Month: April 2026

Taut visions of the subconscious

cliveoconnell

DREAMS

David Joseph

Move Records MD 3479

If you try to find traces of Australian composer David Joseph‘s current activity, you’re pretty much pursuing a lost cause. As far as I can tell, he’s not writing or publishing anything but is living his life as a lawyer in Nunn St., Benalla, and what music is coming out in his name is already-achieved material. Such is the case with this current CD from Move Records. It comprises four works, all of them choreographic exercises although I believe that only one of them has actually been danced.

Further to this retrospective feature, all of the scores come from a limited period in Joseph’s compositional life. The oldest comes first: The Dream, written in 1986 for the Adelaide Chamber Orchestra and here performed at a live concert by that body (now defunct?) conducted by a long-time conductor for all seasons, John Hopkins who passed from us in 2013. Next is The Haunting, which was commissioned in 1992 by Paul Sacher for his Collegium Musicum Zurich, putting Joseph among a very distinguished company in having such a relationship to the Swiss billionaire. And just in time, too: this body was disbanded, after more than a half-century of activity, in that same year. This track is performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under the Anglo-Australian musician Roger Smalley (who also left us, in August 2015) and was recorded live at the Malthouse Theatre.

The Memory was commissioned in 1994 by one-time Song Company director Roland Peelman for the Newcastle-based Hunter Orchestra which I believe has disappeared from that region. This track also comes from a live performance given, I assume, in 1995. Finally, we hear Two Ballet Scenes that Joseph wrote for the Queensland Ballet in 1994, taking their source from Maeterlinck’s Pelleas et Melisande play. First comes By the Fountain, a scene where the lovers converse for the first time and Melisande loses her marriage ring when it drops into a well (not a fountain in the play or in Debussy’s opera). Then we hear the Act 3 scene where Melisande is combing her hair and, in one unforgettable orchestral gesture from the Debussy score, lets it drop from the window.

These two excerpts are performed by a body called the Broadstock Orchestra which I cannot trace at all. It might be connected to Brenton Broadstock, the former Melbourne University academic and composer; it might be an ad hoc body named in his honour. At all events, these live performances have no named conductor, no venue information and, for that matter, could have come from either 1995 or 1996 – the CD leaflet is unsure. Which makes me think we’re fortunate to have these tapes re-mastered before any further details lapse from living memory.

As for the music itself, most of it is complex, if not severely so to the point of impenetrability. But that’s to be expected in works that deal with the subconscious and its perception (or lack of it). The Dream opens with some phantasmagoric skittering wind passages that settle down to a long unison melody for strings and low woodwind, then high strings stand alone in fluent chordal progressions. But the atmosphere turns menacing and unsettled. Slow chords, wavering string duplets, isolated percussion notes all alternate to suggest instability, if not an outright threat.

Some patterns enjoy repetition; others come out of nowhere and disappear: repeated trumpets, a falling filled-in third for woodwind, wisps for strings followed by an Augures printaniers-style chugging, trumpets in the ascendant for a happy Turangalila-reminiscent moment, and much use of 2nds, livened up by some inaccurate brass chording. A central passage of frenetic activity is followed by shards of intersecting motion before a general pause and we move to a more placid stretch of sustained notes and trills. Then a kind of reversion to the opening takes place with broad strokes from the upper strings and a plethora of trills, notably from the brass.

The piece has its moments of nightmare juxtaposed with emotional plain-sailing, although the latter usually devolves into frenetic action very quickly. Even the final sound-planes and broad melodic strophes lead to an unsteady resting point of three chords that are slightly splayed in this performance. As a whole canvas, the work succeeds in depicting a sonority-rich landscape where an awful lot happens, while the dream it depicts presents as both disturbing and disturbed.

As expected, The Haunting bears a strong resemblance to The Dream but is a work with stronger definition in terms of rhythm and interwoven timbres. The block chords that dominate the opening pages completely, later the furious rushing scales from Joseph’s woodwind en masse, and a vehement bass underpinning all produce an accumulating tension that follows the earlier work’s narrative pattern – which, it seems to me, is based on spasmodic activity, prescient pauses and an instrumental stridency where blocks collide without yielding space, like the string body’s whirling pattern being cut across by trumpet-led brass chord-expectorations, over a sustained timpani roll.

Inevitably, you are impressed by the suitability of this score as a film accompaniment, probably for a graphic slasher movie. Joseph doesn’t put any limits on his aggression which continues for some time with downward rapid scales from strings and woodwind cut through by strident brass in repetitive two/three-chord punctuation, while every so often the smoky colour of a vibraphone cuts through. You get a sort of let-up at two-thirds of the way through, although what really happens is that the metre slows and the notes get longer. But dissonance is king in this series of short oases as Joseph moves into a planar model where you have time to appreciate the instrumental structure of his sustained, intensely strident chords, especially the chain of 27 that precede his final, soft farewell to this unnerving process – one that is expertly accomplished by Smalley and the MSO.

