MOZART’S JUPITER
Queensland Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University
Friday March 1 at 7:30 pm
This is the first of a pair of concerts, sharing one constituent only in the last Mozart symphony. Great to see this work serving as a program fulcrum, even if questions, doubts and disappointments arise whenever you hear it live. Tonight (and tomorrow) Umberto Clerici directs his players in this magnificent tribute to musical conservatism, and I estimate that the whole exercise will be fine up to the finale. At about bar 53, the texture will thicken as the whole crowd forces the forte into something more power-driven as the brass push their whole-bar chords forward and the strings are made to feel line-heavy: I must urge out to make my mark. Worse follows, of course, as the polyphony strengthens, so that the essential strophes of light fade into weighty timbral output. Sorry, but I’ve heard it from too many eminent bodies and conductors who become engrossed in the skill rather than the composer’s vivacity. Pianist Andrea Lam begins the night with Beethoven’s Op. 27 No. 2, which is then followed by the same composer’s Moonlight Sonata, but only the first movement. This presents a bit of a problem because the Op. 27 No. 2 is the Moonlight; so Lam plays the whole sonata and then repeats the Adagio sostentuto? Whatever she does, the follow-up will be Kurtag‘s . . . quasi una fantasia . . . for piano and orchestral groups. Why, you ask? Maybe because Beethoven’s sonata was marked Quasi una fantasia and some happy spirit decided to juxtapose the well-known with a wispy piece of post-Webern touch-me-not. Further adding to a listener’s experience comes Mark-Anthony Turnage‘s Set To for brass dectet; another problem here is that I’ve not seen a score but the performances you can see online all have 11 players. There will be an interval, although the Kurtag and Turnage works are brief. Full-price tickets go from $95 to $135; I can’t see any concessions but you can print out your tickets for free and there are np signs of the usual handling-fee extortion.
MOZART’S JUPITER
Queensland Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University
Saturday March 2 at 7:30 pm
So here we are, enjoying the same Mozart in C Major: the best output the poor fellow could manage at the time, given his home-life and monetary circumstances. We’re the winners. Take the Symphony No. 41 as a supreme gift; there’s not much of such substance in the whole late Classical to cling to as a comparable pinnacle. Or am I being too soft? Perhaps it’s coloured by an aversion to the nickname which is ridiculously inappropriate, considering both the god and the work’s content as a matched pair. At all events, Clerici and his band have another chance to achieve something passable. Prior to this, Andrea Lam fronts the Schumann Piano Concerto in A minor which is a traditionalist’s delight these days, even if the concluding vivace enjoys a good many weltering modulations without changing the music’s tenor. As makeweight overture-substitute, we’re to hear Takemitsu’s Rain Tree - or are we? The original 1981 work was written for three percussionists; a year later came Rain Tree Sketch I for solo piano. Ten years later, Takemitsu wrote an in memoriam for Messiaen, which is Rain Tree Sketch II, also for piano. Given Lam’s activity in the alternate program, I suspect that patrons are likely to hear her in one of these Sketches. Ticket prices are the same as for last night’s event; forget that nonsense about it always being cheaper to attend the matinee.
DIVINE ALCHEMY
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Sunday March 3 at 3 pm
I don’t understand these Soloists’ concerts; there’s too much, it’s all programatically fractured, and the forces required to carry off the programs boggle the unprepared mind. The afternoon ends with Konstantin Shamray as soloist in Mozart’s C minor Piano Concerto K. 491, for which the support required is the biggest that Mozart wanted for any of his works in this genre: flute, pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, along with the usual string group. A little before this, more Mozart comes with the Kyrie and Lacrimosa from the Requiem: pairs of basset horns, bassoons and trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, strings and organ. Fortunately, neither of these excerpts requires soloists – only an SATB choir. Then you have to put these alongside Debussy’s Violin Sonata - but in a new chamber transcription. Why? What’s wrong with having Shamray accompany guest-colleague violinist Amalia Hall? The program opens with Bach’s G minor Oboe Concerto which only asks for strings to back the soloist (artistic director Tania Frazer?). We experience the Australian premiere of Elegie by Thibaut Vuillermet, which features Hall’s solo line and a string (I think) orchestral accompaniment to its Bloch-like sentimentality. Then, to cap it all, the Soloists’ Didgeridoo Commissioning Project comes to the fore with a freshly minted composition, The Wise Woman, by Sean O’Boyle and the organization’s fountainhead for these pieces, didgeridoo expert Chris Williams. You can get in for $88, with the QPAC booking charge of $7.20 to spoil the experience.
