cliveoconnell

Pleasure regained

May 15, 2025May 28, 2025 cliveoconnell

THIS MIRROR HAS THREE FACES

Selby & Friends

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday May 13, 2025

Kristian Winther, Kathryn Selby, Clancy Newman

One of the grievous losses about moving to the Gold Coast was the loss of Selby & Friends recitals; you can hear the various combinations in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, even Bowral, but crossing the Tweed has never been part of the organization’s reach. And a great consolation in leaving behind the Not-Too-Deep North’s sybaritic delights is a reacquaintance with Kathryn Selby‘s mobile set of musicians and the assurance that the high quality of these events has not diminished in the interim.

Selby is the fulcrum pianist for this annual sequence of five programs that usually follow the piano trio format and, for this Tour No. 2 in 2025, her associates were violinist Kristian Winther and a long-time favourite of these events in cellist Clancy Newman. The latter I remember seeing several times before leaving Melbourne and being favourably impressed by his enthusiasm and reliability. Winther was a constant presence up to his departure from the Australian String Quartet in 2014 under unsettling circumstances. Since then, his career has remained a series of sporadic appearances in my experience, but clearly the years have been kind to him as he’s playing with the same vivid personality and skill as he showed ten-plus years ago.

Selby encourages her colleagues to share in the introductory talks that have become part-and-parcel of chamber music recitals over the years. Sometimes these can be excruciating because of personal awkwardness or lack of preparation. Newman’s had a layer of personal interest as he introduced Lera Auerbach‘s Piano Trio No. 2 – Triptych: This Mirror Has Three Faces (which may be the case, even if the work holds five movements). This work was written in 2011 and was commissioned by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and the Weiss/Kaplan/Newman Piano Trio; the cellist has been asking Selby to program some Auerbach and here she has obviously succumbed.

This score from the Russian/American writer makes an arresting opening with some powerful piano output, and its progress can be traced from moderato to allegro even if the harmonic language remains unsettlingly familiar and confrontational in turn. The composer tends to play through from one panel into another as the several facets (of one person? of three?) that distinguish the construct’s intellectual process are mapped; fortunately the central waltz gave us a fulcrum to work with as the various personality idiosyncrasies of this venture piled up on either side.

As far as I could judge, the final adagio sounded the most substantial of the movements: a spacious postlude that brought to a simpler ground all the compositional complexities that preceded it. But Auerbach’s score is intriguing, even in the abstract; we don’t know what to look for in her mirror, whether the five panels (two exterior, three interior – it’s a triptych, after all) hold a common thread, if the images presented are personal or generic. At the end, it retains its stolid mysteries and, for this listener, it was worth hearing. Which you find hard to say after many another (near-) contemporary composition.

The players then moved to surer ground for their elderly audience through Schumann and Smetana. With the Czech master, you have no choice: he wrote only one, the draining G minor commemoration of his eldest daughter Bedriska’s death. As for Schumann,, you have a choice of three, with No 1 in D minor almost always the one that ensembles pick to display their talents. It’s been a long while in my experience since No. 3 in G minor has been played live, so full marks to Selby and her partners for giving it an overdue airing.

For all its unfamiliarity, Schumann’s opening Bewegt makes a compelling argument with a notably compressed set of materiel sources spiced up by unexpected touches as in a couple of Brahms-like hemiolas before the exposition ends, and a marked lightening of the atmosphere towards the end of the development where the atmosphere thins out to fragments and pizzicato. These players, however, appeared engrossed in the movement’s assertiveness and closely-knit temper, Selby having the most to contribute; at a few stages, she would have benefited from a brief fermata to regroup, but both strings powered forward.

Schumann’s piano part has less to offe4r at the start of the following langsam pages, which begin as a benevolent string duet, finely executed by both these executants with a sense of real reciprocity in their linear entwining. Selby entered the argument with something more than simple chords four bars before the Etwas bewgter direction when the keyboard serves as both protagonist and support. Despite an infusion of welcome placidity at either end of this section, the action in these central pages impressed more because of the amplitude on show, the performers fully invested in the abrupt shift to dynamic motion.

You could have asked for more more contrast in the scherzo, especially at the arrival of each trio in C Major and A flat Major, but they seemed of a piece with the rather hefty approach to the main repeated segment which took the Rasch direction as involving punch alongside the requisite rapidity. Both this movement and its predecessor impress as brief intermezzi, compared to the trio’s discursive bookends, but their pairing is yet more evidence of Schumann’s emotional versatility. When it comes to the Kraftig finale, we appear to be in a much more monochromatic landscape where the ebullient main theme is worked into the ground with restatement after reiteration, albeit consistently optimistic. You find few surprises in these pages beyond the sudden appearance of a rapid violin A Major scale 12 bars from the end, and the dominance of the piano contribution which acts as a doubling agent for much of the movement’s progress and in which role Selby excels.

After interval, we heard the Smetana trio which is well-trodden territory for Selby throughout her career across several distinguished trio combinations. Still, there are plenty of potholes along this score’s path; I may be partial but it seems to me that most of them lie in wait for the pianist, thanks to some pages of Liszt-style virtuosity. As well, you encounter swift changes in temperament that test the adaptability of all performers.

