Wednesday April 1
SERIOUS BUSINESS – AN APRIL FOOLS DAY CONCERT
Conservatorium of Music, Griffith University
Ian Hanger Recital Hall, Queensland Conservatorium at 1:05
What passes for an April Fool north of the Tweed? This concert may hold the answer. On the other hand, it could be a simple-minded come-on from a latter-day advertising sad sack; it could be just a few smart young people from the Con using the day’s nickname as a fulcrum for the title of their musical exercise. Whatever the case, students from the Conservatorium are presenting a program of well-known japes. Among these are Haydn’s Joke String Quartet Op. 33 No. 2 in E flat where the humour is both broad and refined; Mozart is necessarily represented by his A Musical Joke sextet for two horns and string quartet in which the best of the laughs are formal; Beethoven used the same instruments as Mozart for his three-movement Horn Sextet Op. 81b. And that fills out the great Classical trinity’s essays at raising levity, even though few of us know the last of these and are unaware of its relationship to the April Fool theme. To end, we get Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals, that great 14-movement compendium of inspired effects which may be given in its original scoring for two pianos, string quintet, flute, clarinet, glass harmonica and xylophone. Or maybe not. Whatever comes up on the day, the organizers have it right: getting through this program is going to be a serious concern for the players, no matter how much we are entertained.
Thursday April 2
COMPASSION
Camerata
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre at 7 pm
At this first concert for the year from Brisbane’s chamber orchestra, the focus will fall on a well-travelled collaboration between Nigel Westlake and Lior which gives this concert its title. I first heard this local equivalent to The Song of the Earth about six years ago in the Sidney Myer Music Bowl; it’s a fine vehicle for the singer (as far as I can work out, he has taken part in every performance since the first one in 2013) who performs tonight, and a very accessible work that carries its philosophical and humanitarian burdens lightly. While it exists in two versions, you’d anticipate that Camerata will perform the later one that eschews the original large orchestra scoring for the reduced forces of string quartet, double bass, piano and percussion as a background for the tenor’s keening line. Artistic director Brendan Joyce opens the night with Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge in one of its string orchestra manifestations. Before the short La Oracion del torero by Turina, presumably in its 1926 string orchestra raiment, we hear the equally brief Echorus for Two Violins and String Orchestra by Phillip Glass, a reworking of the composer’s Etude No. 2. A 1967 poem by Ginsberg, Wales Visitation, goes with the music and it will be read by local actor Barbara Lowing. This composite is somehow a tribute to Yehudi Menuhin who might have been nonplussed by the score which is, as usual, an exploration of a simple arpeggio.
Friday April 3
MOZART’S JUPITER
Queensland Symphony Orchestra
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre at 11 am
Last month, the young musicians of Griffith University’s Conservatorium of Music had their say on Mozart’s last symphony; today, the state’s top professionals have their way with it. Conductor Alexandre Bloch is in charge; getting on for 35 years old, he has conducted the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra (2016) and the Australian Youth Orchestra (2014). Now he comes to Brisbane to direct the great C Major symphony. He begins this matinee with more Mozart: the Don Giovanni Overture with its composer-supplied concert ending. In pride of place comes soprano Emma Pearson to sing the solo line in Les Illuminations by Britten – another child prodigy, if not as flashy a one as Mozart. Thanks to Peter Pears, many people forget that the cycle – settings of Rimbaud – was originally written for the female voice and the few times I’ve come across it in live performance over recent years, sopranos have done the honours. The work is brilliant in its melodic sweep and mastery of string orchestral writing. No, it’s not profound or mentally challenging, but neither is the poetry. As with a fair amount of music by the British composer, you do best to be content with its splendid surface.
This program will be repeated on Saturday April 4 at 7:30 pm at which the Don Giovanni Overture will be replaced by Schubert’s B minor and Unfinished Symphony.
Friday April 3
SEEN BUT NOT HER
Muses Trio and Vulcana
Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse at 7:30 pm
A collaboration between two organizations, this event is a performance that will ‘celebrate women being heard and taking up space’. As all the performers are female, that shouldn’t be too difficult to carry out. As far as the musical component goes, this will be provided by the Muses Trio: violin Christa Powell, cello Louise King, piano Therese Milanovic; an ensemble that has made an intentional choice to promote music by women composers. There’s no indication as to what music will be played, however. But the more overtly physical component of this music theatre entertainment comes from Vulcana Circus, an organization that also seems to concentrate on expanding and exposing the talents of female artists. It all sounds like a version of the sort of concept that we have seen in the past from the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and Circa, although this latter collaboration finds its musical sources in more reactionary reaches. You’d hope that the evening’s necessary polemic is tempered to a finer edge than the night’s title which probably seemed clever at the planning stage. Seen But Not Her lasts for 50 minutes.
