OUR CLASSICAL FAVOURITES
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Saturday February 8 at 7:30 pm
Back again for another year’s endeavours in combat against the rising tide of growing irritation with high culture, the QSO goes for the popular jugular with this collection of chunky clunkies. Rather than make the audience sit through the whole thing, conductor Benjamin Northey and his musicians sweep straight into the concluding Galop from Rossini’s William Tell Overture of 1829 – the Lone Ranger bit for an audience who doesn’t know what that means. Graeme Koehne‘s Forty reasons to be cheerful fanfare follows, written for the 40th anniversary in 2013 of the Adelaide Festival Centre and comprising 7 minutes of confected jollity. A well-known lump from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet of 1935 emerges: the Dance of the Knights with its clever fusion of pomp and bounce. We calm down for the Nimrod dirge extracted from the 1898/9 score of Elgar’s Enigma Variations, then turn elegant for Faure’s 1887 Pavane. Raise your beers (or rums) for Bernstein’s 1944 On the Town Overture which gets off to a splendid start but moves into sentimental weltering all too soon. Two of the QSO’s principals, harp Emily Granger, and flute Alison Mitchell, combine for the middle movement of Mozart’s concerto for their two instruments, written in 1778 during his 7-month stay in Paris – an unfortunate residence that saw his mother die in that city. The program’s other soloist, violinist Eric Kim, is a Year 12 student who won last year’s QSO Young Instrumentalist Prize; here, he’s up for Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen showcase of 1878. The soulful Adagio from soulless Khatchaturian’s Spartacus ballet of 1956 takes us into a branch of the USSR’s post-Stalin encounters with Hollywood kitsch. Then the Russian dance theme continues with the Pas de deux from Act 2 of Tchaikovsky’s 1892 Nutcracker ballet, based on that memorable descending major scale motif. A little bit more Bernstein (and choreography) with the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (all of them? That’ll be the longest item of the night), assembled in 1960, three years after the musical’s premiere. We wind up with the Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 5 from the 1869 Book I collection. Standard prices range from $100 to $140 with the usual derisory reduction for concession holders, students and children coming off much better. The QPAC booking fee continues to impose itself this year operating at the higher level of $7.50.
This program will be two-thirds repeated on Sunday February 9 at 11:30 am. Northey and Co. leave out the Faure, both Bernstein works, and the Brahms. Tickets for adults cost between $80 and $115, the same comments on ticket costs made above still applying.
MAX RICHTER WORLD TOUR
Queensland Performing Arts Centre and TEG Dainty
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Monday February 10 at 7:30 pm
Probably everyone in the audience knows more about this composer than I do because my only exposure to his ‘work’ has been via a re-composition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons: those defenceless and evergreen violin concertos in no apparent need of reorganization. Max Richter is presenting extracts from his album The Blue Notebooks and his latest product – In A Landscape. I’ve listened to a few extracts from both and wonder how much simplicity (or simple-mindedness) we can bear before mental implosion. You could have a few laughs at Michael Nyman tracks in the good old days when tolerance was easier to exercise. Even listening to the cyclical deserts provided by Philip Glass could keep you involved for all of three minutes at a time. But a whole two hours of Richter would turn an inquiring brain to distraction, especially one that has any acquaintance with compositional practice over the past century. The composer will be escorted along his way by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble which is, in this format, a string quintet with two cellos. If you want to hear this concert, you’ll have to wait till next time because tonight is sold out – just like Taylor Swift, although the Concert Hall only offers 1800 seats maximum.
This program will be repeated on Tuesday February 11 at 7:30 pm. This is also sold out.
