EASTER CONCERT
St. Stephen’s Cathedral, 249 Elizabeth St.
Friday April 5 at 7:30 pm
To observe the liturgical season, this choir has chosen two formidable works. First up comes Bach’s Christ lag in Todes Banden cantata, one of the earliest in the catalogue and a splendid instance of the composer’s emotional compression, the whole seven movements being in E minor and the choral lines direct and focused. Then we get to enjoy a true rarity: Beethoven’s oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, in which the composer and librettist proposed the idea of Christ as Man more than God, with a lot of emphasis on letting the chalice pass, as outlined in the Passion parts of the Gospels. I don’t know this work at all; wasn’t even tempted to listen to it as a curiosity in those halcyon days when most of Beethoven was a well-thumbed book. Full marks to the Choir for working through it. The three soloists are soprano Leanne Kenneally as an angel, tenor Sebastian Maclaine singing the title role, and bass Leon Warnock playing Peter. Kevin Power conducts the choral forces and the Sinfonia of St. Andrew’s. Tickets fall between $20 for a child or full-time student and $65 for an adult full price. You also have to stump up $1.25 that falls under the generic heading of ‘fees and charges’; this is a reasonably piddling amount but you still have to ask: for what?
HOPELESSLY DEVOTED: A CELEBRATION OF OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Saturday April 6 at 1:30 pm
The country has spoken and Newton-John has been elevated to the status of national saint, mainly because of her work for cancer research rather than for her contributions to music and singing. Helping this popular canonization was her relatively early death, relative to many another senior citizen as she passed away aged 73 in 2022. I can’t explain why this tribute has been so long in the making but here it is with the QSO conducted by energetic young arranger/composer Nicholas Buc. Hosting the evening will be Courtenay Act (Shane Jenek) who has well-established pop credentials and seems to turn up when you most expect it on ABC TV or at public events that favour drag artists – which is just about everything in this country. Patrons will hear 22 numbers from the Newton-John catalogue, some of them familiar even to a distant observer like me: I Honestly Love You. the night’s title number, and Physical. Re-creating the singer’s sound – or not – will be David Campbell, Jess Hitchcock, Georgina Hopson and Christie Whelan Browne, all of whom will share in the programmatic spoils, maybe even splitting some of them in various combinations. Tickets can be obtained for $95, $115, or $135 full price; concessions are available and the usual QSO transaction fee of $7.20 applies, regardless of the concession you claim.
This program will be repeated at 7: 30 pm
FOR THE LOVE OF MUSIC
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Monday April 8 at 7 pm
It’s difficult to determine the provenance of this event. It is absent from the ACO’s own brochure for this year, so I suspect the origin is the ABC which here presents two of its journalist stars in a 90-minute chat punctuated by music. The speakers/conversationalists are Leigh Sales and Annabel Crabb who will be interviewing members of the orchestra, asking them a battery of searching questions about matters that have little to do with aesthetics and everything to do with personal revelations and gossip. I’ve come across similar ventures some decades ago when Mairi Nicholson and Emma Ayres put on a duo act in front of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra which was meant to entertain with its wit but quickly turned into excruciating silliness. Apparently, the Sales-Crabb combo has presented a previous incarnation of this gabfest, and the two journalists have attested to their enjoyment of the experience: hence, its repetition. Sketchy details only have come through of what Richard Tognetti and his musicians will perform: Tchaikovsky’s Andante cantabile from the String Quartet No. 1 in an arrangement for cello and strings, presumably fronted by principal Timo-Veikko Valve; a suite from Sufjan Stevens‘ Enjoy Your Rabbit 2001 album, reworked by Michael Atkinson (among others) for the Osso String Quartet as Run Rabbit Run. The only other prescribed work is Piazzolla’s wretched Libertango which revisits an ACO phase when accordionist James Crabb collaborated with members of the ensemble in a swatch of the Argentinian composer’s monocular output. Tickets can be purchased for $49, $89, $109, and $129 full price with some concessions available, and the usual $7.20 QPAC impost applies to whatever you choose.
