Month: October 2023

Impressive Vine yield

cliveoconnell

MUSIC FROM THE NEW WORLD

Out West Piano Fest

Blackdown Farm, Bathurst

Friday October 27 at 4 pm

Andrey Gugnin

Yet another regional festival, this one dating as far back as 2022 and a treat, I’m sure, for the cultural habitues of Bathurst; just as the Organs of the Ballarat Goldfields week is for that city’s illuminati, and the Mornington Peninsula Summer events delight the effete palates of Melbourne’s beachside (ho ho) Prues and Trudes. For this second-time around at the same farm venue, the organizers have acquired the artistic direction of Andrey Gugnin, winner of the Sydney International Piano Competition (now becoming Piano+; move over, Elon Musk) in 2016. I’m not sure how the remaining events will go but this initial exhibition gave us observers on the Australian Digital Concert Hall site quite a bit of thick meat to digest.

Gugnin has put himself into the performing personnel, as you’d expect. He’s assembled a line-up of Sydney artists in Clemens Leske, Tamara-Anna Cislowska and Yanghee Kim (replacing the scheduled Sonya Lifschitz) and half of the program involved two-piano works, the afternoon ending with a barnstorming Rhapsody in Blue from Cislowska and Kim. Leske and Kim opened our new world ears once more to John Adams’ Hallelujah Junction; Gugnin and Cislowska worked through a pre-interval work billed as ‘from Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5’, but it was neither the Aria nor the Danca although the Latin-American inflexions came through clearly.

For solo work, Cislowska gave us a rich reading of Ginastera’s Suite de danzas criollas (five of them, with an incomprehensibly separated Coda), and Carl Vine represented us splendidly with half of his Piano Sonata No. 1 from Leske (the Leggiero e legato second movement), while Gugnin swept all before him with the complete Sonata No. 2 – a gripping interpretation that almost eliminated from one’s consciousness the work’s indulgent working-out in the later pages of the second movement that begins Legato, senza pedale but takes us well away from that on a virtuosic odyssey.

Like the afore-mentioned Victorian festivals, the clientele for this exercise looked elderly – as far as you could tell from the ADCH cameras. In fact, the youngest person in the place seemed to be Gugnin himself. I don’t see that this sort of enterprise is in any way calculated to bring in young people, particularly as the concert manager and Gugnin himself (during a post-recital address in limited English) kept on referring to pre-event drinks and post-event dining which, from my vast experience, don’t hold much interest for the new puritans.

The Adams work divides into three sections on paper but it sounds like an amalgam of several more elements than that. The composer’s inter-phase/out-of-phase technique is apparent at the opening but dissipates as the work progresses. Its initial percussiveness rouses interest but there’s not much subtlety to be heard; each player simply has to keep his/her end up in a tightly argued onslaught. Mind you, when the dynamic weight increases, you can feel your involvement fading, particularly in those frequent pointillistic chord stabs. Kim had the right idea, using a note-pad, while Leske encountered several moments of discomfort handling his printed score, opting not to involve a page-turner at this point.

True to its school, this score puts you into a mesmerised state as you move in and out of half-connections, the players seeming to enter a compact of rhythm and dynamic only to either drift through or hammer out of it. But, the longer the work goes, the more you wonder where those initial interface passages went – until, suddenly, they re-surface and your logic is engaged once more. For all that, I can’t find any link between the score’s title and the truck-stop of that name on the border of California and Nevada; the composer points to ‘junctions’ in the piano writing and rhythms based on the word ‘hallelujah’ but, while there’s no doubting the first rationale, the second is much harder to follow.

In any case, both performers weltered their paths to a congruence. Cislowska’s solo followed, showing a deft hand with the second Allegro rustico dance, especially the Ivesian 8-note right-hand clusters – all 33 of them. While the slower pieces wafted past pleasantly enough, especially the Bartok-reminiscent No. 4, Calmo e poetico, the aggressive, Panambi-suggestive faster ones proved more entertaining. I would have been happier with the No. 5 Scherzando if it hadn’t been missing about 20 bars of its second page (in my Boosey & Hawkes edition). But Cislowska continued the pattern established by her predecessors of showing the contemporary bent for sonic onslaught (albeit the Adams comes from 1996, the dances between 1946 and their revision in 1956).

Vine’s Sonata No. 1 movement presents as a toccata for both hands in tandem at the start: same notes, different registers over an 4-bar loop, the left hand persisting with the semiquaver-pattern while the treble becomes concerned with melody/cell work. Compared to the only other interpretation of this work I’ve heard (Michael Kieran Harvey, its dedicatee and initial performer), this version tended to become blurred later after the initial dry semi-staccato attack. Also, the onward rush was momentarily interrupted at bar 227. Still, Vine changes tack in the movement’s centre for La cathedrale engloutie atmospherics, albeit with plenty of added notes to complicate any harmonic predictability.