The composer views the third work in this triptych, The Memory, as the most abstract of them but it strikes me as being rooted in something closer to the everyday than its companions. It’s still hard to make links or connections between its constitutional elements although I think the task would be easier in studying this score, if you had the ability and inclination. For one thing, it proceeds in a series of aphorisms, brief outbursts separated by silences that make the content apprehensible. In fact, it’s only at about the three-quarter point that you come across a sustained utterance.

The other characteristic is its pace which, because of the general pauses, impresses because it gives the mind time to absorb. As well, Joseph suggests the everyday intentionally, even if you have to enter into a kind of modern-day Impressionist ambience; you can hear birds, traffic, crowds, although I think he’s stretching it by proposing clouds as a musico-pictorial effect – but then I never believed in the efficacy of Debussy’s nocturne. So, it’s odd: the composer pushing the immaterial character of this work that is suggestive – admittedly, only in part, and perhaps, only to me – of our real lives.

The two Pelleas et Melisande pieces serve as flavoursome vignettes to finish, the first flute-dominated at its opening while the Window scene is led by the strings into an irregular song-like lyric which eventually sounds out clearly, emerging as lucidly as it’s going to get toward the piece’s end. The performance from the Broadstock body is eloquent and clear-cut, the ensemble coping with some hefty post-flute solo writing in the fountain/well scene where the content moves from picturesque to a substantial commentary on humans attempting to interact in the Belgian dramatist’s labyrinthine emotional field.

Joseph’s voice has been one of the more interesting to hear in the Australian musical world over the last thirty years and this collection of works for reduced orchestral forces sets his individuality in high relief, particularly when the CD’s major orchestral offerings are set alongside the vapid effusions we have become accustomed to hearing (and tolerating) from writers with no knowledge of or background in the historical practices of their art. He might be mystifying in his intentions, startling in his ferocity of utterance, and inviting his listeners on a confrontational path, but Joseph maintains his focus and holds your attention across the span of these well-resurrected scores.

Diary May 2026

cliveoconnell

BEETHOVEN, MOZART & MORE!

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hanner Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Saturday May 2 at 7:30 pm

You’ve got Beethoven and Mozart; how much more can you stand? Yet again, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra plays some substantial works complemented by a few fragments as make-weights. British conductor Chad Kelly moved to this country five years ago with a glowing reputation in opera and early music; he played with Solomon’s Knot, for God’s sake! So we are anticipating some highly refined period output in works like CPE Bach’s Sinfonia in D Major of 1775 (well, the first movement of its three) and the Curtain Music/Tune from Locke’s incidental music for a 1674 production of The Tempest; this extract depicts the storm raging as the play begins. Kelly conducts two symphonies: Haydn’s La Passione No. 49 in F minor of 1768, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 in D Major of 1801 – brilliant and buoyant music from a time when the composer’s deafness was becoming more pronounced. As for the Mozart content, that takes the form of the 1783 Horn Concerto No. 2 K. 417 from which we all know the Rondo, if not its precedents. Soloist here will be MSO principal Nicolas Fleury, an able master of this temperamental instrument. Standard seats cost between $75 and $127; concession holders can revel in tickets a whole $5 cheaper; children get in for $20. Every order attracts a $7 transaction fee; can’t wait for the day when that rip-off device is thrown out.

A truncated version of this program will be repeated on Monday May 4 at 6:30 pm in the Quick Fix at Half Six series. The Haydn symphony and Mozart’s concerto will be omitted.

LEONKORO QUARTET

Melbourne Recital Centre

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Monday May 4 at 7:30 pm

Here comes another ensemble that’s completely new to me. But then, the players in the Leonkoro Quartet have only been together since 2019, even if they have won a number of awards since then, a few of which mean something in the grand scheme of chamber music operations. The group’s name comes from Esperanto and it means ‘lion heart’ – a choice that could be courageous or weird, depending on your appreciation of English kings. The players – violins Jonathan Schwarz and Emiri Kakiuchi, viola Mayu Konoe, cello Lukas Schwarz (yes, top and bottom are brothers) – begin with Dutch pianist/composer Henriette Bosmans’ highly neglected String Quartet of 1927. We then hear Mendelssohn No. 2 in A from exactly a century earlier and through which the shade of late Beethoven looms large. To end, the Leonkoros bring out the big guns with Schubert’s Death and the Maiden in D minor from 1824. They don’t come any fiercer than this intensely moving masterpiece which engrosses the listener across its 40-minute length. Tickets range from $79 to $139 full price; middle-of-the-road seats go for $20 less if you’re a concession holder; Under 40s can get into the cheaper sections of the hall for $49. And everybody pays the peculiar MRC ‘Transaction Fee’ of anywhere between $4 and $8.50 per order online or by phone. I’d be tempted to avoid this by showing up at the box office on this night; currently, only half the stalls have been sold.