JURIS ZVIKOVS AND SANITA GLAZENBURGA
University of Queensland School of Music
Nickson Room, Zelman Cowen Building, St. Lucia
Thursday April 11 at 1 pm
Little escapes this institution’s musical walls, and you have to look hard to find out what the faculty is offering the public within its own grounds. Most of the time, the recitals/concerts on offer can be visited on a livestream website, so you don’t have to trek out to St. Lucia for your experience. This coupling is Latvian in origin; duo pianists with ‘a penchant for adventurous collaboration’, they find material in contemporary fields (naturally) and the Baroque (do they indeed?). Surprisingly enough, the university’s website has no details about what Zvikovs and Glazenburga will play in this hour-long recital; I can’t even find any details about CDs that the pair may have generated. You would have thought something on disc might have come from the collaboration which has apparently lasted over two decades. Still, the great thing about these events is that they’re free. You have to register if you’re attending in person, but no such requirement is needed if you’re content to watch/hear the livestream.
TRIUMPHANT TCHAIKOVSKY
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Friday April 12 at 11:30 am
No soloist at this event, unless you count the conductor. Andrew Gourlay is a young (well, early 40s: nobody seems to know his birth date – a retiring celebrity, then) British musician who has been around the English, European, American and Australian traps for some years since winning the 2010 Cadaques Orchestra International Conducting Competition. He has enjoyed a solid relationship with the Britten Sinfonia, which might explain his first offering on this program: the 1940 Sinfonia da Requiem, written for a Japanese government commission and rejected by that country’s official voices because of its Latin movement titles and its sombre mood, although God knows they had need of it in the following five years. The composer’s longest purely orchestral composition, it is rarely heard here; you can trace familiar prefigurations in it of much from Peter Grimes to the War Requiem. As a companion to this comes the Symphony No. 5 by Tchaikovsky which is an audience favourite and rightly so: packed to the gills with brilliant melodies, concentrated in its dramatic framework, directly orchestrated with a splendid sense of showmanship. But nothing gets to me quite as much as the bar 128 D Major woodwind tune in the finale, cutting through the portentous grit and grime with dazzling simplicity. There are few tickets available online for this matinee, but the range is from $76 to $135 with the usual concessions and, yet again that invidious $7.20 booking fee.
This program will be repeated on Saturday April 13 at 7:30 pm.
THE TROUT
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Sunday April 14 at 3 pm
No problem with guessing the main event at this particular event. The ensemble will present five quintets, climaxing with the great Schubert construct which features a double bass (Phoebe Russell?) in the string quartet combination alongside that treble-happy piano part (Daniel de Borah, maybe). Before this reading, we get to hear Reicha’s buoyant Variations for bassoon and string quartet (seven of them with a framing introduction and coda), presumably featuring David Mitchell from the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. Then comes everyone’s favourite newly discovered female American composer, Amy Beach, and her Theme and variations for flute and string quartet (only six in this composition) of 1916; the focus line will probably be played by Alison Mitchell, QSO principal. We nod to national spirit with Lachlan Skipworth‘s concise Clarinet Quintet of 2016 (featuring Ensemble foundation guru Paul Dean, I’d guess) before Glazunov’s Idyll which I can’t trace. There’s a work by that name for solo piano and YouTube has a performance of a completely different composition for horn and string quartet, as well as another video which brings in a flute as well. This afternoon. we’re promised a horn – probably Q regular Peter Luff, formerly from the QSO – and the accompaniment will almost certainly be a string quartet, following the program’s pattern. Anyway, things wind up with the happy, long Schubert masterpiece. For this ‘intimate’ recital, the Concert Hall is restricted to only a few rows front and back of the stage and tickets are $75 with a $55 for concession holders, accompanied by the usual $7.20 surcharge which is rich as it constitutes nearly 10% of a full ticket and more than 8% of a concession admission.
LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Saturday April 20 at 7 pm
As you can tell from the venue, this is not a fully staged presentation of Donizetti’s most popular opera; well, popular in this country, thanks to the epoch-making performances of Joan Sutherland starting in 1959. What we have is a concert presentation, directed by Patrick Nolan. Not that you’re missing much by way of scenery which only takes on importance when the heroine emerges from her mariticidal bedroom for the opera’s stupendous climax. The Queensland Symphony Orchestra and the company’s chorus will be under the control of Richard Mills, who must be the country’s most experienced opera conductor left standing. Jessica Pratt sings Lucia and will doubtless do credit to the role. I heard her sing the part in Opera Victoria’s 2016 presentation at Her Majesty’s Theatre, also conducted by Mills. On that night, she was a bright light in a vocally penumbral space. As was the case eight years ago, she’s partnered by Carlos E. Barcenas as Edgardo, along with Sam Dundas (Enrico), David Parkin (Raimondo), Virgilio Marino (Arturo), Hayley Sugars (Alisa) and Iain Henderson (Normanno . . . or will it be Rosario La Spina, as some of the advertising states?). You can expect a finely honed night’s singing, thanks to the absence of theatrical distractions, although costumes by Karen Cochet and Bianca Bulley are threatened. Admission ranges from $75 to $149 with concessions available, starting from $65 for a child. It doesn’t matter: every order attracts the usual QPAC $7.20 fee/penalty. Also, this enterprise comes under the Brisbane Bel Canto umbrella, a company that promises ‘a new festival for the Brisbane stage.’
This performance will be repeated on Saturday April 27 at 2 pm.
DANIEL DE BORAH IN RECITAL
Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University
Ian Hanger Recital Hall
Friday April 26 at 6 pm
This pianist is Head of Chamber Music at Queensland Con and has managed to elevate himself above the ruck of Australian pianists by being exemplary in his work, particularly on the few occasions I’ve heard him in live performance. This recital forms part of the university’s piano series and, as usual, you labour in vain to find out exactly what de Borah will present. All you find on the man’s own website is ‘Program: TBC’. In the interests of sanity, you’d probably take that as “To Be Confirmed’, rather than the cryptic title of some contemporary score. Oddly enough, this appears to be the only solo recital that de Borah is mounting this year; the rest of his activities involve other groups, like Ensemble Q (see above) or colleague duettists. Mind you, his online diary does contain information that was lacking from the Ensemble’s program: the identity of the string quartet personnel in the April 14 program: violins Sophie Rowell and Anne Horton, viola Christopher Moore, cello Trish Dean. Tickets are $22, with a concession price available of $17; not bad for 90 minutes’ worth of music-making – and no handling charge!
ROSSINI STABAT MATER
Queensland Conservatorium Orchestra and Chorus
Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University
Friday April 26 at 7:30 pm
Straight after Daniel de Borah’s recital (see above), the Conservatorium is presenting this major sacred work by the great Italian opera master. As you’d expect, this setting of the medieval hymn has all the bells and whistles that made the revival of Gregorian chant in the last century so welcome: double woodwind, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani and strings, with four vocal soloists and an SATB choir that is hardly exercised until the last two numbers – actually, the last one would be more accurate. Executants find several hurdles along the way, none of them over-taxing but the work relies on operatic overstatement – just like Verdi’s Requiem – and a flexible approach to phrasing and metre. Richard Mills, in the middle of conducting two nights of Lucia for Opera Queensland, is to direct the Queensland Conservatorium Orchestra and a choir of sixty vocal students, all fronted by an as-yet-unknown quartet of soloists who will be put through their paces cruelly in two numbers that have no orchestral support. As well, the tenor will enjoy expounding the well-known, bracing Cujus animam solo early in the work’s progress. By the way, I don’t think this venue is sufficiently resonant for such a drama-laden composition, but you can’t have everything – not even a convenient local church, apparently. Top ticket price is $65 but concessions are available. Best of all, you don’t have to countenance a booking fee.
O'Connell the Music 