In this more leisurely phase, Leske produced a full-bodied and resonant wash of sound, giving us a fabric that displays Vine’s post-Romantic sympathies – before a return to the opening toccata busyness and the run of repeated figures that eventually dies out for a placid conclusion. A respectable interpretation, then, if not as nervously exciting as Harvey’s efforts. This was followed after interval by Gugnin’s realization of the composer’s second essay in the form (from 1997, seven years after the Sonata No. 1). During his upcoming recitals in Melbourne’s Recital Centre and Sydney’s Angel Place Recital Hall, Gugnin will repeat the work, and patrons will get a rare opportunity to hear this substantial product from a now-venerable Australian composer/pianist.

At the opening, Gugnin approached the stentorian double-octave chords calmly, giving them resonance room; then, keeping an easy hand or two on the rhapsodic rush of arpeggios that obtain from bar 9 on . Towards the movement’s middle, the pianist showed a relish for the lush writing that once again suggested submerged cathedrals, even girls with flaxen hair – the former in a solid meditation at the latter end of the movement. For all that, Vine extends his score for a fair while, happy to repeat his colours (rich as these are) and patterns, if not accomplishing much by way of formal complexity.

We switch to an irregular jazz-inflected atmosphere in the following legato, senza pedale where a loud bass ostinato supports treble clef block-chord spits. You can see why Harvey (again, its dedicatee and first interpreter) would have delighted in this sort of pianism – for its rapidity, bounding across the instrument’s compass, and its clarity of texture. Gugnin brings a similar authoritativeness to these pages, responsive to the Ondine washes that precede the climactic hymn preceding a final gallop to the work’s quadruple forte final smash-and-grab.

This is a remarkable testament to Gugnin’s dedication to some Australian music, never forgetting that among the works he performed in the Sydney 2016 Competition was one of Harvey’s 48 Fugues for Frank. Yes, he used the score of Vine’s sonata – but then, so did Leske. It would be well worth hearing his reading live in either Sydney or Melbourne particularly when considering the odd Grieg/Tchaikovsky/Silvestrov/Stravinsky amalgam that surrounds it; you’ll be treated to an unusual exhibition of mastery from a young artist who deserves all the plaudits he’s amassed so far.

As I’ve reported, the program ended with Gershwin’s sprawling rhapsody in an arrangement I don’t know; it’s not Gershwin’s own, as far as I can tell. To a certain extent Cislowska and Kim shared solo duties, although the former enjoyed what I saw as the lion’s share. You’d be too kind to call this performance a perfectly congruent one: it wasn’t, even if nothing disastrous took place although the final cakewalk revealed some slips. Yet every so often the players complemented each other very well; for example, their role-sharing at Number 22 (in the two-piano score put out by T. B. Harms in 1924) where the main theme is restated in C Major at a Piu mosso section; and the huge mash-up at the D flat Major splurge five bars after Number 26 in the middle of the work’s central cadenza.

Cislowska was left alone with the next big cadenza at Number 32, Kim only entering with those lolloping left-hand chords eight bars before Number 33 (the Leggiero call-to-arms). But the rabble-rousing double glissando interpolated before Number 37’s fussy build-up to the work’s climax struck me as vulgar and unnecessary. Not that such a flourish was too out-of-place in this knock-’em-down, drag-’em-out version of this jazz/classic warhorse which was big and blowsy, without any Bernstein-style sophistication. If nothing else, the recital’s start and end gave us sterling examples of compositions from America that reveal the national psyche more faithfully than anything out of Nashville or Graceland. And we were lucky enough to hear some Australian work that, in its ambition and elevated spirit, negated the reduction to cretinism exemplified by Dutton’s gaggle of nay-sayers, just as the United States shows at its wild and wooly best in Gershwin’s amalgam rather than at a Trump-led MAGA rally of the red-necked and scrofulous.

Illuminated, elucidated Brahms

cliveoconnell

OVER UNDER

Luke Severn, Evan Fein

Move Records MCD 611

This disc comes out of a long-term, long-distance relationship between Australian cellist/conductor Severn and American pianist/composer Fein. A marriage of two aesthetics has apparently come about here and the musicians have a fairly well-established performance history (USA in 2019, Australia in 2022) from which comes one of the two works recorded here: Brahms’ Cello Sonata No. 1 in E minor. Following the California/New York accounts of Fein’s first Cello Sonata, they’ve set down here the other constituent of their Melbourne/Bendigo/Frankston recitals: Fein’s second essay in the form.