CLERICI & SCHAUPP
Queensland Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University
Friday February 14 at 11:30 am
This program is notable for a few elements. The most significant would have to be the world premiere of Gerard Brophy‘s migrating with swallows, a guitar concerto to sit alongside the composer’s Concerto in Blue of 2002. As you can guess from the concert’s title, the soloist will be Karin Schaupp, empress of guitar at the Queensland Conservatorium. It’s splendid to be hearing from Brophy, one of the few survivors of a highly creative epoch in Australian music-making. Bringing up the rear comes Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor which is a marvel of innovation in a tight form and one of the composer’s most athletic creations. To begin, Umberto Clerici and his orchestra play Anahita Abbasi‘s why the trees were murmuring which involves an improvising trombone and two spacialized ensembles. Written in 2020, this score by the Iranian composer now based in San Diego is going to present local audiences with challenges, especially given the prominent solo trombone role and the preponderance of percussion which seem to make up the two different groups that are spatially separate on either side of the orchestra. I can’t see any connections between these three works but is anybody meant to? If you want to get in, the full price ranges between $99 and $140, with students and children getting in for $49 and $35 respectively. Because the event is held at the Con, there’s no sign of that annoying extra charge for handling your credit card.
This program will be repeated at 7:30 pm.
AN EVENING WITH JOSEPH KECKLER
Opera Queensland Studio, South Bank
Friday February 14 at 7 pm
Here’s another one of those oddly non-specific presentations by the state opera company. Joseph Keckler is an American singer/speaker with a wide range – vocally as well as aesthetically. You can enjoy a foretaste of his work on YouTube where the narrator skills are quite evident. I don’t think much of his compositional style, if you can centralize such a concept. It occupies that well-trodden land where consonance is king and progressions take their time; rhythmic patterns are predictable and anything but angular; melodic matter has moved no further than the Romantic era. Will Keckler be accompanied by ambient pre-recorded tape or Alex Raineri’s piano or a chamber ensemble complete with synthesizers? None of this is even suggested on the OQ publicity material. Nor is anything made clear about exactly what he will be singing, although you’d have to assume it’ll be sourced from his previous work, rather than something original, and you can find examples of that on the singer’s own website – if you’re prepared to pay. Speaking of which, tickets are $65, with a ludicrous reduction for concession card holders and students of $6, but there doesn’t appear to be a booking fee.
This program will be repeated on Saturday February 15 at 2 pm.
SINGAPORE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Sunday February 16 at 3 pm
The Singapore Symphony Orchestra has been in existence less than fifty years, which is surprising given the nature of that city-state’s background and ambition. Here it is, at the fag end of its Australian debut after presenting concerts in Sydney and Melbourne which consist of the same program items as are being mounted here. I thought that I would know by sight some of the orchestra members, possibly a couple of graduates from the Australian National Academy of Music, but not so: there are no familiar faces to be found at the orchestra’s on-line home-page. Artistic director/conductor Hans Graf begins with a piece by 25-year-old Singaporean writer Koh Cheng Jin: Luciola singapura which was commissioned and performed by the Singapore Symphony in 2021. This work celebrates the discovery of a new bioluminescent firefly and features a role for the yangqin (a dulcimer), which instrument the composer herself plays (but will she be doing so tonight? Nobody specific is listed on the participating personnel). After this flurry of nationalistic fervour, we settle into the solid Western tradition with Brahms’ Double Concerto Op. 102, the violin soloist Chloe Chua and the cello soloist Ng Pei-Sian, this latter being the SSO’s principal. After interval comes the gloom-to-grandeur sweep of Tchaikovsky’s E minor Symphony – always a rewarding showpiece for its executants, notably the first horn at the start of the second movement. Tickets are going for between $69 and $146 full adult with a miserable reduction for concession card holders and the usual unjustifiable extraction of $7.20 for all that difficult credit card-use office work.
