Month: September 2024

Listening in a vacuum

cliveoconnell

DREAMING IN THE SAND

Bentley String Quintet

Move Records MCD 620

It’s hard to get a handle on this newly-recorded work. Robbie James is an unknown to me. although he has a listing in the Australian Music Centre files and he’s well-documented on web spaces like Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube and he clearly has a firm guitar-based relationship with the group GANGgajang and was at one time a member of the Yothu Yindi personnel. For all that, you won’t find much material about the composer and what material there is on internet sources is repetitious and not very informative.

Matters are complicated by the official data on his works at the AMC. For one thing, this particular disc is not mentioned, but four other string quintets are. First off is one from 1999 called Suzannah, which follows a female First Fleet convict who, at the work’s end, is left ‘dreaming in the sand.’ Next came Kangaroo in 2003 which gives you the animals’ view of the arrival of Governor Phillip in 1788. No. 3, as listed at the AMC, bears the title of The Dreamt World and dates from 2016. And finally – and somewhat confusingly – we come to String Quintet No. 4 which was produced in 2009. This is entitled The Marree Sisters and follows the paths of a mother and her four daughters who leave the small eponymous town at the fundament of the Oodnadatta and Birdsville Tracks to find new lives in Adelaide; these women are/were the composer’s own relatives.

So far, so fair. The out-of-sequence dates for the later two works aren’t that important. What is perplexing to those of us unfamiliar with James’ compositional trajectory comes with the constituents of this third quintet. The work begins and ends with Dreaming in the Sand tracks, which generic title is meant (I think) to cover all of these compositions. Then we encounter a Kangaroo movement, which could be the first movement of Quintet No 2. A little later, we arrive at Kangaroo Rides the Desert Skies and The Gentle Warrior, which are the fourth and third movements of this same quintet.

Track 3 is called Ghost on the Beach which, as near as I can tell, refers to the conclusion of String Quartet No. 1. Suzannah Sails is a definite reference to the same piece. Dance on the Divide was the original conclusion to the first live performance of Dreaming in the Sand in 2021, while The Crow and the Irishman (this CD’s penultimate track) appears to have no precedent, although James does refer to his use of Irish folk music in the Suzannah work.

So what do we glean from all this? You’d have to assume that the format of this (perhaps) new String Quintet No. 3 uses material from its predecessors. Or possibly the composer has re-assessed his previous efforts and recast them. We’ll probably never know because no recordings of the first two quintets are extant. We do know that the String Quintets 1, 2 and 3 all enjoyed their first performances on October 15, 2021 during Brisbane’s Restrung Festival; The Maree Sisters has been recorded by the ABC on July 29, 2022 as performed by the Bentley String Quintet. This ensemble has changed somewhat over the years but its surviving members are cellist Danielle Bentley and double bass Chloe Ann Williamson. The upper lines on this latest Move product are Camille Barry (violin 1), Eugenie Costello-Shaw (violin 2) and Charlotte Burbrook de Vere (viola).

String Quintet No. 3 has nine movements, as detailed above. The work lasts for 31’44” which gives us an average length per movement of about three-and-a-half minutes, so the aim is non-developmental in the usual sense. Nothing lasts long; the sketches of colonial/aboriginal/natural scenes make their presence known and are gone. The problem that the work faces is that very little of it is memorable; pleasant enough music-making, certainly, but nothing to challenge, astound, delight, or arouse. It’s not a half-hour that you grudge but I can’t go along with those commentators who find profundity or insight in these old-fashioned vignettes.

According to what I can glean from the available online sources, Robbie James is an auto-didact (according to the Australian Music Centre) as far as serious composition goes. Which is fine and not that unusual if you accept the claims of several writers who claim that they gained nothing from their teachers. What you have to do if you teach yourself is to work twice as hard so as to make up for what nobody tells you, and that’s why this quintet strikes you as well-intentioned but diffuse. Not that James should have taken to studying his Boccherini and Dvorak; who wants to offer interference? But writing without an awareness of what precedes you is to put huge trust in yourself and your capabilities.

James’ first track, Dancing in the Sand (part one), opens with a single diatonic line, joined by two other instruments; then the rest emerge into a nice harmonic mesh of no complexity. Another scrap emerges on the violin, is repeated, then supported in a restatement by underpinning sustained notes. It’s a nice tune that doesn’t venture outside a simple scale format. We get an antiphonal response from the lower strings, then another collegial chorale before an abrupt change where the lower strings provide a hefty chugging underpinning for a few bars, before a reversion to the pervading placidity and a final statement of the movement’s tune.

So what we have is statement and restatement, a touch of shared labour/melodic responsibility, but nothing that would befuddle any 18th century composer. It’s hard to se a contour to these pages; you get restatements and a harmonic scheme that would have been unremarkable in the early Renaissance. And that’s where auto-didacticism comes unstuck because, if you don’t know what’s been happening in Western (string quintet) music over the past 300 years, where is your edge?

Kangaroo is an improvement, chiefly because it sets up a mobile rhythm that keeps going until a restrained final page or so. The melodies employed are busy but come one after the other with little distinction. What this segment relies on is a three-note rhythmic figure that attracts more attention than anything else. To be fair, James’ vocabulary here moves up a notch in richness with some piquant added notes. When the composer introduces a few irregularities about a third of the way through, you are pleased, even if the performance level is ragged. But the movement might just as well have been called Magpie or Indian Mynah for all the suggestiveness you receive of the titular animal’s motion or natural standing.

Ghost on the Beach is a slow benevolent lament, I suppose, although for what I can’t imagine; the coming of the white man? There’s nothing supernatural about its colour or emotional landscape as it moves between chords that support a violin line which weaves a long contour holding no surprises. Beginning with a perky jauntiness, Kangaroo Rides the Desert Skies calms down to a hymn-tune and follows a stately path to its ambiguous conclusion; less of the wilderness here and more of a European concept of Heaven.

Who is The Gentle Warrior? Possibly the kangaroo because the movement comes from the quintet that deals with that animal. But no: it’s an Aboriginal male that Suzannah is destined to encounter when she arrives in this new land. Again, the mode is upbeat and jaunty with a few passages of decent part-writing alongside others that are clumsy. The interest lies in the rhythmic patterns, although these are nothing to write home about, least of all in 2024. For a little over half its length, Suzannah Sails states, restates and rehashes what sounds like a British Isles folk song; the polyphonic interplay is unsophisticated and the movement’s progress stops after some semiquaver flurries a little over half-way through before James embarks on another melody. But then I’m not sure whether this melody leads anywhere as later focus falls on a figure that seemed to be an accompaniment provided by the cello.