And that’s all there is: 28′ 55″ for the Fein, 28′ 34″ for the Brahms; near-equivalent in temporal terms. But, while you can admire the American’s work for its coherence and bursts of brilliant writing, its thunder is stolen by the Brahms reading which is distinctive in its vision and delivery. Which is the chief problem with this pairing: much as you’d like to find high merit in the Fein, the other outclasses it, to the extent that you wonder why the composer didn’t think to give his work a less striking companion.

The modern work is in four movements: Serene, warm; Redemptive, resonant; Molto scherzando; Lively, playful. It begins with a simple rising two-note cell in the cello that expands on itself. Straight away we’re in a benign atmosphere of something approaching hymn music, broadening to a firm declamation couched in a harmony that Brahms would have found comfortable, if eccentric. Then the work seems to meander into an episode rich in piano triplets, shared with the cello, and a development that moves into new material, both instruments in a close interface.

Once again, the declamation arises and we’re in late Romantic territory – both firmly assertive and ruminative as the opening cell recurs and the exposition’s processes are revisited. This is a music of alternating moods which, near the end, seems to see the triumph of the serene. But not so: Fein ends with a presto flourish for both players; it’s almost as though he’s providing a contrast with the placid rhythmic tenor of his movement’s procedure up till now.

When it comes to redemptive music, I’m not sure what to expect; it could be anything from the Dies irae to L’Ascension, and a world or six of religious music in between. Here, we have a slow sequence of repeated chords in the keyboard under the cello outlining a well-woven melody that stretches for some length towards a climax, that breaks off and then resumes its path with cello and piano more synchronised in their thinking, although the keyboard’s initial repetitions seem to be the spur to action. We are led to a consoling stretch of diatonic affirmation that ends up resembling a Bloch cantillation.

A sequence of common chords leads back to the opening repeated chords under the meandering string line; the same crisis, with the keyboard sustaining its support for a final mellifluously brooding semi-cadence. In these pages, the emphasis for me fell more on the resonant, the performers reaching two points of impressive suspense, as well as a brace of powerful statements that emphasized the possibilities for broad statements. For all that, the harmonic language is, in the main, orthodox; we just have to accept this mode of contemporary composition that is content with titillating the past, not building on it.

The following scherzo strikes me as far from molto, possibly hampered by a rhythmic irregularity/juxtaposition that obtains from the opening but gives way to a smooth body of play across the movement’s centre before returning to round out this simple ternary structure. The instruments are busy with some clever canonic scale descents that inevitably bring Shostakovich to mind, if without that composer’s verve and ferocity. Still, I did like the cello’s final ‘bent’-note slight portamento.

Further reminiscences come bursting in at the finale’s opening, chiefly of Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the animals with the piano’s high-register tinkling while the string line follows its restrained jollity before swinging into an amiable, crowd-pleasing melody. Much of what follows appear to be variants on these two elements with some late attempts at post-impressionist harmonic adventurousness. But Fein doesn’t stray too far from well-trodden paths; just when you think he’s heading in a dissonant direction with an unexpected modulation, he hauls us back to the plain-speaking path of diatonicism. Listen to the final minute or so which is an excellent example of leading towards calm acceptance before a semi-aggressive, if defiantly positive, resolution.

I need hardly record the players’ obvious intensity and painstaking care with Fein’s score. Is either of them taxed by this music-making? Not that much, although some parts of the last two movements have their pressure-points. Yet the sonata presents as rather lightweight, for all the grandiose passages in the opening movements. Certainly, Fein has produced a highly competent work yet it doesn’t hold much that could be termed striking or original. Even its passion is tautly leashed and its appurtenances fail to catch this listener’s interest.

What follows – the Brahms sonata elucidation – is quite remarkable. In the CD liner notes, Fein observes that ‘we dare to hope that some of our bolder musical decisions allow audiences to enjoy this beloved sonata in a new light’. Well, to those of us with a long-standing affection for the piece (many thanks, Daniel Horrigan, for those hours of tolerant rehearsal), this reading offers many insights. The duo takes the first movement’s ma non troppo direction seriously; this is a stately progress through the first subject, its only defect coming through an over-amplification of the cello line. But Severn and Fein have a fine eye for the work’s inner accelerations and dynamic contrasts which make this allegro an absorbing experience, with a good deal of the commonly accepted bravado muted into the composer’s inimitable introspection. Only an odd misfired cello A in bar 18 disturbs the exposition’s accuracy, which is flawless on the repeat.