SIDE BY SIDE: MELBOURNE YOUTH ORCHESTRA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 7 at 7:30 pm

Yet another operatic grab-bag up for inspection here with members of the Melbourne Youth Orchestra playing alongside Melbourne Symphony Orchestra professionals in support of three soloists from the Melba Opera Trust. Most of the program is familiar, even to those of us who eschew the delights of opera. The combined orchestral forces under Nathaniel Griffiths take on the Overture to Verdi’s Nabucco of 1841; the Intermezzo (depicting the heroine’s journey to imprisonment in Le Havre) out of Puccini’s first success, the 1893 Manon Lescaut; and the Galop infernal that brightens up Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld from 1858 and which made the Moulin Rouge dancers semi-immortal. As for sung excerpts, soprano Sophie Blades and mezzo Chloe James collaborate in the Flower Duet from Delibes’ opera from 1882, Lakme; Blades treats us to the brief O mio babbino caro that momentarily stills the mayhem in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, finished in 1918; and James takes on the taxing Una voce poco fa which introduces the heroine Rosina in the second scene of Rossini’s brilliant The Barber of Seville of 1816. James continues along the popular trail with the Act 1 Habanera that brings to the stage the heroine of Bizet’s Carmen from 1878, after which baritone Lachlan Higgins enjoys his first outing with more Barber in the title character’s opening self-introduction, Largo al factotum. Blades moves away from the well-known with Rose’s What Good Would the Moon Be from Weill’s 1946 Street Scene, then Higgins presents the Papagena! solo that brings a welcome dose of comic humanity to the Masonic pretensions of Mozart’s The Magic Flute – his last opera, written in 1791. This event runs non-stop for 75 minutes and tickets are a uniform $35 with the customary MSO $5 reduction for concession-holders, never forgetting the $7 ‘transaction fee’ for coping with the mysteries of your credit card.

OVERGROWN PATHS

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday May 7 at 7:30 pm

You can’t mistake one of the components on this program from the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra. Janacek’s two-volume piano collection On an Overgrown Path, written between 1900 and 1911, is rarely heard entire, and that observance fault will continue this evening as the MCO is playing selections only from the Daniel Rumler arrangement for string orchestra which also, in its original form of 2017, involves texts by the Israeli writer Maia Brami. Australian actor Helen Morse is scheduled to read the prefatory sonnets that Vivaldi wrote for his The Four Seasons, which concertos from 1718-23 conclude this program with director Sophie Rowell handling the solo violin part. Morse is also taking part in a work by London-based writer Libby Croad: the five-movement Portraits of 2020 which also have prefatory poems by Eleanor Percy (this can’t be the 16th century Duchess of Buckingham, can it? Perhaps it’s the American 19th century writer Eleanor Percy Lee?). Not the whole work (of course) but more selections. So possibly Morse will be giving us some of those Brami poems during the Janacek. All of this will be prefaced by Wolf’s Italian Serenade, which is a stand-alone, non-poetry-accreting piece for string quartet, arranged by the composer for string orchestra in 1892. As usual with some organizations who perform at this venue, ticket prices are labyrinthine in their details. Normal tickets cost between $75 and $150; concession prices are $15 to $20 cheaper; full-time students and children can get anywhere for $30; Under 40s get access to the poorer seats for a flat $40; group bookings of ten or more are a whole new ball-game. Whatever your stratum, you’ll fork out between $4 and $8.50 for ordering online or by phone because somebody has to pay for the over-stretched MRC accounting system.

This program will be repeated on Sunday May 10 at 2:30 pm.

BEETHOVEN’S GHOST

Musica Viva Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday May 12 at 7:30 pm

It seems like a random grouping but the three artists involved in this Musica Viva Australia recital have well-established links – just not all together. Pianist Aura Go has collaborated with cellist Timo-Veikko Valve for quite a few years. She has also performed with violinist Kristian Winther. So that link should guarantee the success of this amalgam, right? We’ll see. These musicians are bookending their program with masterpieces of the piano trio format. As a casual observer could predict from the night’s title, they begin with Beethoven in D, the Ghost, published in 1809 and never out of favour since. To end, we hear the vibrant Ravel of 1914; in duration, probably the most substantial offering of the evening and a gift for Go in particular. In between the males come two female writers. First is Lili Boulanger’s D’un soir triste, the French composer’s last completed piece of 1917-18 and originally scored for violin/piano duet although the first performance I can find was given as a piano trio with the composer’s sister Nadia playing piano. As well, there’s a new commission (from Musica Viva, you’d assume) by University of Melbourne lecturer Melody Eotvos; perhaps a successor to the composer’s Sericulture of 2016 but I can’t find any mention of anything definite online. Adult tickets cost between $65 and $163, with deductions of between $12 and $18 for concession holders and students; Under 40s pay $49, while Under 18s pay $20. There’s no mention of the online booking fee of between $4 and $8.50; Musica Viva might be showing the way to everybody else. Or was it just an oversight?