This is a reversion to the simple diatonic writing of the first movement; not that the language ever got far beyond such a happy state. Nothing novel emerges in that regard during Dance on the Divide which sounds like a hoe-down, especially when the movement forward drifts into some elementary syncopation. I think I counted about five tunes being announced but can’t be sure because they merged into each other and the basic key didn’t change – apart from a couple of try-hard momentary modulations near the end. Still, it was cheerful in character.

As is The Crow and the Irishman which boasts a melody line with some Celtic suggestions, although nothing you could definitely hang your hat on. In essence, it is a cross between a minuet and a waltz, graced with some excellent doubling of a subsidiary chain a little before its somewhat lopsided conclusion; I mean, it stops but not exactly on the note that formed part of your mental projection. Dreaming in the Sand (part two), the longest track, begins with a couple of solo violin scraps before we enter into some full-bodied chords and move along our predictable path where the composer seems to be trying out a few devices but coming back inevitably to harmonization exercises.

You could look on this composition as an essay in naivete. The stated attempt behind the exercise is a symbiosis of two cultures: an imposed white one and a pre-existing Aboriginal one. The trouble is that you look in vain for any traces of the latter; whatever the dreaming going in this particular sand is firmly based in a none-too-advanced European vocabulary, not helped by the fact that the only ‘other’ string production technique employed throughout is pizzicato. For all its aspirations, this quintet remains a divertissement; to get beyond this level, you simply have to have compositional technique – information and knowledge about the craft as it is practised today.

Funny thing, memory

cliveoconnell

SUMMER WAVES

Len Vorster

Move Records MCD 661

This must be a re-issue because the pianist’s copyright on it goes back to 2004 and the credits listed on the slim leaflet point to original production and design by an entity called MANO MUSIC. This organization is listed as a Norwegian company and the sort of music it publishes these days is (as far as I can tell) soft-core pop. Whatever the history, here is Len Vorster‘s CD under the Move label and this musical content is impressive, if much of it is light. Still, that’s only to be expected when the background to the recording are this musician’s recollections of his youthful holidays by the sea in South Africa.

The leaflet also notes that Vorster is celebrating the centenary of one of the composers he performs: Lennox Berkeley, who was born in 1903 – which puts the recording into an even firmer temporal location. Mind you, it also means that these liner notes have not been updated; more to the point, a biographical screed printed here on Vorster is also possible to date from 2004 or thereabouts because his career details after that time remain unrecorded.

The CD opens with Gershwin’s three Preludes of 1926, familiar pieces that betray a sort of compositional constriction despite the ebullience of the outer numbers. Then we have a clutch of disparate pieces by de Falla: Cancion (1900), Serenata (1901), Nocturno (1896), Serenata Andaluz (1900), Vals-capricho (1900). Two pieces by Lord Berners follow – a 1941 Polka and a 1943 Valse. Continuing the sudden British detour, Vorster airs the 1945 Six Preludes for Piano by Berkeley. Two nocturnes follow – one in B flat Major of 1817 by Mr. Nocturne, John Field; the other more well-known one coming from Grieg’s Lyric Pieces of 1891. Then it’s all Gallic fun with Debussy’s La plus que lente waltz of 1910, Poulenc’s Les chemins de l’amour song dating from 1940 but here pianized, and Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales of 1911 – at close to 15 minutes, the longest track on this recording.

As you’d expect, the so-called ‘jazz’ preludes enjoy an expert airing, the first Allegro not exactly in synch with the published dynamic markings and a heavier accent than most on the last quaver chord in bars 4 to 6, and later when that bass support pattern emerges. But there’s a delicious elegance in the forte-to-piano run pf demi-semiquavers across the penultimate bar and Vorster maintains his syncopated initiative from first bar to last. He takes the middle ‘blues’ prelude slowly and doesn’t really press forward during the middle F sharp Major interlude, taking the right path out of a contradiction between a tempo and largamente con moto.

And I liked the alternation between arpeggiating some of those 10th left-hand stretches and landing the notes together; sort of in keeping with the relaxed ambling pace of the composition’s most successful pages. For the final Allegro prelude, Vorster maintains a consistent rhythmic and dynamic output; my only complaint is that the final statement of the theme in octaves across the score’s final 8 bars impresses as hard-won rather than the virtuosic powerhouse made of it by other interpreters.

Fall’s Cancion follows Gershwin’s ternary shape and stands as an unremarkable, melancholy piece of salon music with a deftly reinforced re-statement of the composer’s balanced tune. A bit more national colour flavours the Serenata which is given with an agreeable rubato that invests the piece with a quasi-improvisatory ambience, even if all the notes are there to be articulated – in this case, with great sympathy. Not much distinguishes the Nocturno, apart from an infectious descending figure of two demi- and one semiquaver across a Major/minor 3rd; which lends the piece a kind of Andalusian kick. Otherwise, it’s a Chopin rip-off with no claims to longevity.

Speaking of that province, we come next to another serenade in the Serenata Andaluz which is a tad more diffuse in its shape than its precedents by this writer. Here, the colours applied have a very familiar character, not least the triplet that comes at the start of the bar which concludes several of the main tune’s phrases (after we get to a tune, 16 bars after a frippery-filled preamble). The piece oscillates between D Major and minor, expanding to a polonaise-rhythm coda that eventually recalls the decorative opening as de Falla harvests his material – sort of. But Vorster’s reading is infectious and eloquent.

After this composition, we enjoy yet another just as fulsome in its expression. The Vals-capricho is an ebullient piece of semi-virtuosic salon music, certainly more digitally challenging than anything we’ve heard in the Spanish composer’s output so far. The performance is excellent, finding out the rather trite sentiment and its flashy expression, maintaining a steady pulse throughout, handling the right-hand flights in alt with obvious mastery.