ALEX RAINERI: SPEECHLESS
Opera Queensland
Opera Queensland Studio, 140 Grey St. South Brisbane
Friday March 8 at 7 pm
Brisbane’s most active music personality, Raineri will present an hour-long program for the state’s opera company which will probably involve transcriptions of operas in the best 19th century tradition. Well, when I say ‘transcriptions’, I really mean fantasias on themes from certain operas. It’s fair to say that Liszt is the most well-known originator of these works, what with his thematic elaborations of Norma, Lucia, La Juive, Les Huguenots, Don Juan, Rigoletto, and a welter of Wagner. Raineri is due to play re-visitings of Verdi, Wagner and Mozart. He’s also scheduled to give us some Richard Strauss, and he has certainly performed the Dance of the Seven Veils and its consequents from Salome in what I vaguely remember was his own transcription. But there’s also Puccini in the list of offerings and here we enter a land that I don’t know at all. Of course, Raineri may play his own fantasias, reminiscences or musical tours of Turandot or Tosca but I believe that today’s practice is simply to isolate a piece and elaborate it in the best Lisztian manner. God knows there’s plenty to choose from, like O mio babbino caro, Un bel di, or O soave fanciulla. Still, it’s a healthy employment of this pianist’s considerable gifts. Entry costs between $59 and $65 and I can’t trace a booking fee.
This program will be repeated on Saturday March 9 at 2 pm.
OPERA GALA
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Friday March 8 at 7:30 pm
Yes, it’s a night of opera but it’s confined to one composer: Puccini. We have no indication as to which specific arias or duets will be essayed (bar one), but educated guesses indicate some possibilities. Tonight’s conductor will be Giordano Bellincampi, a notable figure in Danish opera houses and currently music director of the Auckland Philharmonia. He’s in charge of the QSO’s efforts supporting soprano Sae-Kyung Rim, tenor Kang Wang, and baritone Phillip Rhodes, with the Voices of Birralee working through some choruses. There’s Tosca, where Wang has two big arias, Rim will probably work at Vissi d’arte, and even Rhodes could give us Va, Tosca! We have La Boheme (which the QSO puff-writers seem to think is set in 1930s Bohemia) and here the soprano and tenor have all of Act 1’s second half at their disposal, or Rim could take on Musetta’s Act 2 delight. Madama Butterfly isn’t only Un bel di; we might also get the Act 1 duet Viene la sera, or the Humming Chorus, or possibly those sweeping final pages as Butterfly says goodbye to her child. In the best of worlds, the organizers could offer us that wrenching scene between Butterfly and Sharpless in Act 2. As far as Manon Lescaut is concerned, nobody knows much beyond Sola, perduta, abbandonata and Donna non vidi mai; perhaps patrons will be offered that final tragic duet, Fra le tue braccia, amore. The solitary program certainty is Wang in Nessun dorma: the only excerpt from Turandot, which also holds two glorious soprano arias and a wealth of chorus work. Tickets are at their lowest for a child ($35) and move to top adult of $150, with the inevitable $7.20 surcharge.
This event will be repeated on Saturday March 9 at 1:30 pm
CASINO ROYALE IN CONCERT
Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre
Friday March 15 at 7:30 pm
Are people that enamoured of Daniel Craig’s attempts to play James Bond that they’ll come out to see his first film in the role, even if he does his best to give us a male Ursula Andress at the opening? Perhaps I’m out of touch with the Fleming-conscious zeitgeist but I doubt if the new characterization’s sulky somnolence would drag me out on a humid Friday night. What makes the experience even more questionable is the ridiculous storyline that deviates monstrously from the author’s original novel, right up to that cataclysmic Venetian conclusion. Anyway, you could go along ‘for the music’ which was assembled by David Arnold and formed part of his considerable Bond oeuvre. Fair enough, although John Barry had the best lines in that branch of the film composer’s art, identificatory tropes that his successors have recycled over and over. The exercise recalls nothing as much as the current Nemesis betrayals occurring on ABC TV; you’re getting nothing new after the first half-hour. Tonight’s conductor is Vanessa Scammell, an aficionado of these sound-track efforts across the country. Entry rates range from $79 to $135 with Ticketek’s service fee of $7.40 added to every order; that’s even more than QPAC and I thought that rip-off was over the top. Oh, the event runs for 2 hours and 35 minutes with an interval interpolated which will last only 11 minutes as the film itself takes 144 minutes.