The most obvious of those interpolated accelerandi comes at bar 50 in the vehement build-up to the B minor explosion of bars 57-8. What follows is a masterful depiction of the descent to gloom across bars 74 to 77. Later, in the development, a gradual increase in tension starting at about bar 102 is accomplished by a simple consensus of dynamic heft working towards the fortissimo F minor resolution of bar 126. Further re-acquaintance with the artists’ approach comes in the recapitulation which follows a similar pattern of subtle speed and dynamic increases and subtractions, highpoints the cello’s vital high in bar 222, determines a dark-shaded coda approach from bar 235 on, and culminates in a moving processional across the movement’s final 20 bars.

Severn and Fein hit on the ideal approach to Brahms’ Allegretto. It is given a minuet’s lilt in the outer sections, Fein picking and choosing which staccato directions he’ll observe (all of them in the opening bars, more selective in the left hand of the second half in this section [bars 16 to 27]). Adding to this excellent clarity of delivery, the central trio from Fein is clog-free with a welcome lack of glutinous pedaling, despite the direction to sustain from bar 79 in my old Breitkopf & Hartel edition. This helps give the movement a kind of unity, ensuring a continuity of output, even if the minuet’s return still piques because of the absence of its trio’s continuous two-semiquaver-plus-quaver pattern from the keyboard and a reversion to ye old-fashioned rustic courtliness.

To end, Brahms starts out a fugue, but it doesn’t sustain its formal characteristics. Fein states the subject with plenty of detached notes; not quite abrupt enough to come under a staccato heading and still maintaining a melodic contour. And the first climacteric at bars 24 to 25 is a true Brahmsian welter, if one where the instruments maintain audibility and their lines carry distinctly right through the interleaving of lines up to bar 53’s light relief and the rubato brought into play at bar 61 where dance wins out; the same gentle hesitation that the duo employed in the previous movement’s trio. I was struck by an odd tuning error from Severn on the B in bar 72, and a Fein slip in the C minor triad of bar 93. But almost immediately, the lack of brutal teeth-marks in the closely-argued mesh from bars 115 to 123 merits strong approval for its communication of polyphonic stress rather than instrumental effort.

If Severn and Fein come close to your traditional Brahms thickness round the waist, it’s in the final pages from bar 152 and through the coda Piu presto which is, compared to the rest of the interpretation, thunderous and virtuosic in the best sense of serving the score through craft. It brings this reading to a highly satisfying consummation. In the end, it realizes that declared intention of shedding ‘a new light’ on the score which here takes on an unexpected transparency in its instrumental interplay and a welcome immediacy due to an enlightened approach to dynamic levels and care in sound production.

Diary November 2023

cliveoconnell

SONATA PROJECT 1

Yundi Li

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Wednesday November 1 at 7:30 pm

Yundi Li, laureate in 2000 at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw and the youngest performer to win that distinguished event, began a world tour in 2019. In that year, he presented sonatas by Schubert, Chopin and Rachmaninov. He’s back again with a new, all-Mozart program: the K. 331 in A Major with the Rondo alla turca finale; the just-as-popular K. 310 in A minor; and the K. 457 in C minor which prefigures Beethoven’s Pathetique, they say. These latter two exhaust Mozart’s output of keyboard sonatas in minor keys. As well, Li will give us the hefty Fantasia in C minor K 475 which was published simultaneously with the K. 457 work. That’s quite a solid night, exhibiting the kind of concentration that most artists avoid, and it’s particularly interesting coming from an artist not known for his Mozart. Li has recorded the delectable K. 330 Sonata in C Major and he played the A Major Concerto K. 488 with the Staatskapelle Dresden during a 2017 tour of Germany and China. But his most sustained efforts have gone into Chopin with a little spattering of Liszt. Tickets range from $59 to $179; mind you, I tried booking just now and was met with an ‘error’ message every time I followed directions to make a reservation. Nevertheless, what I do know is that QPAC will still charge its disproportionate booking fee, no matter where your seat is.

INAUGURAL PADEREWSKI TOUR

Friends of Chopin

Old Museum, Bowen Hills

Saturday November 4 at 7 pm

A group that’s new to me, the Friends are commemorating (a bit early) the Australian 1904 tour by Paderewski, the famous pianist/composer/prime minister of Poland who was the most famous of the post-Liszt virtuosi who came to this country to be met with a wave of riotous enthusiasm. As with most events presented at the Old Museum, details are there on the website, but scant. For example, participants in this recital will be the Orava Quartet – expert and amiable locals – alongside pianist Aleksandra Swigut whose main claim to fame in the Chopin stakes is her experience on historical instruments. Hard to tell what she’ll be using for this exercise but I’m pretty sure it won’t be a Pleyel, Broadwood or Erard. Now, what are these musicians playing? Two of the names are familiar: Chopin and Penderecki; Swigut will be exercising her gifts on the former, the Oravas on the latter – in fact, the third (2008) one of Penderecki’s four quartets. The third composer is Wojciech Kilar, once a part of the New Polish School along with Penderecki and Gorecki, but turning his back on all that to write your normal harmonically conservative, sometimes folksong-inflected compositions including a string orchestral work, Orawa, which ties in neatly with our string quartet. As for Swigut’s contribution, that will consist of the Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, probably with the orchestra reduced to the available four strings. Tickets move between $40 concession (with a $3.35 fee for nothing) and $70 full (shackled to a $4. 86 fee – the $30 difference in price makes such a difference in handling?).