CZECHMATE – MEETING AT THE CROSSROADS

Melbourne Recital Centre

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday May 15 at 6 pm

This is a run-straight-through hour’s worth of Baroque music-making from a new group – CzechMate – filled with senior musicians who specialize in period performance. These are two violinists in Czech national Helena Zemanova and our own Julia Fredersdorff, home-grown dulcian expert Jane Gower, and Danish harpsichord master Lars Ulrik Mortensen. As for their offerings, they are currently nine in number. We hear Sonatas 9 and 10 by Dario Castello, published in 1621 and employing all four players; Giovanni Battista Fontana’s Violin Sonata II, which I assume is the D Major from the composer’s 1641 collection of 18 Sonate; the 1657 keyboard Toccata VII by Michelangelo Rossi; a brace of ricercars from Diego Ortiz’s Trattado de Glosas, published in 1553 and which all appear to be written for the bass viol; Sonata 19 by Francesco Turini, which I assume is one of the trio sonatas that might have been published in 1621; then Johann Balthasar Erben’s Sonata sopra ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la which seems to be pitched in B flat and is another trio sonata, probably from the mid 1650s; a sonata a tre with prime place for Gower appears in Philipp Friedrich Buchner’s Sonata 8 published in 1662; and we end with the euphonious-sounding Johann Heinrich Schmelzer and his Polnische Sackpfeifen; yet another trio sonata, his No. 10 published between 1682 and 1688, imitating the unforgettable sound of Polish bagpipes. We’re assured of a wild, unstructured musical escapade as these early Baroque writers cavort intellectually and emotionally all over the place; maybe, but the music on paper looks well-organized to me. Tickets are $55 flat, with a $10 concession discount. You also have to pay the MRC’s transaction fee of somewhere between $4 and $8.50 if you order online or by phone; the recital is being held in the Salon, so there’s not much choice in the matter.

STRING SPECTACULAR

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday May 16 at 7:30 pm

Concertmaster of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Natalie Chee takes the reins for this program which will end with one of the fundamental masterpieces for string orchestra: Tchaikovsky’s Serenade of 1880 which still manages to test its executants’ balance of timbre and dynamic. As an opening gambit, Chee leads her forces in the brief three-movement Mozart Divertimento K. 136 in D, written in 1772 when the composer was 16 and already producing those superbly shaped melody lines that make the products of his peers sound vapid by comparison. Another delight from the string orchestra repertoire comes with Grieg’s Holberg Suite, written in 1884 for piano solo but arranged for the larger force a year later. It’s hard to imagine it as a keyboard work, so accustomed have we become to the rich bellyfuls of string output from its Sarabande and Air, and the sprightly momentum of its outer movements. As a nationalistic nod, we’re to hear Ella Macens‘ The Lake in its 2019 format rather than the original for recorder, cello and chamber organ of a year earlier. Amiable and soulful, the Latvian-Australian writer’s piece sits contentedly in G Major and, alongside its rich divisi scoring, holds solo lines for Chee and whoever is playing principal cello tonight. Standard tickets range between $57 and $105; concession holders are charged $5 less while, if you’re under 18, the fee is $20. And don’t forget the MSO’s $7 fee if you book online or by phone; probably unavoidable, more’s the pity, as the event is selling well with only a little over 160 seats left at the time of writing (April 18).

MASS OF DELIVERANCE

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Sunday May 17 at 12 pm

Dan Walker is an Australian composer, conductor and performer, and I’ve never heard of him. Others have, clearly, because (a few members of) the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and its Chorus are presenting his 2014 Mass of Deliverance which asks for 8-part choir, piano, brass quintet and percussion. From what I’ve read, the work lasts about half an hour, and so this 60-minute program is being fleshed out by two other choral works. One is John Rutter‘s Gloria of 1974 which calls for roughly the same instrumentation and choral forces as Walker uses, apart from an organ substituting for the piano and some soprano and alto soloists in the middle movement. Also, it has to be said, Rutter’s setting leaves out quite a bit of the text set down for your everyday Mass. But the Australian writer deliberately pays homage to the British master in his choice of forces – and probably in other ways as well. Between these two pieces, the Chorus will sing another work by Rutter: his ‘Hymn’, which I presume refers to the Hymn to the Creator of Light from 1992 to texts by Lancelot Andrewes and Johann Franck for double SATB choir; it is, in effect, another Gloria. The concert will be conducted by Warren Trevelyan-Jones, director of the MSO Chorus. Standard seats range from $57 to $105; concession holders pay a whopping $5 less; children under 18 get admission for $20. Everybody will pay an extra $7 for ordering by phone or online; you could risk fronting up just before midday but there are only about 140 seats available currently.

GRAN PARTITA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Sunday May 17 at 6 pm

A little later on this Sunday, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra appears in partial form again for this chamber music recital comprising two works only. But the concert has an interval so you’d have to think that the scores in question are substantial. Well, the MSO winds begin with the Wind Sonatina No. 1 by Richard Strauss of 1943, subtitled From an Invalid’s Workshop. This calls for 16 players: pairs of flutes, oboes, and bassoons; three clarinets and a bass clarinet with a basset horn for a fleshy middle to the texture; a contrabassoon, and four horns. This lasts over half an hour but its three-movement stretch is good-humoured and far from realizing any morbid suggestions inferred from the auxiliary title. Then comes the 1781 Mozart Serenade No. 10 K. 361, the Adagio of which featured so strongly in the Forman film Amadeus when Salieri first comes across his colleague’s music. This asks for 13 musicians: pairs of oboes, clarinets, basset horns, bassoons, as well as four horns and a double bass. And it lasts for about 50 minutes – Gran in the sense of substantial and in running through seven movements. Not all of it is as inspired as that miraculous third movement yet the work is a brilliant melange of textures and an organizational marvel. The MSO’s principal oboe Johannes Grosso and its principal clarinet David Thomas share directorial duties. If you want to hear these works, you pay between $57 and $105; concession holders have to stump up $5 less; if you’re under 18, you get in for $20. All bookings attract the MSO’s $7 transaction fee but you might gamble on getting a ticket on the night at the box office; there are over 200 still available.

