many years but I can’t see why. Mind you, my affection for it sprang from a long flight leg many years ago during which the classical audio channel got stuck so you had access to a few works only: excerpts from Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette and this concerto were the recurring highlights – hour after hour. Whatever the abilities of the orchestra itself, I can speak highly of the two soloists’ professional skills.
Thursday July 18
THE RITE OF SPRING
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Hamer Hall at 7:30 pm
The city performances marry a concert-hall cliche with a bourn undiscovered outside the pages of text-books. Sir Andrew Davis revisits the work that, in 1913, re-defined serious music; after The Rite of Spring, nothing was even potentially the same again and those ignorant enough to dismiss Stravinsky’s chef d’oeuvre in the following decades by pursuing the traditional paths have suffered the fate of all those who stand in the doorway and block up the hall. The rhythmic changes remain compelling and abrasive, the melodies superbly apposite (now that Taruskin has revealed to us that most of them are folk-tunes), but the orchestration must have shown the composer’s peers how much they still had to learn. Davis draws on the MSO Chorus and two children’s choirs to present the 1934 melodrame Persephone to a Gide text. As for principals, his Eleusinian Mysteries originator Eumolphe will be American tenor Paul Groves; the narrator is Lotte Betts-Dean who I’m supposing will not follow commissioner Ida Rubinstein’s lead and dance as well (the four other dance roles are not mentioned on the MSO site). At the Geelong performance, Persephone disappears (as she does every year), replaced by Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite and the 1919 suite that Stravinsky fabricated from The Firebird – the one that we all know and which makes us comfortable.
This program will be repeated – well, half of it – on Friday July 19 in Costa Hall Geelong at 7:30 pm and, in its original format, back in Hamer Hall on Saturday July 20 at 2:30 pm.
Saturday July 27
The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge
Hamer Hall at 7 pm
The famous choir is back again, moving into a large space that can host its many admirers. While it may be singing in Melbourne twice, it will sing the same works on each night; unlike Sydney, which will enjoy an almost completely separate menu at its night/matinee performances. We will be treated to some all-too-familiar repertoire staples – Gibbons’ Hosanna to the son of David, Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols (really?), Byrd’s Laudibus in sanctis. The singers will work through an off-shore bracket with Bach’s Komm, Jesu, komm, Monteverdi’s settle-down motet Cantata Domino, and the four-part Salve Regina by Cavalli. The remainder is solidly British, for the most part: Loquebantur variis linguis by Tallis, Master of the Queen’s Music Judith Weir’s setting for last Christmas’s Nine Lessons and Carols in Cambridge of Wesley’s O Mercy Divine (this calls for the assistance of Sydney Symphony Orchestra principal cellist Umberto Clerici); Vaughan Williams’ setting of Bunyan sentences in Valiant-for-Truth (who’s going to supply the organ-or-piano intro? Probably harpist Alice Giles who’s involved in the Britten Christmas collation). Erollyn Wallen’s 6-minute PACE suggests novelty – so far. Like the Weir, a new work by our own Ross Edwards will enjoy its Australian premiere. Singing the Love currently retains its mysteries, including the origin of its text, but we can hope for an outpouring of Maninyas ecstasy to brighten up what looks like a by-the-numbers event.
This program will be repeated on Tuesday August 6 at 7 pm in the Melbourne Recital Centre.
O'Connell the Music 