SPOTLIGHT ON THE DOUBLE BASS

Brisbane Symphony Orchestra

Brisbane City Hall

Sunday November 5 at 3 pm

Billed as this orchestra’s final concert for the year, the BSO takes over the Town Hall for this program that highlights Queensland Symphony Orchestra principal double bass Phoebe Russell taking on the solo part in Bottesini’s Double Bass Concerto No. 2 in B minor of 1853. Not that anybody should have anything against the bass but this piece is interesting mainly for its relationship to the cello concertos of its time and a little later; from the first solo notes (and they come pretty quickly), we’re in the Romantic world of quiet complaint and melancholy, which obtains through a substantial slow movement, changing to something more aggressive for a polonaise-rich finale. Still, it’s great to hear this instrument treated as a lyrical voice, for once (no, Mahler: you don’t count). As far as I can tell, only the first movement was scored for full orchestra (11 wind plus strings) and most through-performances feature string accompaniment only. Conductor Paul Dean finishes the afternoon with Sibelius’ Symphony No 5: an unadulterated joy from first to last of its three movements, with an unforgettably sprawling conclusion: Finland at its most triumphant. The event will probably begin with James Ledger‘s Signal Lost, commissioned by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra for a premiere in June this year and here enjoying its Queensland debut. It sprang from considerations of Beethoven’s deafness coming on him about the time of the Eroica, and a parallel loss of communication outlets for us all during the COVID crisis. From the composer’s notes, cantus firmus/passacaglia/ground bass (to repeat myself) seems to be the main operating fulcrum. This piece asks for the largest orchestral forces among the scores being essayed. Tickets range from $20 to $40 with no credit-charge-managing fee, as far as I can tell.

ORGAN RECITAL

Simon Nieminski

St. John’s Anglican Cathedral

Thursday November 9 at 7 pm

In a building of this type, you’re bound to have a few recitals for this Norman and Beard/Hill, Norman and Beard/Simon Pierce instrument, if only to expose its extensive four-manual range. This time round, we have Nieminski visiting from St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney where he is assistant director of music, working under the newly-appointed Daniel Justin, one presumes. As far as I can see, the recital consists of one work: Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2 in E minor, as transcribed by this performer. Well, that’s a 50-minute extravaganza, well-known to Melbourne Symphony Orchestra patrons of a certain age because of Hiroyuki Iwaki’s enthusiasm for it. You’d have to suppose that Nieminski will enjoy himself finding the variety of colours needed to animate this sometimes voluptuously expansive score; I’m thinking of that broad-beamed A Major Adagio and the ejaculation-rich E Major finale. Good luck to him; as far as I can find, nobody else has made another such transliteration of this score. Tickets range from $20 concession to $35, school students admitted free; there’s a 50-cents booking fee, which sounds about right, if you have to charge such a thing at all.

CHOPIN & THE MENDELSSOHNS

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday November 13 at 7 pm

Rounding out our Chopin piano concerto experience for this month, here comes Polina Leschenko with the No. 2 in F minor, also in an arrangement for string support only. There’s precedent for this, with an arrangement for string quintet being published by Breitkopf und Hartel in 1836; added to which, the composer has suffered from being faulted as an orchestrator for nearly two centuries. As for the Mendelssohns, we first get to enjoy Fanny’s String Quartet in E flat Major of 1834, a work her brother disapproved of for its formal eccentricity (what a Victorian prude he was) but of which she changed not a note. We’ll be hearing a string orchestra transcription but so far I can’t find a name behind this expansion of forces. To end, we have Richard Tognetti, the ACO’s artistic director, collaborating with Leschenko in Felix’s Concerto for Violin and Piano in D minor. This will be the original version with string accompaniment only, as distinct from the later orchestration involving winds and timpani. Mind you, this work was a product of the composer aged 14, so don’t expect too much; it’s sturdy enough but, to my ears, completely unmemorable. Seats are priced between $59 and $149 with an astonishing $8.50 ‘handling fee’, which sounds like an extra service from a brothel, although there you get value for money.