But it’s about this stage that I started to wonder about the relationship between Gershwin’s brassy combination of Latin rhythms and jazz, de Falla’s ambivalent unhappy fusion of his country’s folk music with the effete ‘art music’ of his youth, and Vorster’s summertimes at home in South Africa. You might call it all holiday music, possibly: nothing heavy, most of it pretty skittish, a lot of it amiable and forgettable. And the vivacity keeps on coming with the two dances by Berners, the Polka a heavy-handed romp with a penchant for ending a phrase on an inappropriate note, but the atmosphere jaunty and vulgar in a 1920s style – impossible to imagine without its generic forebear in Walton’s Facade of nearly 20 years previous. Vorster sounds comfortable with the piece’s flourishes and loud peroration, but the piano sound is inclined to be harsh and jangly.

The Waltz is longer as well as more polished in its modulation scheme and shape. Vorster performs it with a liberal rubato and plenty of languid hesitations but the most interesting element lies in its irregular phrase lengths and the whimsical interchange of the anticipated with the eccentric. You wouldn’t call it a serious dance by any means but you are drawn in by its impetus and spiritedness. Both these Berners pieces are emphatically tonal; any of the contemporary experiments and rule-breaking that the composer would have been more than well aware of, considering his rich field of acquaintances, find no place in his own work.

You have to assume that the inclusion of Lennox Berkeley’s Six Preludes would be partly due to Vorster’s friendship with Michael Easton, a pupil of the venerable English composer. While you might find traces of holiday romps in Berners’ frivolities, these almost contemporaneous pieces have more gravitas to them. The first, Allegro, is a serious near-toccata with a continuous run of triplets underpinning the aggressive chords that constitute the central matter. As becomes the pattern in the series, the second prelude is much more relaxed in tempo, a slow-moving Andante, following a recognizable developmental path and staying within the rather sophisticated harmonic boundaries that Berkeley set himself.

No. 3 of the set, Allegro moderato, is the shortest and another busy construct, loaded with purposeful activity and clever in its progress, if not leaving much to roll around the tongue. The following Allegretto is a slow-moving waltz based on a simple enough melody memorable for a mid-motion demi-semiquaver snap, its evolution cloaked in a sequence of ever-mobile modulations; the whole finely realized by Vorster whose delivery is both deliberate and insouciant.

No. 5 is an Allegro whose outer segments appear to be in 7/8, the central page moving to a regular 6/8. The material is light-hearted at either end with a piquant, elliptical stepping melody that is subjected to less stressful handling than its predecessor. Finally, the longest of these preludes, another Andante, takes us back to the quiet and contemplative ambience of the other even-numbered pieces, serving as a rather sentimental envoi to the set, here handled with excellent suppleness. Berkeley’s work, more than anything so far on this album, might suggest the happy days of the performer’s youth, if one spent in elevated company.

An odd miscellany follows, starting with Field’s Nocturne No. 5 that is distinguished for its gentle charm and dexterous right-hand writing, Vorster takes his time over the fioriture but gets to the heart of the gentle sentiment that colours these two pages. He brings admirable breadth to Grieg’s Notturno, notably the concluding nine bars where he makes a good deal out of the composer’s sleight-of-hand coda. As well, you have to admire the precision of those quiet, exposed trills in bars 16, 19, 57 and 60.

We end in France, first with Debussy in slower-than-slow mode. Here, the rubato direction is employed fully and the interpretation is one of quite legitimate pushes and pulls, fits and starts, action and languor. Even if it was written as a benign satire, La plus que lente is a highly effective, moody score that oozes seductiveness, more persuasive than pretty much anything else in the belle époque‘s musical output. Poulenc’s waltz-song, originally to Anouilh’s words, has a genial spirit with a considerable sweep to it, but it seems to me to be indistinguishable from many others of its type. Further, its language smacks of the music hall and presents as simplicity itself when compared to its Debussy companion. As we’ve come to expect, Vorster’s reading is excellent: an enthusiastic rendition of a piece of fluff.

Ravel’s collection of eight waltzes is remarkable as an extended essay in pianism if unsettling in its juxtapositions of tonal high spirits and bitonal or added-note chords in eventually-resolved discord-to-concord movement. Each of the constituents, apart from the concluding Epilogue Waltz 8 which is a downward-looking Lent, passes by rapidly. There is a kind of contrast available – for instance, the stentorian call-to-arms of the first Modere – tres franc, followed by the 7th-rich ambivalence of the following Assez lent. But the impression is of studied cleverness in the clashing thirds and fourths that pepper the No. 4 Assez anime which in turn is set alongside the quiet appeal of the lilting pp and ppp calm of Ravel’s Presque lent No. 5.

I’m not much of a fan of the middle F Major (ostensibly) pages in No. 7 where the accents get displaced and the outcome is a blurred mess; not Vorster’s fault but a triumph of smartness over sense. Still, the final quietly resonant pages with their premonitions of Britten’s Moonlight interlude bring this odd, challenging miscellany to a cogent end. Yet, for the last time, I have to wonder how these off-centre waltzes put us in mind of holidays. To me, they anticipate the 1920 La valse which some see as a glorification of the dance form, while the rest of us find it close to a post-war nightmare.

Faintly bowing

cliveoconnell

TOGNETTI. MENDELSSOHN. BACH

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday, September 16, 2024

Einojuhani Rautavaara

First piece on the program for this latest ACO mid-tour appearance was not scheduled in the original material. Rautavaara’s Pelimannit – Fiddlers is a five-part suite for strings, fantasias on tunes by folk-fiddler Samuel Rinda-Nickola. This Opus 1 was originally a piano solo that the composer arranged for strings and it employs a good many fiedel techniques or – better – habits like no vibrato, flat-bowing, passages with unvaried dynamic and (I suspect but can’t prove) some microtonal output to establish roughness of group articulation.

The work was expertly carried off by the players, with an outstanding passage or two when ACO artistic director Richard Tognetti‘s violin shadowed the cello melody line of Timo-Veikko Valve – possibly in the second Kopsin Jonas movement – where the folk-music suggestiveness reached an apex; more convincingly than the strident sweeps of the suite’s outer movements where the ethnic flavours were slathered on. Naturally, what come to mind on exercises like this are the works of Bartok: the employment of national musics from across Europe in settings of folk tunes, if not the Hungarian master’s transmutation of such material into his own music.