VOICES BETWEEN WORLDS

Flinders Quartet

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Monday May 18 at 7 pm

After some personnel jolts and jumps, the Flinders Quartet has settled into a steady composite: violins Elizabeth Sellars and Wilma Smith, viola Helen Ireland and cello Zoe Knighton. Now 26 years old, the ensemble maintains two founding members in Ireland and Knighton; both violinists have been constants in Melbourne’s musical life for many years. These musicians are presenting three works with distinct characteristics. Melbourne writer Nicole Brady‘s Ricochet is a straight string quartet, commissioned and performed by the Flinders ensemble in 2024 and, in its slightly more than ten minutes’ length, it lives up to its name, the material/note-stabs bounding between the interpreters to disorienting effect. We’ll also hear Ravel in F Major from 1903, one of the semi-modern foundation stones of quartet writing. The evening’s surprise comes with Eric Avery‘s Wirringintungiyil, here receiving its ‘premiere’. The composer is a Ngiyampaa, Yuin, Bundjalung and Gumbangirr man from New South Wales and his piece is a lullaby which he has previously performed with his father on didjeridu while he himself played violin and sang the original melody. I’d assume that this new version involves the Flinders people and so might be more sustained than the barely-five minutes of the earlier duo rendition. It’ll need to be if the two hour scheduled duration of this event is to be realized. Tickets cost $55, with concessions $10 cheaper. And the Recital Centre charges you between $4 and $8.50 for booking online or by phone – a fee you will probably have to meet because the Salon has limited seating.

INTERWOVEN

Australian String Quartet

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday May 21 at 7 pm

This body has also been through some drastic changes in participants over the years but seems to have settled on its current population: violins Dale Barltrop and Francesca Hiew, viola Chris Cartlidge, cello Michael Dahlenburg. Can’t remember if I’ve heard them in this format; the last time I encountered the Australian String Quartet was probably four years ago in a room attached to the State Library of Queensland but have no memory of Cartlidge. Anyway, these musicians are presenting four disparate works tonight from all over the repertory shop. We begin with a piece of Australiana (of sorts), a score that gives the occasion its title and which was written by Elizabeth Younan in 2017, then revised in 2019. The composer is (still?) pursuing doctoral studies at the Juilliard and has garnered prizes from here and in America. Her quartet is in three movements, written to disparate commissions. Next comes Haydn Op. 20 No. 6 in A, the last of the 1772 group that set the composer up as master/creator of the string quartet form. After interval comes the second of Prokofiev’s two quartets, written in 1941 at a wartime refuge and using Kabardino-Balkar folk tunes, as directed by a government official who clearly thought it a fine idea to respect the culture of that autonomous republic. Finally, the group plays Clara Schumann’s Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann: her last piano work and given to her husband on his last birthday with the family in 1853. These seven variations are based on the No. 4 Albumblatter 1 from her husband’s Bunte Blatter collection and have been set up for string quartet by that fertile arranger, Eric Mouret. A standard ticket costs $95, concession price $75; Under 40s pay $40, students cough up $15. Everybody has to find the $4-to-$8.50 transaction fee imposed by the Recital Centre money-changers if ordering online or by phone. There are currently over 300 seats available in the stalls (I think the circle and wings have been closed off for this event), so it might be worth your while showing up on the night and being a real nuisance by paying cash.

GREAT PASSIONS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 21 at 7:30 pm

These particular passions are Russian ones but not the Tchaikovsky/Rachmaninov/Rimsky types of white-hot Romanticism. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra‘s chief conductor Jaime Martin will take his colleagues through Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4 of 1935-6. The composer was engaged with this large-scale work when the infamous Stalin-endorsed Pravda attacks on him began in January 1936 and the first performance was deferred until 1961, well after the homicidal dictator’s death. The forces required to handle this symphony are impressive, notably in the number of strings – at least 64, at best 84 – and it is emphatically loose-limbed throughout its powerful three movements; settle in for a Mahler-length construct, one that you’re not likely to hear again for many years. Prior to this symphony, Serbian musician Nemanja Radulovic will be soloist in the colourful Khachaturian Violin Concerto of 1940. A feast of Armenian lyricism, this work was very popular here (and everywhere else) in the 1960s but I can’t recall a recent performance beyond the recording that James Ehnes made with the MSO under Mark Wigglesworth twelve years ago. At all events, it’s a soloist’s showcase and is apparently a signature piece for Radulovic, even if he hasn’t managed to persuade a company to let him record it. Above all, it offers a splendid contrast between a composer who stuck by his own truths (if in private) and another who gained Party approval for this attractive sample of populist art. Standard tickets cost between $75 and $139, concession prices are $5 cheaper, Under 18s pay $20. Everybody has to find the MSO’s $7 transaction fee if ordering online or by phone; according to the MSO website, there are 100+ seats available in all three divisions of the hall, which seems like an unlikely spread statistically. But it’s up to you if you want to call their bluff and show up on the night, cash in hand.