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 1
Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre
Saturday March 16 at 1:30 pm
A day after its 007 excursion, the QSO hops back onto the Potter bandwagon with this live soundtrack concert playing under the film. To demonstrate the relative popularities of the two exercises, this one involves a second performance for more mature (are there any?) Potter fans in the evening. By this stage in the epic, the films have turned to an overall grey-to-black colour palette and – as with the Bond films – the soundtrack elements that remain present like a second language are those already familiar; in this instance, from John Williams’ scores for the first three of the series. Of Alexandre Desplat‘s new music and themes for the last two films, nothing comes surging out of my memory. Mind you, I haven’t watched The Deathly Hallows for some years; I’ve been particularly ignoring the first one because the death of Dobby makes me laugh inordinately and that tends to upset the grandchildren. Vanessa Scammell is back to lead the QSO through these same-day readings; fine, but I could have sworn that Desplat’s score involved a chorus. Tickets cost the same as for the Bond film above, but there’s something odd about the timing – again. The original lasts for 146 minutes; this concert’s two parts (either side of a 20-minute interval, run for a combined 139 minutes. Don’t tell me: the Potterverse has been censored to fit in with Queensland’s prevailing cultural ethos. Egad, we could be in Florida.
This concert/film will be repeated at 7:30 pm
AYESHA GOUGH IN RECITAL
Griffith University Queensland Conservatorium
Ian Hanger Recital Hall
Thursday March 21 at 7:30 pm
As the city’s music-conscious universities lurch into gear, this event struck me as one of the few interesting exercises on the Griffith calendar. I haven’t heard Gough live, even though she has been a feature of Brisbane’s musical life for some years. But she has skin in the game, having won the 2015 Lev Vlassenko Piano Competition, and she carried off the Michael Kieran Harvey Scholarship in 2022. Tonight, her program is an individualistic wander around the repertoire, involving works by Mozart, Chopin and Liszt to satisfy the elderly, or those of us who want to see what novelty she can bring to well-trodden paths. On the contemporary side, she is presenting works by Harvey and French writer Yann Tiersen (of Amelie soundtrack fame). The odd man out is Rossini, who is usually represented on piano programs by a peche de vieillesse. Tickets are going for $22 but discounts are available for the elderly and Griffith alumni.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio
Friday March 22 at 7 pm
Umberto Clerici, the QSO chief conductor, takes his players into the organization’s studio to give us a program that will display the clarity of intonation to be found in the various ranks. Or so we hope. The night begins with Rossini at his most transparent: the Overture La scala di seta which will set up the strings pretty nicely. Then comes the aberrative Symphony No. 8 by Beethoven, sitting between those bully-boys, Nos. 7 and 9. Here is a more mellow mind at work with some humorous passages, although nothing as light as Haydn being quaint or even Rossini keeping himself entertained. To end this 80-minute pleasure party, Clerici & Co. perform a suite from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream music. In fact, given the time available, the executants could get through the entire incidental music if they felt like it. But that’s not likely as you need two vocal soloists and a choir, as well as a speaker, and none of these are mentioned. I’ve seen it done by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (after a fashion) featuring Joel Edgerton. But it’ll probably just involve the Overture, Scherzo, Nocturne and Wedding March, as usual. Tickets range between $79 and $35 and, on its own ground, the QSO charges top dollar for its services, adding $7.95 to your purchase as an over-priced ‘transaction fee’. Or perhaps the fiscal branch of this organization takes longer to do the ‘job’ than its professional counterparts.
This program will be repeated on Saturday March 23 at 3 pm
MESSIAH
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Thursday March 28 at 7:30 pm
There was a time when you could count on three performances of Handel’s great oratorio at Christmas time from some of the nation’s state orchestras. We have a different generation doing the patronage these days and so Brisbane is mounting a single Messiah. Mind you, it’s being presented at the right time of year, temporally related to its premiere in Dublin on April 13, 1742 and following the work’s main thrust towards the Resurrection, not the Nativity. By the way, I love the subtitle attached to this occasion – An Easter Passion; as if you could have a Pentecost Passion or an Advent Passion. Tonight’s conductor is Brett Weymark, long-time director pf the Sydney Phlharmonia Choirs. His soloists are soprano Celeste Lazarenko, mezzo Stephanie Dillon, tenor Alexander Lewis, bass Christopher Richardson with the Brisbane Chamber Choir taking on the brunt of the work with those wonderful tub-thumping choruses. The night’s operations will be completed in 2 hours 30 minutes, including an interval – and that tells me that we’re going to be missing about half an hour’s music as some time-honoured cuts will obtain, particularly in Part the Third. You want to get in? It costs $35 for a child and $135 for a full adult with the usual fee of $7.20 for bothering to be present at this sometimes-uplifting annual ritual.
O'Connell the Music 