TOGNETTI. MENDELSSOHN. BACH
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.
O'Connell the Music 