Winther took us all on board with the famous G string solo that sets the trio on its tempestuous path. Even more than with the Schumann interpretation, this treatment impressed for its determination in the clinches and the alternating lissomness of line in passages like the Alternativo 1 which in one page moves from insouciance to high-strung elation. Mind you, the tension was high from the start with Selby eventually exploding in bar 17 where the keyboard breaks free from its accompanying function.

Some moments linger in the memory, like Newman’s eloquent statement of the noble second subject in this first movement at bar 43, followed by Selby’s transformation of the first motif across bars 53 to 55 where optimism turns down its mouth in one of those wrenching changes of ;prospect at which Smetana showed such mastery, specifically in this score. And Winther brought his own voice to the mix with that soaring nine-bar solo beginning at bar 55 when a rhapsodic ascent sinks slowly back to earth. Beside all the heroic clamour of protest and tragedy, passages like these come back to life for days after their articulation if the performance has been vivid enough.

A little later, I was taken aback, as usual, by the sheer carrying power of Selby and Newman doubling a formidable triplet-heavy bass line from bar 80 to bar 89 underneath the violin and right-hand piano’s peroration treatment of this same theme. These players sustained the fire throughout the major part of the movement’s development with its fierce, close canons and harsh insistence before the opening returned and the composer worked his material towards that manic G-dominated acceleration to the end.

Just as striking were both the Alternativo interludes during the work’s central Allegro; first, the simple charm of the F Major, then the switch to grinding power at the E flat Major one’s climax in bar 187 where all three players reinforce each other in a slow march fragment oscillating between C Major and F minor, the strings in fierce competition with the keyboard chords through powerful triple and quadruple stop slashes. – a sudden burst of pageantry in this movement’s pervading aura of secrecy and scuttling.

With a few exceptions, the finale belongs to the pianist who sets the running for a solid initial stretch (bars 1 to 118), and Selby shines in these rapid-fire conditions, making the sudden emergence of Newman with a firm lyric all the more striking. What followed was one of the delights of this afternoon in the duet between cellist and violinist at the score’s Piu mosso marking: a fine instance of intermeshing lines blending in excellent partnership. A repeat of the opening ferment, a revisit of the string duet and we arrived at the movement’s gloomy core: a slow march using a fragmented version of the strings’ theme, followed by another frantic presto rush to an emphatic G Major ending which to me offers no consolation, just a gasp of release.

In sum, an event that reassured us of the consistently high standard that Selby and her confederates can achieve, especially when each of them is versed in both the practices and repertoire of chamber music. Even so, this combination proved singularly effective in its work. Yes, there were surface flaws, mainly of ensemble rather than individual miscarriages. But at the end you were swept up in the participants’ enthusiasm and devotion towards this presentation of contemporary, slightly obscure and all-too-well-known music.

Experts revisit us

May 9, 2025May 28, 2025 cliveoconnell

HOLLYWOOD SONGBOOK

Musica Viva Australia

Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday May 6, 2025

Signum Saxophone Quartet (L to R David Brand, Jacopo Taddei, Blaz Kemperle, Alan Luzar), Ali McGregor

First off, you would find it hard to fault the musicianship of the Signum Saxophone Quartet. When these players are handling music that fits their talents and performing environment, they demonstrate exceptional musicianship; on this night, for example, when they treated us to three excerpts from Copland’s Rodeo ballet from 1942 arranged by Linda Waid, which brought us the brightest and most effective numbers on their program.

Three of the group’s members survive from their last tour in November 2022: Blaz Kemperle (soprano), Jacopo Taddei (alto), and Alan Luzar (tenor). Guerino Bellarosa from that tour has been replaced in the baritone chair by David Brand, who was in fact a former Signum member. So the musicians have experience with one another, and it shows throughout their ensemble stints which covered a wealth of 20th century material.

The saxophone ensemble opened with Stravinsky’s Circus Polka for a Young Elephant, written in 1942 for a troupe of gifted pachyderms. Here, the piece served as an establishment of sound level and timbre, the reading full-frontal with plenty of definition in the quick-march segments, if you missed the subtleties of the composer’s orchestrated version which shows as more hefty than the strident approach of the Signum group. A deft bagatelle, the piece travelled past evenly enough, but you were impressed once again by how powerfully dynamic this quartet combination can be.

More of the same arrived a little later with Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet, from which collection we heard the final three: Alla Cseca, Alla Tango milonga, and Alla Tarantella. You missed the acerbity of the original’s strings and the slightly abrasive ‘wrong-note’ language that the composer employed at this optimistic time (1923), compared to what was waiting in the historical wings. When you have four reeds in play, the harmonic shifts are more in-your-face and probably succeeded best in the tango where the ensemble devoted themselves to spun-out lines rather than short sharp ejaculations and taking the pages on at very rapid speed.

