SCHUBERT’S TROUT
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Monday September 26, 2022
Olli Mustonen
In one of the ACO’s more chaste excursions, five members of the ensemble participated in this latest series event in Brisbane: violinists Satu Vanska and Liisa Pallandi, viola Stefanie Farrands, cellist Timo-Veikko Valve and double bass Maxime Bibeau. Presiding over the program sat pianist/composer Olli Mustonen – a favoured guest of this orchestra and whom I’ve also heard presenting a Beethoven concerto or two with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra – not the happiest of memories. On this night, he led a string quartet through Milhaud’s La creation du monde, then headed an outline of his own Piano Quintet which has been heard here before. After interval, Pallandi dipped out and Bibeau came onboard for the big Schubert quintet.
As soon as the French ballet score began, it all came back: the pianist’s idiosyncratic attracting your attention with extravagant hand motions way above the keyboard, the insistent dynamic dominance of proceedings, and the eccentric singling out of notes for emphasis while others recede or disappear completely. Excuses can be made for the piano’s hogging attention: it represents the missing 14 other instruments in the original score, even if it doesn’t have all their notes entrusted to its care. In fact, what we heard was Milhaud’s own arrangement of the five-movement work.
You could shut your eyes and ignore the manual flamboyance easily enough. But you couldn’t ignore the jerkiness imposed on the central Romance where the phrasing’s sense disappeared. Nor was there a way of avoiding the insistent dominance brought into play during the Scherzo; half the time, the quartet might as well have stayed at home – a pity as, from what could be gleaned, the players were well-matched (what would you expect, given their professional relationship?).
Mustonen’s quintet of 2015, to its credit, gives room for the string lines to make a considerable mark. Still, the piano part has a good number of florid virtuosic flights in a work which shows that Shostakovich didn’t live in vain. You’re faced with aggressive passages of high energy in the opening Drammatico e passionate where percussive cascades are contrasted with lush common chords for the strings, the whole heading towards a powerful conclusion. The following Quasi una passacaglia: Andantino struck me as being a good deal more than quasi; it made a fine contrast to the preceding pages as Mustonen’s attention turned towards a more lyrical scenario. Still, the variants almost fell into predictability in some segments where the actual scoring sounded repetitious; so some firm explosions came as welcome interludes in a format that presented as eloquent and, in some ways, as traditional as some later chamber works by Britten.
Mustonen labels his finale Misterioso but that descriptor seems to apply to the strings which generate some suggestive textures. As in the first movement, the impetus comes from the piano which yet again reaches some eloquent clangorous heights and urges the movement into rhythmic ferocity. Both here, and in the passacaglia, you come across Mustonen’s tendency to write plain diatonic passages in direct juxtaposition with grinding dissonances; despite the latter, I suspect that you could analyse this quintet – well, a large part of it – along orthodox harmonic lines. Which is not to decry the composer’s language which is a stage further along the historical road than, say, Shostakovich’s Op. 57.
I had to move at the start of the Schubert A Major Quintet; a brace of biddies behind me continued to whisper/chat after the work had started – the sort of inconsiderate behaviour that makes me blind with fury. But you can’t take it out on the socially subnormal – well, not in mid-performance. Having settled further back in the Concert Hall, I found Mustonen tinting the opening Allegro vivace by continuing with his peculiarities, vide the piano’s statement starting at bar 40 which moved in and out of focus as his outline favoured some notes more than others. This in a piece where the contours are so lucid that you don’t really have to shape them. Still, the string combination – Vanska, Farrands, Valve, Bibeau – was an unalloyed pleasure for its direct speech and fluent delivery without dynamic abruptness, making the exposition’s repeat very welcome.
Farrands and Valve gave us a glowing partnership in their duet at the change of key to F sharp minor in the Andante‘s bar 24, and again at the reprise of bar 84. B ut then, this whole movement was delivered by all with persuasive eloquence. Across the following Scherzo: Presto, Mustonen had an unnerving approach to his part’s frequent fp markings – the first note firm, the second two in the group almost non-existent. But the movement’s outer segments held your attention for their inbuilt vitality and bite; this is, of course, the music that the Australian Digital Concert Hall uses as a prelude to each of its broadcasts.
On to the famous lied and its variations. An appealing grace of delivery from the strings prefaced a reading of considerable merit. Not that it was free of some odd piano passages but the first variation, where the tune is entrusted to the piano playing it at the octave, came over with unexpected equilibrium. Later, Variation III with its demi-semiquaver bravura for the piano was handled flawlessly, each note audible and sparkling. Mustonen pounded out his fortissimo (well, they are marked thus in my old Boosey & Hawkes edition) chords in Variation IV, making Valve and Bibeau surplus to requirements. But his articulation in the final Allegretto, where the piano is entrusted with the lied‘s triplet-happy accompaniment, made for sheer delight, this segment an interpretative gem with just the right level of optimistic buoyancy.
Yet again, the ACO string representatives delighted with their restrained resilience across the concluding Allegro giusto with Mustonen emerging and disappearing throughout, then giving a ‘straight’ reading with the delectable triplet chains from bar 135 to 170, and later across bars 371 to 406. Indeed, much of the versicle-and-response pattern of this movement worked very well, the respective dynamic levels of strings and keyboard telling reflectors of each other – nowhere more effectively than in the last sample from bar 457 to 465, with that uplifting brief gallop to the end that brushes away (temporarily) several reservations.
So, another unsettling recital (for me) from Mustonen. Not that there’s much point in rehashing old problems: he’s now 55 and set in his musical behavioural practices. Judging by the QPAC audience response at the end of the Trout interpretation, he has plenty of admirers and you can find it hard to kick overlong against the vox populi – never forgetting the incredibly successful careers of David Helfgott and Andre Rieu, among others too numerous to mention. You just have to admit your bafflement – as you do when faced with the ongoing presences of Eddie McGuire, Scott Cam, Karl Stefanovic, John Laws and their peers: that perennial gang of home-grown mediocrities, who happily stand as cultural gurus for Monday night’s crones in the stalls’ F row.
O'Connell the Music 