BRAHMS & BEETHOVEN
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Monday February 17 at 7 pm
In existence slightly longer than the Singapore Symphony, the Australian Chamber Orchestra is this year celebrating 50 years of existence, 35 of them with Richard Tognetti as King of the Kids. To give the opening concert an extra-auspicious aspect, he will take the lead in the Brahms Violin Concerto: an unmitigated joy from first bar to last and gifted with the most exciting and luminous violin writing in all such concertos across the Romantic era. Just as pleasurable will be the Tognetti experience, chiefly because of his ability to find new facets in familiar diamonds; I have rich memories of his outstanding interpretation of the Dvorak concerto many years ago with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. To balance this, we hear the Beethoven Symphony No. 7, the ardent A Major which I don’t believe the ACO has recorded. But you can be sure there’ll be surprises in shaping, rhythmic emphasis and attack as this dynamic warhorse is dusted off. To hear these two big-frame works, you have to pay between $85 and $167 if you’re up for full adult admission. By some computer crack-up, you can get a $10 concession discount, but no such luck if you’re a student or Under 35: Box Office says Full Price for these last two. That can’t be right, surely. In any event, you have to pay the disturbing QPAC cover-charge, slightly increased this year to $7.50.
THE RITE OF SPRING
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Thursday February 20 at 7:30 pm
It’s a great ballet and a fulcrum in Western serious music. Also, it’s one of the few pieces of 20th century creativity that musicians know bar by bar. For all that, I must have heard it countless times in concert performance but have seen it danced only once, and that an amateur performance that did little credit to the dancers or the unhappy choreographer. In this version from the QSO under chief conductor Umberto Clerici, we get a new visual experience, provided by Circa, Brisbane’s own contemporary circus group that I last saw cavorting through Gluck’s Orpheus for the state opera company. I suppose the troupe might be able to make some relevant acrobatic commentary on Stravinsky’s work that deals in complex tribal dances and climaxes in a self-willed human sacrifice. To give this epoch-marking score a contemporary companion, we’ll hear, as an opening to the concert, Debussy’s Prelude a ‘l’apres-midi d’un faune’, Written in 1894, it was taken over by Nijinsky as a (mainly) solo display of his skill in 1912, a year before he assumed the choreographer’s role for Stravinsky’s ballet. In the middle of these masterworks, violinist Kristian Winther takes on the solo line for Respighi’s Concerto gregoriano of 1921, which uses (obviously) Gregorian chant for its basic material. This is a true rarity; I can only recall one previous performance of it, headed by Leonard Dommett over 40 years ago, before he left Melbourne after his stint as concertmaster with the MSO. Full adult tickets range from $120 to $140, with a $20 reduction for concession card holders, and the usual rate of $49 for students and $35 for children – but you still have to pay the QPAC $7.50 fee for daring to darken the Concert Hall portals.
This program will be repeated on Friday February 21 at 7:30 pm, and on Saturday February 22 at 1:30 pm.
CELEBRATE!
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Sunday February 23 at 3 pm
Vienna, city of so many dreams and multiple nightmares, gives us a focus for this opening 2025 foray from the Soloists with Mozart and Johann Strauss II leading the way. Soprano Alexandra Flood, well-prepared for this afternoon following her time with the Wiener Volksoper, takes centre-stage for two Mozart pieces: Ah se in ciel of 1788 to a Metastasio text, and Un moto di gioia which replaced Venite inginocchiatevi for a 1789 production in Vienna of The Marriage of Figaro. The Strauss excerpts kick off with the Emperor Waltz of 1889 as arranged by Schoenberg in 1921 for piano, string quartet and flute. Then Flood takes on the Laughing Song, Mein herr Marquis, from Die Fledermaus of 1874, and (you’d hope) Voices of Spring from 1882 which has an optional soprano part. In the middle of this program we hear Beethoven’s 1800 Septet for clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello and double bass; it’s a serenade that proved very popular in the composer’s lifetime, much to his chagrin. As for the program’s opening, that is a new work for didgeridoo and (unspecified) ensemble by American-based Leah Curtis and Chris Williams, permanent artist in residence with the Soloists. Williams is the only musician who is certain to appear, but I’m not sure that the organization can mount a full body for those Strauss pieces untouched by Uncle Arnold. Adult tickets go for $90, and there’s a concession rate of $80 while Under 35s can get in for $40 for 90 minutes’ worth of uninterrupted music – so the group will be playing the entire Septet. Please don’t forget the compulsory $7.50 requisition by QPAC for taking your money.
O'Connell the Music 