This program will be repeated on Saturday May 23 at 7:30 pm.

SCHUBERT’S FANTASY AND OCTET

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday May 23 at 7:30 pm

Here’s another program with only two works, only this time they’re by the same composer. For reasons best known to himself, the Australian Chamber Orchestra‘s artistic director Richard Tognetti has seized upon Schubert’s late Fantasy in C of 1827, a substantial continuous seven-‘movement’ work for violin and piano, arranging it for members of his ensemble – the same ones who will later participate in the much longer Octet of 1824. This latter will involve violins Tognetti and Helena Rathbone, viola Stefanie Farrands, cello Johannes Rostamo, bass Maxime Bibeau, with three guests for the wind parts: clarinet David Griffiths bassoon Todd Gibson-Cornish, and horn Carla Blackwood. The Octet holds six movements and lasts about an hour, nearly all of it a melodic delight up to the unexpectedly banal final Allegro – but then, by that stage, I’ve usually had enough of what is often a duet for violin and clarinet. No idea what the Fantasy arrangement will be like; the piano part will resist any sort of realignment from the opening tremolo backing, through the Impromptu-reminiscent Andantino variations and that melody’s Allegretto return just before the final scramble, not to mention all those contrary motion passages that scream out for one-person control. Tickets fall between $49 and $166, concession rates for middle-of-the-range seats are $10/$11 cheaper, Under 35s pay $35 for mediocre-to-poor places, while full-time students get to the same sites for $30. I thought we’d avoided a transaction fee but there is one: $7. Trouble is there are about 60 seats left in both stalls and circle/wings so gambling on getting a place on the day is far from a sure thing.

This program will be repeated in Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne on Sunday May 24 at 2:30 pm and in the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre on Monday May 25 at 7: 30 pm.

TOUR DE FORCE #2

Corpus Medicorum

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Sunday May 24 at 5 pm

Melbourne’s doctors and ancillary staff are at it again as the Corpus Medicorum presents its second program for the year under the direction of Fabian Russell. This enterprise is one that raises funds for the treatment of lung cancer at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, which sets it apart from most other enterprises gracing the Murdoch Hall. The players begin with a foxtrot from venerable American composer John Adams: The Chairman Dances. This was extracted from the composer’s Nixon in China opera and dates from 1985. Its distinction is that it calls for a massive percussion section; I counted 18 separate instruments, not including piano and harp. Soloist in Mozart’s luminous Clarinet Concerto of 1791 is Frank Celata, for over thirty years associate principal with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and a real acquisition as guest artist for the Corpus. Finally, the performers take on Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances from 1940, the composer’s last major work and somewhat nostalgia-driven with quotes from a few previous compositions in the two outer movements. Again, you need quite a few percussionists to handle this score, although I can only see ten separate instruments alongside piano and harp. Don’t know about you but I find this the most engrossing of the composer’s symphonic works, particularly its jubilant finale. Ticketing is simple: standard $70, concession $40, student $30. And there’s the sliding transaction fee from the MRC of $4 to $8.50 for booking online or by phone. Currently, a third of the seats have been sold, so you could probably gamble pretty safely on getting a ticket at the venue.

THE LIVING TRADITION

Selby & Friends

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday May 28 at 2 pm

This time, Selby & Friends brings to the table (or desks) two familiar faces from previous excursions, as the President would say. Alongside the founding luminary of this enterprise, pianist Kathryn Selby, we are to hear violinist Alexandra Osborne, associate concertmaster of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and American cellist Clancy Newman. The recital reaches its climax with the melody-rich, confident Piano Trio No. 1 in B flat by Schubert of 1827-8; it’s hard to think of another score in this repertoire which fills the ear so fully and with so many rewards for performers and audience. As a series of prefaces to this lengthy masterwork, Selby and her guests play an Elena Kats-Chernin piece: Variations on Schubert Trauerwaltz (which I assume refers to the well-known A flat Op. 9a No. 2). This score offers two variations: a big one of about 4 minutes, and a mini of 45 seconds; you can play them in any order (of the two possible). Fanny Mendelssohn’s 1846-7 Piano Trio in D minor follows: four movements of surging lyricism in its outer movements and refined contentment in its middle, the whole running for about 25 minutes. Last in this group are Beethoven’s Kakadu Variations, originally from 1803 but revised in 1816 and possibly revisited eight years later. With ten variations in all, the final two sound incongruent with their predecessors but it’s always worth the 18 minutes or so that it lasts to watch the composer build some mini-mountains and a concluding alp on the slightest foundation. Standard admission is $89; concession and full-time students $20 less; Seniors get in with a $12 reduction. You also have to find cash for a Transaction Fee which, for a standard seat, is $7 if you book online or by phone. As the event takes place in the small Salon, there’s not much choice but to pay up.