Wednesday April 8
Goldner String Quartet & Piers Lane
Queensland Conservatorium Theatre at 7 pm
As with Garrick Ohlsson’s Musica Viva appearances, there are two programs on offer for this latest in the organization’s international series. The venerable Sydney quartet and expatriate pianist Lane are collaborating in three piano quintets across both programs: Brahms in F minor, Korngold in E Major, and Elgar in A minor from the remarkably fecund (for the composer) year of 1918. The artists have recorded the Korngold (2018) and the Elgar (2010), so the performances ought to be exemplary. Brisbane gets to hear only the British work. As well, the Goldners trot out that hoary chestnut, Dvorak in F Major Op. 96 from the American years. But, as a balance, they will premiere a new String Quartet No. 1 by Adelaide composer Jakub Jankowski; in fact, this will be its third hearing, after Sydney and Perth. I’ve had no exposure to this composer’s work, as far as I can tell, but am intrigued by the title that the Musica Viva promotional material gives to this quartet: Kairos. Which means the proper time: not the correct tempo, but the suitable or appropriate moment. Granted, that’s old-time Greek; in my family, we use the word to talk about the weather.
Wednesday April 15
Leanne Jin
Ian Hanger Recital Hall, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University at 7:30 pm
This musician is currently studying at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and has a string of awards to her name, including last year’s Lev Vlassenko, the Sydney Eisteddfod Kawai Piano Scholarship and the Sydney Conservatorium Piano Concerto Competition. She has won places at competitions in Vienna and New York, but you have to work hard to find out about her repertoire. A few concertos: she has fronted the Prokofiev No. 1 and Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, while only last month, she was soloist in Beethoven’s E flat Emperor in Chatswood, Sydney. As for recital material, two years ago she was playing Haydn’s E flat Sonata Hob. XVI/49, Scriabin’s Sonata No. 2, Liszt’s Paganini Etude No. 2 from the S. 140 collection of six, Falla’s Four Spanish Pieces, Beethoven’s Sonata in B flat Op. 22 (the one that featured in Garrick Ohlsson’s recent Musica Viva recital), and Schumann’s Kreisleriana. She’s presenting Scarlatti, Haydn and Rachmaninov on April 28 at the Camberwell Uniting Church in Melbourne, so you might guess that those three composers will feature on tonight’s bill of fare. Exactly what Jinn will present remains up in the air – a normal state of affairs with these Conservatorium recital programs. It’s as though you’re expected to come along on trust and be happy with the music that is served up. Whatever we do hear, you can be pretty sure it won’t be too adventurous.
Sunday April 19
BEETHOVEN, ROSSINI AND WEBER
Queensland Symphony Orchestra
Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio at 3 pm
Here is the second in the QSO’s somewhat checkered chamber music recitals in which success is a hit-or-miss affair. For all that, they’re popular enough, possibly because of the reasonable price of admission. This afternoon, the Beethoven 250th birthday celebrations continue with a Rasumovsky, the String Quartet in F op. 59 No. 1 in which the composer gets serious and asks his chamber music interpreters to work hard. The lucky winners here are violins Alan Smith and Jane Burroughs, viola Nicholas Tomkin and cello Andre Duthoit. The other major work is Weber’s Trio in G minor for flute (Alison Mitchell), bassoon (Nicole Tait, substituting for the original cello)), and piano (Anna Grinberg, who took part in this year’s first QSO chamber music Sunday afternoon program, herbing powerfully through the Brahms Piano Quintet). On a lighter note, in the middle come arrangements of arias from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville; well, I’m assuming the intended atmosphere will be on the less hefty side, but who can tell? These arias (and duets, and trios) have been arranged for two bassoons (Tait and Evan Lewis); probably the transcriptions by Francois Rene Gebauer of which there are 12. We’ve all got our favourites, even if the best is over by the time the Act 1 curtain falls; here’s hoping we get All’idea di quell metallo and Zitti, zitti, piano, piano.