In this arena, Rautavaara sounds dependent on the players’ vitality and community in combination more than making much of the melodies as subjects for treatment. In fact, my impression was that the variants didn’t travel very far from home-ground and the harmonizations were more intriguing for their timbral qualities rather than for any polyphonic interlacing. But then, the work comes from 1952, seven years after Bartok’s death and the composer was pushing his up-to-datedness hard at the age of 26 in an unadventurous environment. Still, Pelimannit enjoyed a performance that elevated the score to an absorbing level.

Adelaide-based composer Jakub Jankowski wrote his Ritornello to the ACO’s commission and the score is enjoying its premiere performances in this series. The score begins with gestures: all players extending their bows like duellists, swishing them, then a communal shout reinforced by a hefty foot stomp and the work proper begins with long, slow bands of sound that move into a melodic strand (a Ukrainian folksong, the composer claims). Several features struck me as original, like the harmonics produced on Maxime Bibeau‘s double-bass and a kind of orthodox tutti that seemed to me to be the ritornello itself. But the most novel sound came with a kind of regular one-note bouncing effect, thanks to some wooden comb-bows utilized by the performers.

Still, I’m probably all at sea about the ritornello source and character as the score carefully wound up its strands into a composite; e.g., those extended bow gestures being given to individual players who used them as directive punctuation points during the work’s progress. It is paying Jankowski no small compliment to observe that his score kept his listeners intrigued; not so much for the theatrics but for the exercise of tension and release, for the generous spread of sound-sources around the eleven participants, and by his afore-mentioned sense of shape, of formal probity.

We then experienced a Bach violin concerto, the BWV 1041 in A minor with Tognetti as soloist. I’ve not experienced the Bach recording of this, the E Major Concerto, the Violin and Oboe Concerto and the D minor Double Concerto that this violinist and his orchestra produced to significant acclaim in 2006. But this night’s reading was unsettling because of Tognetti’s interpretation which eschewed the bold strokes of most players and favoured a remarkably light right hand under which notes tended to disappear. I don’t mean tutti passages but solo-dominated sections where the executant is meant to administer a clear line.

So no soaring aspirations in this version which was equivalent to seeing through a glass darkly where all too often the progress of Tognetti’s voice drifted into inaudibility. Certain aspects of the supporting decet’s work also puzzled, like the sudden pizzicato that was employed once during the opening Allegro, and the vibrato-less chains of detached and continuous quavers that populate the middle Andante‘s length. Of course, this latter methodology gave the soloist a plain setting above which to outline the composer’s splendid arabesques. Again, reticence came into play and the movement’s emotional eloquence was ignored for a polite, unassuming series of statements, distinguished by an occasional rhythmic liberty amounting to a sort of slurring of a gruppetto.

The gigue finale moves too rapidly for much beyond slotting the notes into place but here again, the soloist was determined to be self-effacing. At bars 31-32, the semiquaver interruptions to the regular quaver set-up didn’t come as a relief but a faint set of quivers. As the movement bounced past, you looked in vain for any assertion of primacy in the top line; rather, Tognetti followed an eccentric path that dipped in and out of prominence, blending in with the ritornelli bursts but leaving even these pages to succeed by an inbuilt minor-flavoured vivacity.

After the break, we came back to a smaller ensemble for Anna Thorvaldsdottir‘s Illumine; the pairs of violas and cellos remained, as did the bass, but the violin forces were halved to Helena Rathbone, Anna da Silva Chen and Ike See. The briefest work programmed, this short nature (I believe) poem was meant to indicate a physical transition to light – or was it one solid movement from quiescence to enlightenment? Shuddering, slow bands of discordant (later, concordant) sustained notes, suddenly fore-fronted sounds yielding to complaining short scales, Bartok pizzicato snaps, finally a series of soft glissandi: it’s all there in an amiable compendium of technical tropes common to your contemporary writers. Will I want to hear it again? Probably not because I didn’t catch anything individual about it.

To end, we had more of the disappearing violin approach across Mendelssohn’s E flat Major Octet, one of the ACO’s showpieces. Tognetti and Rathbone divided the softly-softly attack style between them, with Ilya Isakovich and Tim Yu rounding out the requisite violin quartet. Here also, we met with the absence of a hero top line; rather, we were faced with one that was content to meld in with the ensemble, yielding place to anyone with a moderately interesting subsidiary contribution – just playing along with the gang. The first Allegro came into high focus for this approach as the lengthy exposition was repeated. Even the opening climactic points at bars 4 and 8, the sforzandi in bars 10 and 11: all were under-emphasized.

And the story continued through a shadowy interpretation of the Andante where the soft outline prefigured what was to come in the very light Scherzo. In this latter, miraculously deft movement, the emphasis on collegiality reached a new high; even that splendid counter-strophe that begins at bar 37 failed to rollick even subterraneously. Still, the sudden break into visibility that came with Stefanie Farrands‘ solo at bar 188 served to leaven the piano-to-pianissimo, leggiero affettuoso atmosphere that dominated proceedings.

Dynamically, the Presto conclusion gave us a relief from the soft-stepping of the preceding two movements with cellists Melissa Barnard and Valve making a welcome forte start to the composer’s opening fugato. Tognetti and Rathbone occasionally moved into a dominant role but my interest (when it was roused) fell on the violas and cellos who seemed to be straining against the bit, unleashing an impressive power and drive when exposed.

This was certainly the most polite version of Mendelssohn’s youthful masterpiece that I’ve heard; fit to be played at the British court of the composer’s time in its polite titillation and well-couched reserve. For all that, the QPAC audience sounded delighted with it. But these patrons were also more receptive than I’d expected to the Pelimannit and Ritornello excursions of the evening’s first half and at least two fellow-passengers on the train home declared their enthusiasm for the Icelandic writer’s exercise. As with nearly everything that the ACO brings to town, you could admire the ensemble’s overall achievement and its polish, but I missed the usual urgency and dramatic sweep that you usually encounter in readings of the two older works.