This program will be repeated at 7 pm.

JAIME CONDUCTS DVORAK, SMETANA & COLL

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 28 at 7:30 pm

Here’s something of a change back to the tried and true for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra whose programs get more singular and innovative as the years move on. The organization’s chief conductor Jaime Martin gets star billing here as he conducts a sort of overture in Smetana’s 1874 Vltava, still popularly known as The Moldau and one of your great pre-cinema documentary scores tracing the path of a Czech river from its spring sources to its junction with the Elbe, proposing plenty of graphic scene-painting along the way. After interval, Martin directs the Dvorak Symphony No. 7 in D minor, written in 1885 and slowly gaining a concert hall place despite the overwhelming popularity of the composer’s Symphony No. 9 which sounds bombastic when its outer movements are put alongside this more refined product. For a concerto, we’re offered the premiere performance of a piano concerto commissioned by the MSO. This has been written by Francisco Coll, a Spanish composer/conductor and trombonist who has been awarded several prizes in his home country and the United Kingdom. Soloist in this new work will be Russian/American Kirill Gerstein, last seen here in a 2024 recital tour for Musica Viva although he did appear with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2019. Now it’s Melbourne’s turn; lucky us. Seats cost between $51 and $139; concessions are the usual lavish $5 cheaper; children pay $20; everybody pays the MSO’s $7 transaction fee for booking online or by phone. As I said up the top, can’t wait for the day . . .

This program will be repeated on Friday May 29 in Costa Hall, Geelong at 7:30 pm and on Saturday May 30 in Hamer Hall at 2 pm.

An uneasy (partial) listen

cliveoconnell

THE WELL-TEMPERED CLAVIER

Judith Lambden

Move Records MCD 667

Rather than loading up reviewers with the full 5-disc set of this exercise, Move Records have sent us the first disc only in the series, which takes in the first twelve preludes and fugues of Book 1 in Bach’s monument to adjustable temperament. I don’t know whether this is a case of economy (the rest of the CDs are available on request) or compassion; after all, it’s a substantial task to listen through the whole 48, even if such an effort is good for the soul and serves to pay due respect to the performer.

I’ve heard one previous all-Bach recording on Move from Judith Lambden. It dates from 2021 and comprised the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, the Italian Concerto and four of the seven keyboard toccatas: a welcome variety in content and form. But this Well-Tempered Clavier performance is a much more concentrated experience, even if the various pairs involved are – to some extent – common currency among pianists/harpsichords today.

Most of us have experienced these pieces in fragmentary form – as components in examination material or as instances of form in musicological investigations. Some musicians will have investigated the two volumes out of curiosity (possibly, a delighted form) at Bach’s endless facility for invention of the highest order. I’d suggest that quite a few keyboard players enjoy certain specific preludes and often their partner fugues more than others; in my lengthy exposure to them, I can count some favourite pairings on the fingers of one digitally semi-amputated hand.

But that’s as a player and substantiates the tedium of studying a piece under compulsion. In the realm of entertainment, the fugues have an emphatic cerebral attraction, primarily in seeing the work that the composer put into manipulating his initial material. Many of the preludes hold little interest, which may be due to over-familiarity, but that’s an unfair complaint and completely irrelevant to Lambden’s achievement which, we are informed by the Move publicity machine, is the fruit of nine years’ preparation and recording.

And it’s not the case that Bach’s compendia are solely useful for educational purposes. I’ve some memories, necessarily faint because they date back to October 2008, of the Canadian Bach specialist Angela Hewitt playing Book I in Melba Hall for Margaret Farren-Price’s Impresaria organization. Mind you, my main recollection is of the gleeful spitefulness from some audience members who detected a fault in one of the later fugues but, if that’s your level of insight after what was a dazzling demonstration of intellectual concentration, it would have been best to keep mouths shut. Sadly, they didn’t.

It’s not as though Lambden is lacking significant predecessors in recording the 48. Glenn Gould, Edwin Fischer, Wanda Landowska, Andras Schiff, Sviatoslav Richter, Rosalyn Tureck, Ton Koopman, Daniel Barenboim and Roger Woodward are only a handful of names in that long list of exponents who chose to put down their versions of these volumes for general delectation. I suppose that Lambden too feels that she has something individual to add to our experiences of this massive construct.

No surprises (are any possible?) with the C Major Prelude; Lambden avoids the ticking-clock approach for a more elastic mode with two points of slight rallentando and a realization of the piece’s climactic at bars 28-9. With the fugue, we are made aware of the subject entries in all four voices by the pianist’s practice of slowing the pace so that the first four notes are crystal clear. Still, while the performer takes care to point up some entries more than others, your sense of coherence is not challenged and it’s novel to hear a reading that pays as much attention to the tenor as to the soprano.

In the C minor Prelude, the toccata approach is muddied by some irregularities where Lambden doesn’t stick to the regular pattern but indulges in occasional blurring or note-clipping. As well, she has some sustained carry-over in the three single-strand bars 25 to 27 which are usually carried out with a love-’em-and-leave-’em touch; and the following Presto doesn’t live up to its name. In the following fugue, my only question is with some crotchets that aren’t sustained – hit well enough but left by the wayside, e.g. the alto crotchets in bars 10 and 11. But Lambden’s approach here, especially near the opening, is full of a welcome lightness that sometimes nears staccato.