MICRO-MASTERPIECES

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday November 17 at 11:30 am

To kill off the year in its regular venue (as opposed to the Lyric Theatre where the players will congregate for three rounds of the Wagner Ring in December), the QSO is being controlled by chief conductor Umberto Clerici. As part of an unremarkable observance that takes in the last three Mozart symphonies over three years (really?), the program glories in the Symphony No. 39 in E flat which may see the repeats observed in its finale. Clerici begins with Rossini’s Overture to The Barber of Seville – a joy in any context, even this specious one: the Italian is his country’s answer to Mozart. Also in this collection of small chefs d’oeuvre we find Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1, called Classical. More Haydn than Mozart, this score is a diatonic marvel which demonstrates the composer’s melodic felicity and brilliantly appropriate orchestrational skill. In his QSO website puff-piece, Clerici talks about the Schubert Symphony No. 5 and this composer’s admiration for Mozart; but the work is not included in the program list below these prefatory remarks. If it were, the program would blow out from about 50 minutes’ worth to over 77 – improbable as the event is scheduled to take 65 minutes without interval. Tickets move between $45 for a student to $130 full price, both despoiled by the $7.20 hyper-charge for employing the only currency available: credit card.

This program will be repeated on Saturday November 18 at 7:30 pm.

A JOYFUL NOISE

Brisbane Chorale

Brisbane City Hall

Sunday November 19 at 3 pm

For this afternoon, patrons can be assured of two works, the first being Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs. I’m assuming the version being offered is that for baritone solo (and who would that be?) with SATB choir and orchestra. For this afternoon, the only musicians mentioned are the John Coulton Brass Ensemble and organist Christopher Wrench – along with regular conductor Emily Cox. I’m sure something practicable will be cobbled together, if stretching the sources specified by the composer. As well, we’re to hear John Rutter’s Gloria for choir, brass, percussion and organ (or orchestra if there’s one lying around). which has for me reminiscences of Belshazzar’s Feast, if not as dramatic or daring. Both these add up to about 40 minutes of listening experience, but the promotional material offers ‘ . . . and more!’ Such a prospect dizzies with its suggestiveness and I question what could cap these two British choral gems but more of the same? You can buy tickets for between $15 and $60, with a ‘Fees & Charges’ tax of $1.25; I suppose this is small enough, especially when compared to other organizations’ unreasonable levies, but why have it at all?

WILDSCHUT & BRAUSS

Musica Viva Australia

Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University

Wednesday November 23 at 7 pm

This violin/piano duo is here at the half-way point of a national tour. As far as I can see, Noa Wildschut (violin) and Elisabeth Brauss (piano) have no long-standing relationship, if you judge by their published schedules. Following the practice of many another Musica Viva guest ensemble,, they are presenting two programs, although there’s only one major difference between them. Common elements are Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in A minor, Messiaen’s early Theme et variations, Debussy’s late (final) G minor Violin Sonata, and an Australian novelty in May Lyons’ Forces of Nature, commissioned for this tour (as is Musica Viva’s wont). The point of difference is that half of the recitals will hear Enescu’s folklore-infused Violin Sonata No. 3 in A minor; the other half (including Brisbane) have to settle for that welcome war-horse, Franck’s A Major (eventually) Violin Sonata. Well, these artists may not meet again after this set of recitals, but at least they’ll always have Australia. Tickets move between $15 and $109; I don’t think there are any extra charges.

HANDEL’S MESSIAH

Oriana Choir

Brisbane City Hall

Sunday November 26 at 3 pm

Thank God: for a moment I thought the barbarians had taken over and our annual Christmas dose of Handel’s oratorio wasn’t going to be spooned out. But here it is, presented by a near-20-years-old Sunshine Coast organization. Oriana has again gained the services of Andrew Wailes, long-time director of Melbourne’s Royal Philharmonic Choir and a consistent presence in a remarkable number of other choral bodies; in my experience, he has directed several outstanding performances of choral+orchestral music. He also has the outstanding quality among musicians of not measuring out his friendship in proportion to favourable reviews. His soloists are soprano Elisabeth Wallace Gaedtke, contralto Anne Fulton, tenor Tobias Merz, and bass Jason Barry-Smith – locals all, these days. But the bulk of the work falls to the chorus which, from its websites, sounds ultra-enthusiastic. The Sinfonia of St. Andrew’s will provide the instrumental support and this performance will follow an out-pf-town reading on the preceding night in Buderim. You can hear the Brisbane performance for between $15 and $55, with that usual added surcharge of $1,25 that seems to be peculiar to Brisbane Town (city) Hall presentations.