Diary October 2024

cliveoconnell

VIGNETTES

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Sunday October 6 at 11:30 am

The QSO’s Grand Panjandrum Umberto Clerici is guiding us through this French or French-connected set of scraps, with an emphasis on the saxophone, an instrument invented by a Belgian. This morning’s soloist will be Nick Russoniello who will front – inevitably, given this program’s nature – the Debussy Rhapsody for alto saxophone, written in 1911 with piano accompaniment, then orchestrated eight years later by Roger Ducasse. The only other element of the program featuring this instrument prominently is Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition where the second stop, The Old Castle, features a famous (alto) sax solo. Still, Clerici is conducting selections only from this showcase, so the odds of hearing this gem are about 15 to 1. Also in the allied rather than native-born genre will be Gershwin’s An American in Paris with its brilliant central blues and unintentional (one hopes) suggestions of a loud-mouthed tourist out of his depth. The event opens with a suite from Rameau’s 1735 Les Indes Galantes, hopefully (as footballers say) including that great finale Forets paisibles. Along the way we hear Les Gymnopedies by Satie – presumably all three. And the female-acknowledging extra will be the Overture No. 2 in E flat by Louise Farrenc, written in 1834. That’s an awful lot of playing to fit into a scheduled 70 minutes with no interval, but you’ll be charged from $76 to $109 full price, with various concessions (some of which are useful) as well as the usual outrageous transaction fee of $7.20 attached to every booking.

SOUNDS LIKE AN ORCHESTRA

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday October 11 at 11:30 am

Never too late to start. This program is aimed at children aged from Prep (Is it still called that? My younger granddaughter went through a process called Foundation last year, but that was in Victoria which might as well be a different country) to Grade 6. Conductor Jen Winley has a fair bit on her plate this morning but she’s being assisted by versatile composer/presenter Paul Rissmann and vocalist/educator Ashleigh Denning. First up is the first movement, Dance, from Coleridge-Taylor’s 1909 Othello Suite: a mildly ebullient excursion to get this familiarization process under way. The Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 5 in G minor is also fine, if not exactly calculated to enchant the target audience. For Oz content, we have Elena Kats-Chernin‘s Dance of the Paper Umbrellas from 2013 which exists in seven different versions and is perky enough in a Playschool minimalist manner to appeal to the most jaded of juvenile palates. Rimsky’s bumblebee enjoys a ventilation and the finale is the main theme to John Williams’ Star Wars music. Before that comes a Rissmann composition in Leon and the Place Between which will feature Denning as focal interpreter – a role that she has undertaken at previous airings of this setting of Angela Mcallister’s fantasy adventure. I can’t see anywhere else on the entertainment list where she could feature as well. Tickets are $35 straight, as far as I can tell; no card-use penalty added on.

This program will be repeated on Saturday October 12 at 10 am.

REEL CLASSICS

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday October 11 at 7:30 pm

All of this content is familiar and none of it comes from the John Williams era of composition for the screen, or soundtracks in a contemporary adolescent’s experience (or a young adult’s, for that matter). Conductor-host Vanessa Scammell brings in some adopted oldies, like the Intermezzo from Mascagni’s 1890 opera Cavalleria Rusticana, used in Scorsese’s 1980 Raging Bull film. She brings back Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette of 1872 which introduced Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV mysteries from 1955 on. But the rest is a sequence of memorable tunes. You have Henry Mancini’s subtle The Pink Panther from 1963; John Barry represented by both Born Free (1966) and Goldfinger (1964), both put in place by London-born arranger/orchestrator/composer Nic Raine; a selection from Elmer Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven of music of 1960 as well as Leonard Bernstein’s Times Square sequence from that golden oldie of 1949, On the Town. You can’t go past Harold Arlen’s even older (1939) Somewhere over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz in an arrangement by ‘Hurst’ (can that be the ABC’s own Michael?); nor can you get away from the Carousel Waltz/Overture (1945) by Richard Rodgers. Bernard Herrmann is represented by a little suite from his music for Hitchcock’s Psycho, which made 1960 memorable. And we can never forgive/forget Kubrick’s use of Strauss filius’ The Blue Danube for his 2001: A Space Odyssey; written in 1866, the oldest music on this program and, dare I say it, the best? All this is yours for $95 to $135 full price, with lavish concessions for students and children, worthless ones for the elderly, and the usual $7.20 overcharge for taking your money.

This program will be repeated on Saturday October 12 at 1:30 pm. Tickets here cost either $115 or $135 full price; the concessions comments above still apply, as does the loathsome supercharge.

ENSEMBLE Q & WILLIAM BARTON

Musica Viva Australia

Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University

Saturday October 12 at 7 pm

The country’s leading chamber music organization here presents Brisbane’s premier mixed ensemble; its nature is reflected in this program, as in everything it attempts. Didgeridoo master William Barton has become a familiar presence on concert platforms, playing others’ music but becoming more notable as his own composer. Tonight is the end of a fortnight’s tour for Musica Viva and the ensemble’s regulars take on a challenge, half the program devoted to works by its interpreters. They begin with Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles, derived from an earlier Musica ricercata (1953) for solo piano, here transferred to wind quintet: flute Alison Mitchell, oboe Huw Jones, clarinet Paul Dean, horn Peter Luff, bassoon David Mitchell. Then follows Paul Dean’s 2018 Concerto for Cello and Wind Quintet, fronted by Trish Dean with the oboe doubling cor anglais and the composer employing both bass and B flat instruments. The soloist also gets to star in the eloquent Brahms Cello Sonata No. 1 in E minor, eventually finished in 1865 and here arranged in 2007 for wind quintet and an ad lib double bass (in this instance, almost certainly Phoebe Russell) by German conductor and composer Heribert Breuer. Finally, Barton appears in his own Journey to the Edge of the Horizon, commissioned by Musica Viva for this tour. This involves all the night’s players and invites its listeners into the composer’s indigenous world-view, about which I know as much as most white Australians. Tickets range from $15 student rush to $115 full adult in the stalls. As far as I can tell, there’s no booking/transaction fee, which puts this organization in a class of its own.