Sunday April 19
WHEN THE WORLD WAS AT WAR
Ensemble Q
Queensland Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University South Bank at 3 pm
When isn’t the world in a state of conflict: Taliban? Daesh? Coronavirus? Brexit? Nonetheless, this recital has a clear reference to the two world wars, although some of the composers involved were more terribly affected than others. With regard to World War 1, the Ensemble presents two compositions: Ravel’s remembrance of dead soldier-friends Le tombeau de Couperin (piano solo played by Daniel de Borah, or one of the many arrangements?), and Battle-of-the-Somme sacrifice Frederick Septimus Kelly’s 1915 Elegy in memoriam Rupert Brooke for Strings (presumably Richard Divall’s arrangement for string quintet eschewing the original’s harp). A victim of a Nazi camp, Erwin Schulhoff wrote his four-movement Concertino for flute, viola and double bass in 1925, before the shadows deepened intolerably. Another Czech composer, Hans Krasa wrote his Passacaglia and Fugue for string trio in the year of his murder at Auschwitz. Heinrich Kaminski survived World War II but not by much. His Quintet for clarinet, horn and string trio dates from 1917, so he sits in this program as a sort of middle-man, straddling the World Wars. The regular Q Ensemble personnel will host German-Canadian guest violinist Annette-Barbara Vogel
Friday April 24
OPERA GALA
Queensland Symphony Orchestra
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre at 7:30 pm
If there’s no staged opera being offered this late in the year, why not give a greatest hits concert hall selection? Conductor Giovanni Reggioli has conducted here before, most recently at a similar concert to this one in 2019. I can’t find out much that is current about his present overseas activities; doubtless he wouldn’t be here unless he had proven his talent. The concert is a grab-bag, as you’d expect, with four soloists: soprano Emma Pearson, mezzo Bronwyn Douglass, tenor Andrew Goodwin, and bass James Clayton. The QSO gets to shine in three pieces: the overture to Verdi’s The Sicilian Vespers, the greatest polonaise of all from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, and the Intermezzo from Act 3 of Mascagni’s L’amico Fritz which tears a passion to tatters on the flimsiest of excuses. Mascagni’s opera is notable for this extract as well as the Cherry Duet in Act 2 which we also get to enjoy; the rest of the piece is lost in transition. As for more Verdi, all the singers come together for the Rigoletto quartet, and Clayton has the last say of the night with Iago’s profession of faith. Rossini scores with three extracts, all from The Barber of Seville: Figaro’s self-introduction, Rosina’s opening gambit, then the pair’s duet Dunque io son. As well as the Polonaise, Eugene Onegin is further exposed in Lensky’s Kuda, kuda and the Letter Scene, Puskai pogibnu, that lays bare the marvellous character of Tatyana. There will be two Mozart excursions: the Countess’s Dove sono from The Marriage of Figaro, and that magical quartet No ti fidar, o misera from Act 1 of Don Giovanni. The two Gounod slabs are unexceptional: the love duet O nuit d’amour from Act 3 of Faust, and the opportunity for Pearson to sparkle in Juliet’s waltz song, Je veux vivre. Saint-Saens and Donizetti are represented by one aria each: for the former, Delilah’s neglected solo Amour! viens aider ma faiblesse, while Goodwin is gifted with Nemorino’s Una furtiva lagrima from L’elisir d’amore.
About half of this program will be performed on Sunday April 26 at 11:30 am.
Tuesday April 28
Umberto Clerici and Daniel de Borah
Ian Hanger Recital Hall, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University at 7:30 pm
Clerici is principal cello with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and my experience of his work has been exclusively through Selby & Friends recitals where he has put in several fine appearances. Here he is again in that field, partnered with de Borah from the Conservatorium’s staff. This pianist also has been to my ears a chamber music performer. From the sketchy details on the concert diary of the Conservatorium, I learn that the pair will play sonatas by Chopin and Mendelssohn. You’d assume that the Polish composer would be represented by his G minor Cello Sonata. And you’d be right. Fortunately, more specific information can be found on de Borah’s website. Of the two Mendelssohn possibilities, the duo are presenting No. 2 in D Major. By way of introduction to the proceedings, they will also perform Mendelssohn’s Op. 109 Song Without Words. Half way through the recital, they intend to play some ‘songs without words’ by Chopin, referring specifically to the composer’s Opus 74. This work, you’d have to assume, is the composer’s 17 Polish Songs; I’m almost ready to guarantee that Clerici will play the vocal line, not sing it wordlessly. The scheduled No. 8 ‘song without words’ is indeed in D Major – that finger-snapping hit, Sliczny chlopiec; No. 9 is, however, not in G Major, as the web-site has it, but a Melodia in E minor.
O'Connell the Music 