THEREMIN & BEYOND
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne
Sunday May 18, 2025
Carolina Eyck
This was an afternoon full of listening material, some of it worthwhile, most of it entertaining. But it did come down to a case of special pleading for guest Carolina Eyck‘s specialization: the theremin. The Australian Chamber Orchestra‘s artistic director, Richard Tognetti, has taken on board some unexpected colleagues, like oud master Joseph Tawadros and accordion guru James Crabb. But Eyck’s is a pretty obscure sound-maker, even if it pops up in unexpected places – or sounds as if it does, as in the original Star Trek title music where the actual sound you hear on top is a soprano.
I’ve had to learn to distinguish it from the ondes Martenot that Messiaen uses to devastating effect in his Turangalila-symphonie; still, to my increasingly useless ears, both instruments sound remarkably similar. Does the thremin have a masterpiece like that to boast of in its catalogue of works? It seems not, but Eyck made something of a case for its use as a solo by performing a welter of scraps from the serious to the popular, with a few touches of humour along the way; never a bad thing in this context.
Throughout the program, the ACO presented some chamber works without Eyck, beginning with an extract from Brett Dean‘s Short Stories of 2005. This was the fourth of the set, Komarov’s Last Words, referring to the Soviet cosmonaut who died re-entering Earth’s atmosphere in 1867 – the first casualty of the space race. It’s a fast if not furious piece which somehow manages to suggest nervousness, fear and strong resignation all at once. Somehow, this linked in with Glinka’s The Lark, part of the composer’s A Farewell to St. Petersburg song-cycle of 1840 in which Eyck came to the fore playing the melody line, with pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska providing some punctuation from the florid Balakirev transcription.
So far, so fair. Eyck produced a gentle version of the sung line, which served to underline the instrument’s inbuilt limitation of producing one note at a time. Then, Tognetti started his strings on the Air from Bach’s D Major Orchestral Suite (c. 1730), the one on the G string. After the opening strophe, Eyck joined in on the repeat and stayed a constant, playing the top violin line with no little grace and a few traces of the theremin’s glissando trademark effect..
For the last part of Offenbach’s Overture to his highly successful opera of 1858, Orpheus in the Underworld – the Can-can – Tognetti and his strings (with the aid of percussionist Brian Nixon) gave a fair simulation of the dance’s energy, even if we missed the brass timbre when the piece’s broadest theme breaks out at the key change to G Major. As well, at about this stage, you came to appreciate just how few of the ACO force were on board: five violins, pairs of violas and cellos, and one bass.. Yes, you can’t doubt the ability of any ACO member but both here and later on you felt the lack of weight in the ensemble’s output.
Anyway, this Galop infernal led into its parody by Saint-Saens in his 1886 Carnival of the Animals; the Tortoises, to be precise, where both Cislowska and Eyck figured. We also heard The Elephant, Aquarium and The Swan, all of which found the theremin taking pride of place or sharing the honours with the original front-runner (e.g. Maxime Bibeau’s bass dealing with the pachyderm). Still, my attention was taken more by Cislowska’s handling of the piano part across these extracts which proved as atmospheric and broad-beamed as the original’s two piano contribution.
It’s also worth noting that all four of these pieces from the suite are slow-moving and well-suited to the theremin’s ability to outline a top solo part with elegance. Much the same came just before interval with Miklos Rosza’s Spellbound Concerto, sourced from the 1945 Hitchcock film’s score which did use a theremin. So we came to a non-arranged work at last, even if the composer’s lush Hollywood score was presented here as a pallid reflection of its original full-bodied amplitude, and at half the original concerto’s length with an over-emphasis on Eyck’s instrument at the expense of Cislowska, the work’s real soloist.
Preceding this reminiscence-laden offering, the ACO played Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet of 1924. These dances come from the pen of a young man intrigued by the wrong-note high-jinks of Les Six; the sore is dedicated to Milhaud. And the whole is clever and spiky as Schulhoff moves from waltz to tarantella with a deft mixture of vigour and not-too-serious eroticism. When the Signum Saxophone Quartet played the final three of these pieces here last week, I noted that you missed the bite of the original’s strings; now, I’m not so sure as the ACO players moved through this score with a fluency that flattened out its acerbities.
Straight after the break, we moved into our times with a vengeance. beginning in 1993 with Jorg Widmann‘s 180 beats per minute for string sextet where the young composer played a few amiable games with rhythmic displacement in an unpretentious jeu d’esprit. Much the same could be said of Holly Harrison‘s Hovercraft, commissioned for this tour and giving Eyck space to show off those special effects, like rapid glissando loops and burps, that make up part of her instrument’s reputation for special effects on film-tracks. This proved to be a clever example of scene-setting, the title mechanism’s swoops and starts (not to mention its periods of stasis) mirrored in this new score.
Moving back in time a shade, the ACO gave a hearing to Yasushi Akutagawa’s Triptyque for string orchestra, written in 1953 before the composer struck up his friendships with several Soviet writers, including Shostakovich and Kabalevsky. At this stage of his career, his compositions were competent, slightly British in sound as though he were a member of a colonial school like Australia or New Zealand. As far as I could tell, traces of his own country’s background were few and far between. But this comes from somebody who knows nothing of this composer’s later work which could have taken a huge turn after his time in Russia.
From here on, proceedings took an idiosyncratic turn in that we were confronted by Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee from The Tale of Tsar Saltan opera, premiered in 1900. Naturally, Eyck took part in this, though not taking on as much of the buzzing as expected. But it was a remarkable demonstration of her deftness, particularly her right hand which determines pitch in the distance between her hand (or her body) and the instrument’s circuitry.
Then it was one thing after another. We all enjoyed Alexander Courage’s theme music for Star Trek, its raciness enhanced by Dixon’s backing, and memories of the three-handed (Eastwood, Van Cleef, Wallach) stand-off at the climax to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly 1966 film of Sergio Leone reared up in response to Morricone’s tense underpinning for this The Ecstasy of Gold scene. Somewhere along the way came Eyck’s own composition Oakunar Lynntuja (Strange Birds), the first of her Fantasias for Theremin and String Quartet from 2016; this left not a rack behind in this memory – too little, too late.
We endured a pretty lengthy handling of the 1966 Brian Wilson/Mike Love collaboration, Good Vibrations, here enriched by a true theremin rather than the electro-cousin/bastard used in the original recording. Again, Eyck’s timbre dominated this version, somehow reinforcing its association with the counter-culture at work in the naïve United States of those distant years.
As you can see, this was an exhausting collation, yet the mainly elderly audience enjoyed it, if an air of relief permeated Hamer Hall when familiar melodies emerged from the mix. Added to which, Eyck has a quiet personal charm that made her explanations and illustrations useful and entertaining. The instrument is a curious one and this musician’s handling of it quite exceptional. Yet you can understand why it wasn’t taken up by the electronic music laboratories and workshops that sprang up – for a while – when Stockhausen & Co. emerged to brighten up our lives with their mid-20th century experiments.
O'Connell the Music 