CHAMBER PLAYERS 5

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio, South Brisbane

Sunday October 13 at 3 pm

Here’s another example of the QSO moving between the lines. All eight participants in this concert are cellists; I count seven in the orchestra list, but only six are specified in the material relating to this event. We have principal Hyung Suk Bae, Kathryn Close, Andre Duthoit, Matthew Kinmont, Kaja Skorka, and Craig Alister Young. No mention of Matthew Jones, who features in the QSO’s official cello line-up. And anyway, that leaves us one short. Whoever the lucky musician is, s/he/they will first off get to take part in what I assume is an arrangement of Grieg’s joyfully robust Holberg Suite; actually, I’ve found versions for five, six and twelve cellos, so there are certainly precedents. Popper’s Requiem follows, written for three cellos and piano (another un-named participant?), although I’ve also come across an orchestration of this one-movement work by the great 19th century Bohemian cellist-composer. A favourite encore for cello soloists is Faure’s song Apres un reve, which may or may not feature that spectral pianist, or it could be a solo with cello supporters rumbling underneath. Finally, we’ll enjoy Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1 – as the publicity has it, ‘reimagined’ – although, if the phantom pianist really is there, you might have . . . No, it’s the cellos’ afternoon and God knows the music is malleable enough. Tickets range from $35 to $59 with the QSO’s home-ground money-wrenching tax of $7.95 added on to every purchase.

INTO PARADISE: FAURE AND DURUFLE REQUIEMS

Brisbane Chorale

Brisbane City Hall

Sunday October 13 at 3 pm

This is a lovely idea: matching up the two top French Requiems in one program. There’ll be a few moist eyes at the end of Faure’s In Paradisum setting of 1890, but the Durufle 1947 work grabs me from the outset with its Requiem aeternam based on the unforgettable plainchant. Both operate on a non-histrionic level and register as spirit-centred rather than the usual Timor mortis conturbat me tenor of Berlioz and Verdi – even Mozart. And we have the recent memory of Musica Viva’s guests, the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, giving us the spartan choir+organ version of the Durufle to offer a comparison between the chaste all-male timbre and the more credible male-female complex. The two works will be conducted by the Chorale music director, Emily Cox, with venerable organist Christopher Wrench underpinning the process, while the Sinfonia of St. Andrew’s will probably provide smaller-scale accompaniments which exist for both works, although it seems to me that there’s a lot of leeway in the older work, thanks to the composer’s multiple over-writings and changes of opinion.. Soprano Sarah Crane and baritone Shaun Brown take part in the Faure and the Durufle, Crane shifting to mezzo for the latter. Entry ranges from $15 for children and students to a top of $55 for adults with some meagre concessions and a piddling, petty charge of $1.25 for each purchase.

RACHMANINOV’S PIANO

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday October 18 at 11:30 am

Well, you can’t expect the QSO to have imported an instrument used by the composer, can you? What they have in mind is an entertainment that features the Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, a work that these days depends for its reach on the 1996 film Shine, telling the story of David Helfgott. I think this work has now surpassed the once-inevitable Concerto No. 2 in C minor as far as regular live performances are concerned. It’s a cow to play but nowhere near as superhumanly demanding as the film makes out. Anyway, you can bet that guest Nobuyuki Tsujii will have it under control, even if he’s not recorded it. Continuing the obvious theme, the QSO under Eduardo Strausser (who, for a young conductor, will turn 40 next year) will perform Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 7 in C sharp minor. The composer wrote an alternate up-beat ending for this 1952 work in order to win a Stalin Prize but instructed that the original quiet finish should be substituted when the roubles were in the bag; as far as I can see, he didn’t win, in any case. But it’s a programming rarity, heard nowhere nearly as often as the Symphony No. 5 or the very popular and crisp Symphony No. 1. So good on (relatively) young Strausser for learning this work and giving it, the composer’s last in the form, a Brisbane airing. Full-price tickets range from $76 to $109 but a child can settle into a good seat for $35; as usual, you have to stump up QPAC’s $7.20 for dealing with your order.

This program will be repeated on Saturday October 19 at 7:30 pm with the addition of the Waltz from Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Sleeping Beauty, presumably to justify the hike in entry costs. Tonight’s full-price tickets move between $95 and $135; your child can get a poor seat for $35, but don’t forget that spirit-grinding surcharge.

RACHMANINOV SYMPHONIC DANCES

Queensland Conservatorium Symphony Orchestra

Conservatorium Theatre, South Brisbane

Friday October 18 at 7:30 pm

Continuing the Russian composer’s fortunate run of performances, the Conservatorium musicians, under an as-yet unknown conductor, is performing this masterful product of Rachmaninov’s final years in America. Despite the writer’s innate melancholy and gloom, this score radiates as much energy and spiritedness as the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with more than enough demands to keep what will be a large orchestra (including a big percussion group) operating at full bore throughout its three movements. Then, you can follow up yesterday morning’s reading of the Piano Concerto No. 3 from Noboyuki Tsujii with this evening’s interpretation of the Piano Concerto No. 2 from Reuben Tsang, a prize-winner at last year’s Sydney International and first place in this year’s Lev Vlassenko. The Rachmaninov double will be interleaved by works from Mozart and the Luxembourgeois/Australian near-recluse Georges Lentz who was highly favoured by Markus Stenz during his time as chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. This event takes your regular two hours including interval and you can gain entry for $45 full price, $35 concession, $25 for a student. As usual, it seems that there’s no transaction fee – a mark in favour of this institution’s fiscal responsibility in times of duress for us all.

MAGIC, MYSTIQUE AND MELANCHOLY

Southern Cross Soloists

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Sunday October 20 at 3 pm

For the most part, this exercise sticks to its last of focusing on the Belle Epoque and the Ballets Russe. The outlier is a new work by Perth-based writer Lachlan Skipworth that involves the talents of didgeridoo player Chris Williams who is the Soloists’ actual soloist in residence. From what I can make out, the score will be a collaboration between Skipworth and Williams in the best ‘what do you do with this un-notatable instrument?’ tradition. There will be a dash of Tchaikovsky with the Meditation movement from the 1878 three-part Souvenir d’un lieu cher violin/piano duet. For an epoque grounding, we’ll hear Saint-Saens’ Le cygne from the 1886 Carnival of the Animals suite; it will/should probably be expounded by a cello. More populism follows with Faure’s elegant Pavane, originally for piano, from 1888; then the composer’s 1898 Fantaisie competition piece for flute and piano. Further to the period comes Dukas’ showy Villanelle of 1906 for horn and piano. The afternoon’s most challenging work features last: Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka. I don’t know how this is going to be carried out; the original 1911 score requires a large orchestra and the 1946 revision isn’t that much smaller. There’s a transcription available of the original for symphonic wind band but most of the other versions are for piano solo, four hands, or two pianos. Perhaps here is where the concert’s two other soloists – violin Catherina Lee and trumpet David Elton – will feature, although it’s pretty obvious that Lee will forefront the Tchaikovsky scrap. If you’re under 30, you can get in for $35; if you have a concession card, you pay $73; normal price is a flat $88. Well, it’s not really flat as you’re lumbered, wherever you sit on the schedule, with QPAC’s $7.20 surcharge for attempting to support these players.