ZEPHYR: VOICE WITH WINDS

Brisbane Chamber Choir

St. John’s Anglican Cathedral

Sunday November 26 at 3 pm

This body is singing on its home turf in St. John’s where it is chamber choir in residence, but it also has strong affiliations with the University of Queensland School of Music with which it is affiliated. Its conductor is (and has always been) Graeme Morton, who is an eminence at both the cathedral and university. Alongside the singers we’ll hear a double wind quintet from the UQ School of Music, cellist Patrick Murphy, soprano saxophone Diana Tolmie, and organist Andrej Kouznetsov who is Morton’s assistant at the cathedral. As to what is on the program, details are scanty. Front and centre will be Stravinsky’s Mass for Mixed Chorus and Double Wind Quintet, the latter comprising two oboes, cor anglais, two bassoons, two trumpets and three trombones. All well and good; I’ve not heard this score in live performance and would appreciate the opportunity. But it lasts – at best – 20 minutes. Now we’re promised other music that puts voices and winds together but no details are available. Still, if you put your trust in these performers, you’ll give them the benefit of a fairly solid doubt. And, who knows? Perhaps the other works might explain the event’s title. Admission falls between $20 and $50 with a 50 cent booking fee per seat – which is cheap but irrational.

An amiable window into the Baroque

cliveoconnell

BACH PIANO 2

Judith Lambden

Move Records MCD 653

For the first of her Bach CDs for Move, released in 2021, Lambden presented four of the toccatas, the Italian Concerto, and the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue: a deft combination of the present-but-unexplored alongside two familiar scores. Something of the same combination obtains in this latest offering which comprises five works. Those that have general currency are the French Overture BWV 831 and the Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother BWV 992. As for the arcana – well, I have barely encountered them – they begin with the Overture in F Major BWV 820, move to the Aria variata alla maniera italiana BWV 989, and wind up in the perplexing Fantasia and Fugue in A minor BWV 944.

Unlike a few recent publications on this label, Lambden’s CD runs a substantial length at 76 minutes (actually, adding up the individual tracks, I believe that it comes in closer to 79); nearly 33 of these are taken up with the first eight tracks: the French Overture, or Overture in the French style which is the longest suite in Bach’s keyboard catalogue. Immediately, you can see that this offering is a continuation of the pianist’s 2021 disc; there’s an authority at work but the performance is not a perfectly bland surface with everything in its allotted place. You can hear patches – no, seconds – of unevenness: glossed over notes in brief runs during the Ouverture‘s stately preamble (e.g., second time through, last three right-hand notes of bar 14), a slight slowing down as the voices accrete in the 6/8 fugal-gigue that follows.

And there are also interpolated passages of play that deliberately slow down the rhythmic inevitability beloved of contemporary performers who operate their Bach craft with metronomic regularity. You can hear plenty of examples in Lambden’s progress through this marvel, as at halfway through bar 85 when she simply changes gears, or the slight accelerations that push the envelope, like in bar 115 and beyond. The return of the stately opening impresses as more individual and imaginative with a more free approach to metrical regularity. I don’t want to complain too much but the executant refrains from repeating bars 20 to 163; yes, it’s exhausting for the pianist but there are so many linear delights to be savoured in these pages.

Still, this suit-yourself approach is everywhere in the following Courante which is packed with small pauses throughout, in both hands. The fluency is hard to cotton on to until the first half’s repeat where you learn to make adjustments for the piece’s occasionally fitful outline. During the Gavotte I‘s left-hand semiquaver groupings, you can detect some notes being articulated unevenly the first time round. on the return, nothing is out of place, each group sounding true and clear. Lambden treats the pair of Passepieds with a similar studied nonchalance which results in a certain amount of latitude with ornaments, as the start of bar 28 on each of its three appearances.

But there’s something to be said for this room-space. For sure, when the musician is taking time to insert acciaccature, mordents and appoggiature, you won’t be able to dance this suite with absolute certainty; but is Bach writing for potential footloose and fancy-free Leipzigers, or just using the form? The latter, of course., so Lambden is quite at liberty to pause where she sees a hiatus point, or – consoling the dodgy pianists among us – where the going gets a tad tough. I’ve got nothing but praise for the mobile Sarabande which is given without exaggerated gravity, notably in the thick (relatively) chords of bars 24 and 25.

The Bourrees enjoy direct treatment, especially the first where the opening detached note approach rouses us from a bucolic torpor. Still, there is the occasional missed (or misfired, probably) note and the slight ritardandi in Bourree II puzzle more than please. The Gigue that follows is handled with excellent calm; nothing is hammered in this chaste framework and the outlook is almost placid, even if a few (two?) notes go missing in the little bursts of semi-scalar fioriture/demi-semiquavers. Finally, the Echo swaggers past amiably, my only problem Lambden’s lengthening some of the bass quavers (bars 22 to 25, then bars 54 to 57) which brings to mind, in a small way, Busoni’s Bach transcription exaggerations.