I didn’t find the C sharp Major Prelude over-convincing because it came over as awkward with too many moments where fluidity of utterance disappeared, e.g. the left hand work from bar 47 to bar 53 and the subsequent recovery of tempo when the hands’ material is reversed. Again, this fluctuation in speed turned to an asset in the long fugue during which Lambden handled with warmth the middle section with its multiple double-sharps while pointing up some pivotal modulations with some slight pauses-for-emphasis.

No significant problems with the C sharp minor pair. Lambden made a feature of pausing slightly on the initial half-way point of the opening bars but started to distribute her emphases more equitably in the prelude’s second page, again finding a steady fluency in the soprano line whose dominance enjoys only one real challenge and that comes in the concluding five bars. I don’t think you can do much with the five-voice fugue except ensure that the simple subject gets prominence whenever it rears its head. Here again, the entries are handled with flexibility and only rarely do you sense the piece’s polyphonic weight (e.g., bars 99 to 100) as Lambden outlines the intermeshing strands with deliberation but little Romantic heft (apart from that tempting bass C sharp in bar 73).

Some clumsiness marred the delivery of the D Major Prelude with quite a few noticeably clipped notes in what is an evenness study for the right hand and which here started out as if to meet that requirement. As well, Bach’s concluding flurries for both hands – bars 29 to 32 – are treated as spasmodic bursts with interspersed pauses for regrouping, rather than the pell-mell rush that I think they represent as a lead in to the bar 33 cadenza-like flourish. I’ve not heard the fugue treated like this before where the subject’s semiquaver components are treated like demi-semiquavers, a practice that turns this already jumpy construct into a series of unexpected jerks. Does it work? Sort of, but you miss the magisterial progress counterbalancing the theme’s initial flourish/motif.

Lambden makes a better fist (or two) of the D minor Prelude, maintaining her tempo despite some uneven right-hand delivery points on the second page, then making the odd choice to sound the original’s sustained soprano D in the last bar’s first chord. Still, she does the same at the end of the fugue which progresses well enough apart from a pair of laboured alto/tenor trills. You are, by this stage, continuing to welcome the pianist’s intention to keep the polyphony clear but this lucidity can result in momentary digital strain as Lambden avoids employing one of the modern instrument’s greatest gifts: the sustaining pedal.

You encounter a deft example of this artist’s limpid approach in the E flat Major where both prelude and fugue enjoy room to breathe but with few indications that the performer is under stress, least of all in that long prelude with its sudden move to a kind of alla breve before taking up the initial motion fifteen bars later. No surprises of any moment crop up in the E flat minor Prelude – a sterling instance of Bach introducing us, through a slow-moving pavane in 3/2 time, to a key that we’ll encounter rarely on our various paths through Western musical practice. Then the D sharp minor fugue gives us a taste of the inversions, augmentations, cancrizans – the whole panoply – that eventually hit us centuries later with Webern. This makes a fair temperamental pairing in Lambden’s reading which is well-defined with a sense of exploring the strands that coalesce across this contrapuntal marvel.

A gentle amble through the E Major Prelude further exemplifies this artist’s undemonstrative mode of interpretation before an unexpectedly strict reading of the companion fugue which follows its inexorable path, leavened by some unexpected false relations. You get the mildest of emotional contrasts between the opening 22 bars of the E minor Prelude and that subsequent shift to a presto which, in this case, doesn’t send the blood racing. But you couldn’t ask for a more transparent texture than that offered in the fugue which sounds like a particularly spartan invention, accounted for here with a digital idiosyncrasy and dynamic balance.

A further instance of clumsiness comes with the F Major Prelude, another two-part invention which should sail past with even flutters but on this occasion is laboured, the trills in both hands clearly a trial to integrate into the piece’s movement, while the alternation of material between the lines is not deftly integrated. Fortunately, the kindly three-voice fugue that follows enjoys more fluent handling, even if much of the ornamentation distracts as it interferes – albeit slightly – with the work’s rhythmic consistency.

I’m sure there must be a reason why Lambden keeps on repeating the usually-sustained bass C across bars 17 to 21 of the F minor Prelude but that is a minor issue when you face yet again the problem of hard-fought ornamentation. By this stage you’re tempted to say that, if a mordent interferes with the music’s performative logic, leave it out; leave them all out! The second page of this piece proves to be much more enjoyable; in my Henle edition, there are no ornaments. It’s whipping a dead horse to note that the only real flaws in the F minor Fugue come when Lambden slows down to negotiate a trill, notably one introduced into bar 55 – just when the work was proceeding steadily.

You can’t doubt the performer’s sincerity in this exercise and the intense labour that has gone into the recording. But it makes for an often uncomfortable listening experience, chiefly because the disc shows effort of delivery on nearly half its tracks. In the end, for me, this Well-Tempered experience is unsettling and uneven.