NOBUYUKI TSUJI

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday October 21 at 7:30 pm

A QSO guest performing the Rachmaninov D minor Piano Concerto a few days ago, Nobuyuki Tsujii here presents a recital that doesn’t appear in the orchestra’s schedule; so you’d have to assume that the real sponsor is QPAC on whose site I found this event. Not that the musician is casting a particularly wide programmatic net; for instance, he is opening with Beethoven’s C sharp minor Piano Sonata, the Moonlight. These pages are very familiar and you have to be something of a non-pareil to bring anything new to them. He then gives us a couple of Liszt works: the Consolation No. 2 in E Major (well, at least it’s not the following well-worn No. 3 in D flat) and the Rigoletto Paraphrase that focuses throughout on the Act IV Bella figlia dell’amore quartet and is a brilliant exhibition piece for anyone brave enough to enter its challenging cadenza-rich pages, Then follows the placid, ambiguous Pavane pour une infante defunte by Ravel, one of the composer’s best-known piano solo works. The evening’s novelty comes in Nikolai Kapustin’s Eight Concert Etudes from 1984 which are brilliantly voluble exercises in jazz/classical fusion: the sort of thing Gershwin might have written if he’d lived longer and heard more adventurous works. Kapustin has a keen technical insight into writing out what sounds brilliantly improvisational and he shows a mastery of the medium’s modes – cakewalk, blues, Michael Kieran Harvey-type toccata. It will make for a splendid finale to this otherwise predictable occasion. Mind you, there’ll be some trouble getting in: the performance is sold out, so all you can hope for are cancellations.

SOUNDS OF ITALY

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Friday October 25 at 7 pm

This recital opens the second round of the festival’s recitals with artistic director Alex Raineri playing an unusually smaller role in the six events, all of which are offering repeat performances, usually on the following day. Here, the 26-year-old Italian pianist Andrea Molteni – on a tour that takes in Western Australia, the ACT, and Sydney – is presenting an action-packed program that features music by Italian writers and some other works thinly associated with that country. For instance, he opens with Bach’s Italian Concerto; well, to be honest, it’s cast as ‘in the Italian taste’, isn’t it? And he finishes with Liszt’s 1874 Concert Fantaisie on Bellini’s ‘La Sonnambula’ which is something of an adoption rather than home-grown. Still, the body of his presentation is authentic enough. He is playing old Italian in a Scarlatti sonata: the G minor K. 30, known as the Cat’s Fugue. And then he focuses on two contemporary greats. First is Dallapiccola’s Sonata Canonica su Capricci di Niccolo Paganini in four movements that utilize seven of the supreme violinist’s caprices in a language that closes a gap between modernity (in 1943) and Scarlatti’s formalism, especially in the final E flat Major-tinted pages. And then appear two pieces by Petrassi: the 1933 Toccata which in its concise but episodic character mirrors the earliest formats of this type of work, rather than the all-in unstoppable thunderings of the composer’s contemporaries; and the Beckett-inspired Oh! Les beaux jours, the composer’s final piano product which appears to be a diptych composed across a 35-year gap. Entry costs $25 with a $1.99 surcharge, dedicated by the Humanitix booking agents to computer science classes.

This program will be repeated on Sunday October 27 at 10 am.

RENAISSANCE

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Friday October 25 at 9 pm

I’m not at all sure what to expect in this event. It presents as a solo violin recital from Julia Hill but there’s no indication of what she will be playing. The program refers to this player’s ‘touching story of recovery and resilience’, which suggests to me an illness or a breakdown, but references to any such crisis are absent on any of the many websites and accounts that focus on the young violinist. And then there’s the event’s title and that could mean anything from a spiritual awakening to a return to physical life. We know Hill is well-travelled, with an obvious penchant for Japan; she has also performed/studied in Switzerland, China and Singapore, thanks to several scholarships and a distinguished course of study at the Queensland Conservatorium. The only ‘dark’ reference I can find is to COVID, which curtailed a lot of Hill’s plans. Not only hers. Anyway, if you’re after a clean slate event where you go in knowing nothing and happy in anticipation, this is for you. Admission is $25 flat fee, with an additional Humanitix surcharge of $1.99 to subsidise books for schools.

This program will be repeated on Sunday October 27 at 12 pm.

PIANO ROOM

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Saturday October 26 at 10 am

This enterprise is sponsored by HOTA, Arts Queensland, and the Regional Arts Development Fund. As far as one can tell, the exercise au fond combines poetry, background music, and actual live-performed music. The last-named is provided by Corrina Bonshek and Liszt, the latter in the form of his Chasse-neige study, last of the Transcendental Etudes in the set of twelve published in 1852. As for the poetry component, that will be provided by Merlynn Tong. Bonshek has a four-part function: concept, composer, sound-art and collaborative direction.. Tong’s role falls under three headings: writer, voice actor and co-creator. We are blessed with an ambience designer in Tiffany Beckwith-Skinner, and James Clark (also known as Tonepacer) is the sound engineer for this project. In the middle sits pianist Roger Cui. Piano Room is by way of being a ;fever dream’ and we’ve all enjoyed one or twenty of those in our time. The whole thing reeks of the happenings of three generations past and its publicity suggests a surrender of self and critical faculty that I would find hard, unless Cui’s playing is sensationally good – which it may well be, considering his career and achievements so far. Tong is best known as a playwright and an actor but there’s no ban against expanding into verse. In the end, you get to enjoy a sensual feast with lots of manipulated sounds thrown into the mix. Tickets cost $25 with the customary Humanitix $1,99 charge going towards books for schools.

This program will be repeated at 6 pm.