This large-scale work is followed by a small relative in the BWV 820. Its short Ouverture is packed with ornaments in its opening 13 bars, a few of them wisely omitted here. Then the 3/8 burst into fugato energy comes across with quiet security that is rarely ruffled – although I’m coming round to thinking that those short breathing-spaces (scarcely that, in fact) are Lambden’s system of punctuating the work’s thrust, avoiding the Tic-toc-choc metallic assembly-line approach. In the Entree, this player introduces a great many more dotted quaver-semiquaver patterns than occur in my admittedly antique Breitkopf und Hartel score. Nevertheless, here the slow march holds the right Charpentier strut in its slight two-part sinews.

Not much to report about the Menuet-plus-Trio, Bourree or Gigue. As with the post-Ouverture dances in the BWV 831, Lambden observes every repeat faithfully, offering a piano repeat on the odd occasion but for the most part retaining those ornaments that she introduces first time through. Mind you, these three dance movements are brief and lacking in digital complications; Lambden’s slight rhythmic relaxations prove handy enough in adding some quirkiness to what are simple and internally repetitive structures.

Some desperates have been pointing to the Capriccio as one of the first examples of tone-poem narrative in Western music. Not really: it had plenty of choral and instrumental antecedents. But its brief pages hold some moving emotional content, especially in the Friends, Dangers, Lament and Farewell segments, Lambden making affecting work of the first, third and fourth of these scenes while somehow suggesting the Goldbergs‘ penultimate Quodlibet in the angular second. Especially honest is the melancholy character realized in the Lament mini-passacaglia, and the well-there-he-goes stolidity of the brief Abschied.

About the two concluding Postilion movements, I’m not so sure. There’s nothing urgent about the Aria which doesn’t propose a speedy journey but more of a leisurely jog as the octave jumps that are intended to imitate the driver’s instrument have no bite or energy. The Fugue would have gained from a more rapid tempo and a good deal more energy in the thicker meshes (bars 27 to 38, for example; even bars 45 to 47). Still, Lambden works through this last with careful craft, making as much as possible from one of the least satisfying final bars in the composer’s output.

Once again, the performer indulges in more hesitations and pauses while she works through the Aria variata’s unremarkable arches, laden on during the repeats with ornaments delineated in my edition. It sets up a ruminative atmosphere which is probably for the best with this undistinguished material. The trouble is that few of the following 10 variations have much to delight in them, but more an unusual number of disappointments, like Variation 2 with its going-nowhere triplets (bars 5 and 6); ditto Variation 3‘s bar 7; the aimless right-hand repetitions of shape and actual notes across Variation 5. In fact, it seems that inspiration flagged pretty consistently in the third bar of each variation’s second part. So much so, that it’s a relief to get back to the Aria‘s paraphrase in the final Variation 10.

It seems to me that Lambden is not really challenged by this work, its twists and turns rarely unpredictable – on a par with the preceding Capriccio. But her reading is composed and undemonstrative, the strands well balanced and distinctive, if some of the phrasing shapes sound a tad contrived and the short suspension of action for the sake of a grace note starts to grate in the repeats. Speaking of which, the second part of Variation 9 is not played again: a shock in continuity as every other part of this work is given a second run-through.

To end, we are offered the BWV 944, which opens with a fantasia that you improvise yourself on a series of 18-and-a-half chords, with the between-staves interpolation ‘Arpeggio’. Some publications spell it out with arpeggios travelling from one hand to the other; Lambden goes the same route but arpeggiates in contrary motion simultaneously. Nothing unusual in that, although it’s a rather ordinary way of negotiating the problem. Still, you can go a long way before you find somebody with an original take on these 10 bars, e.g. not just splaying out the chords or maintaining their written range.

The fugue opens bravely and confidently but the arrival of the third voice in bar 18 sees some initial fumbling and, by the time we get all bass-operative at bar 38, the pace has slowed, only to pick up a little further on. Also, the executant seems to slow down to accommodate a cadential trill too often for comfort. She finds the going tough from about bar 106 on to the bass pedal B that lasts for 4-and-two-third bars at the work’s centre; the polyphonic interplay here sounds laboured – which it is but it shouldn’t come across that way.

Near the end, the spirit of Liszt/Busoni takes over and there is a pronounced acceleration from about 19 bars before the conclusion, the dynamic level moves into a near fortissimo level, and the approach to the fugue’s concluding bars smacks of the grandiose. Mind you, the player can hardly be blamed for a touch of triumphalism after this active, long web of fabric. It makes for an unexpectedly assertive last word to this disc that is for the greater part characterized by restraint and a pliant, relaxed approach to rhythmic regularity. These offerings bring together an interesting range of works – from the highly demanding to the simple – and reinforce Lambden’s standing as a sincere and informed interpreter of Bach’s keyboard catalogue.