PRELUDE, ELEGY, BURLESQUE

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Saturday October 26 at 12 pm

Two genuflections to tradition, then it’s on with the motley. This recital is being given by the Karlsruhe Concert Duo – cello Reinhard Armleder, piano Dagmar Hartmann – which has been in existence since 1998. The pair open with the G Major Prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1 as arranged by Moscheles for cello and piano; well, the keyboard part seems to be original and there’s an added cello melody on top. Happy but mindless. The duo moves to a cello/piano classic with Faure’s Elegie of 1880 which is well-worn territory. Czech writer Jindrich Feld‘s Elegy and Burlesque of 1954/5 follow; unknown territory to me but a bona fide cello/piano duet. Sadly, these musicians then opt for Part‘s 1978 Spiegel im Spiegel where minimal creativity is brought into play; but, my word, it’s very popular and subject to many performance combinations, of which cello and piano is a permissible one. Enter American bassoonist and composer Chuck Holdeman whose Karlsruhemusik Concert Piece, written three years ago, is here enjoying its Australian premiere; nothing seems to be extant about this score but you’d have to suspect that it was written for this lucky pair of executants. Back to the North for Rautavaara’s 1955 Prelude and Fugue for cello and piano; the trouble is that he composed two of them – their fugues based on the names of Bela Bartok (B-E-B-A), the other on the name Einar Englund (E-A-E-G-D). On to another Burlesque, this for the cello-piano format by Nikolai Kapustin from 1999 and packed with jazzy cross-rhythms and syncopations. Finally, the atmosphere drops markedly for Piazzolla’s Le Grand Tango which I, for one, have heard too many times. But at least you have the preceding Kapustin as a benchmark for what you can achieve with popular tropes. Entry is $25, with the Humanitix $1.99 impost for computer science classes.

This program will be repeated on Sunday October 27 at 4 pm.

WAYFARING

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Saturday October 26 at 2 pm

We have three soloists in this event, the constant fulcrum being the festival’s artistic director and pianist Alex Raineri who accompanies baritone Camilo Lopez and cellist Michael Gibson. Raineri enjoys one definite solo in Debussy’s La plus que lente waltz of 1910, before he accompanies Gibson in Webern’s Op. 11 Three Little Pieces for Cello and Piano from 1914. To conclude the recital, the pair play Ligeti’s two-movement Cello Sonata, finished in 1953 and redolent of his senior countrymen Kodaly and Bartok. In the exercise’s first half, Lopez sings seven Latin/South American songs, most of which I don’t know. Famous Mexican composer Manuel Ponce’s 1912 Estrellita is a familiar quantity but the rest are well outside my ken. First off is Cantiga en la distancia from 1946 by the Cuban Cesar Portillo de la Luz. Then we hear the 1982 Todo cambia by the Chilean expatriate Julio Numhauser, followed by Gardel’s El dia que me quieras, the Argentinian writer’s popular (so they tell me) sung tango of 1934. Next comes Ahora by Otilio Galindez, a Venezuelan countryman of Lopez who wrote this piece in 1978, and then another Argentinian in Carlos Guastavino and his lushly Romantic 1942 La rosa y el sauce. Finally space is found for Venezuelan Simon Diaz’s folk song Caballo viejo which became immensely popular after its publication in 1980. Linking both halves of the recital, Gibson and the hard-worked Raineri perform Gaspar Cassado’s 1931 encore piece Requiebros. As usual, tickets cost $25 for all comers, with a $1.99 for Humanitix to cultivate literacy skills.

This program will be repeated on Sunday October 27 at 6 pm.

FAIRY TALES

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Saturday October 26 at 4 pm

Finishing this segment of his festival, artistic director/pianist Alex Raineri performs a three-part solo recital. He opens with Ravel’s three-part suite Gaspard de la nuit of 1908, its first movement – Ondine – fitting well into the fairy tale scheme. Le gibet which follows proposes a desolate landscape on which is found a scaffold while a bell tolls incessantly in the distance. Scarbo is a goblin, a very active one and possibly malicious into the bargain; but the piano writing is intensely difficult and marvellous to experience. After this we hear a new work by Ian Whitney, here enjoying its world premiere. So far, no news about a title or any content; let’s hope Raineri is more informed than we are. Finally, the pianist performs Melbourne-based academic/composer Melody Eotvos‘ Piano Sonata No. 2, A Story from the Sand Dunes, written three years ago. and commissioned by Raineri. The piece takes its inspiration from a Hans Christian Anderson story concerning a shipwrecked baby who is of noble birth but lives his life as an adoptee fishing on the Danish shoreline.. This substantial sonata – about 25 minutes long – falls into five segments and speaks in a unique voice that suggests mobile power and emotional restlessness.

This program will be repeated on Sunday October 27 at 2 pm.

QSO FAVOURITES

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Sunday October 27 at 11:30 am

Eduardo Strausser is back to direct this catch-all miscellany that bounds across the orchestral repertoire with frolicsome abandon. To help him on his way, Ashleigh Denning puts in another appearance, following her participation in the QSO events on October 11 and 12 (see above), to host this entertainment. Our morning begins with Bernstein’s Candide Overture from 1956, one of the composer’s smartest and sassiest products gifted with a finely-spun love theme, Oh, Happy We, in the middle of the ruckus. Our own Elena Kats-Chernin comes up next with her Dance of the Paper Umbrellas recycled from the QSO’s October 11 concert (see above). Violinist Ein Na, the orchestra’s Young Instrumentalist Prize winner last year, fronts the Saint-Saens Introduction and Rondo capriccioso delight from 1863 (to be honest, I’d rather hear the melting Havanaise). The Beethoven Symphony No 7 from the fateful year of 1812 is programmed also, but surely not all of it in this 70-minute, no-interval program. Likewise, Tchaikovsky’s 1889 ballet Sleeping Beauty is also on the schedule, but that must refer to the Waltz only – another recycle from Strausser’s October 19 QSO concert. Balancing out the arthouse pretensions of Kats-Chernin’s frolic, we are treated to The Man from Snowy River music by Bruce Rowland for George T. Miller’s 1982 film of happy memory. For a rousing finale, what better than Sibelius’ hymn to freedom, Finlandia? Composed in 1899, this is the ne plus ultra in high-minded nationalism and makes a somewhat lofty companion to Rowland’s derivative sound-track. Full-price tickets cost between $76 and $109 but a child can get a good or a lousy seat for $35; other reductions are available for concessionaires and students. All will pay the QPAC fee of $7.20 for a richly over-funded accounting exercise.