To end the program’s first half, the Signum players gave us two well-known excerpts from Prokofiev’s 1935 Romeo and Juliet: Juliet as a Young Girl, and Dance of the Knights. Taking on this kind of work presents several problems, the main one being the ensemble’s monolithic timbre replacing one of the composer’s more brilliantly scored works. For the ponderous Knights’ Dance, the approach showed an awareness of the opening and closing strophes’ ponderousness, although Brand’s bass line came over as noticeably heavy; yet it is weighty in the original, if owning somehow less of an oompah deliberateness. On the other hand, you could admire Kemperle’s top line right from the start of the skittering presentation of Juliet: excellently clear and precise in articulating a difficult sequence.

We heard an authentic suite in Bernstein’s Three Dance Episodes from On the Town, extracted from the musical by the composer a year after the 1944 premiere for concert performance. By this stage, I suppose, most of us were hardened to the prevailing saxophone climate and, in any case, we were hearing a voice that spoke the instruments’ language, particularly in the raucous concluding Times Square: 1944 with its continued references to New York, New York – the only song from the musical that remains in common parlance. It might be an early work, but On the Town established the Bernstein voice – well, the most recognizable one – with its spiky rhythmic jumps and a sugar-and-salt melancholy that owes more than a little to Gershwin, viz. the solid lyric at the heart of Lonely Town: Pas de deux which could be part of the appropriate melancholy stage at the middle of An American in Paris.

Once again, the group gave us a vital, exhilarating account of the last section, packed with energy and an impressive precision on Bernstein’s stops and starts, with an attractive ebullience in their output that found the performers sharing the space like jazz artists, the middle voices of Taddei and Luzar taking the limelight with full-bodied ease, although that is probably due to the skill of arranger Izidor Leitinger who also arranged the Stravinsky and most of the songs.

As I said above, the Signum reading of Buckaroo Holiday, Corral Nocturne and Hoedown from Copland’s brilliant portrait of an America that never was (see also Appalachian Spring) made a striking impact because the simple directness and charm of the composition found a sympathy in these performers that carried us through on their enthusiasm, even during the alarums and excursions of the final piece – which is the most good-natured expression of national colour you will find of the nation, and how many of us would like to believe in it, too.

But you could take pleasure in all three segments; the first for its balance of lines and coherence, the second for its finely-spun lines of melody. As with their Bernstein, the ensemble impressed for their crisp coherence, so much easier to achieve in small numbers as compared to the original orchestral sprawl. And I don’t think any large body, no matter how well-coordinated, could have taken the Hoedown at the pace of these saxophonists, nor could they have achieved the same energetic bite in attack.

far as the vocal part of the night was concerned, I felt sympathetic but ambivalent. Ali McGregor is best known to me for her work in opera (The Magic Flute, Fidelio, Die Fledermaus) where she presented as a bright and polished soprano, informed by an infectious onstage sparkle. Most of this night’s work proved to be brooding, melancholy, if not downright sad, starting with the traditional ballad I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger which McGregor turned into a sort of blues over a drone-like backing from the Signum players. This made for a sombre start, but no matter: an attractive melody if not part of what normally passes for membership in a Hollywood songbook.

A brace of songs by Friedrich Hollaender made for a welcome introduction to the real thing. First came Illusions from Billy Wilder’s 1948 film A Foreign Affair which served to show (if you hadn’t picked up on it already) how amplified the singer’s voice had to be in order to cope with Leitinger’s arrangement. More accessible to most of us was Falling in Love Again which distinguished Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel of 1930, helping to promote Marlene Dietrich. McGregor’s version was notable for a security of pitch and articulation which betrays a voice that is properly trained; enjoyable to encounter this classic sung with musicianship allied to mild theatrics.

Kurt Weill was represented by that ode to the bright side, One Life to Live from Lady in the Dark of 1941 and, from two years later, the clever I’m a Stranger Here Myself that graced One Touch of Venus with Ogden Nash’s words and a brilliantly meandering vocal line that found a responsive interpreter despite the often clamorous backing.

On the evening’s second half, McGregor gave a typical chanteuse (chantoosie?) version of Irving Berlin’s Let’s Face the Music and Dance from the Follow the Fleet film of 1936 where Fred Astaire sang it and then danced it into the ground with Ginger Rogers: a memorable Hollywood song which here was given with more power and vim than Astaire could have managed, and rose to a fine peroration at its high-note climax.

We then arrived at the four excerpts from Hanns Eisler’s The Hollywood Songbook of 1943 – the night’s raison d’etre: Hollywood Elegy Nr. 7, To the Little Radio, Die Landscaft des Exils, and The Homecoming. All of the texts were written by Eisler’s most famous collaborator, Brecht, but none of them lasted particularly long, although permeated with the composer’s desolation in a necessary exile. McGregor sang in English, with the exception of her third offering, and all of them recalled the nervous sadness that permeates the between-wars period in German and Austrian cabaret music. But, in the end, there was precious little to get your teeth into, apart from a vague atmosphere of displacement and depression.

We ended the program with two Hollywood evergreens: So in Love by Cole Porter from his Kiss Me, Kate of 1942; and Somewhere Over the Rainbow – an essential for any compendium of Hollywood songs – taken from 1939’s classic The Wizard of Oz film. Both of these succeeded largely through McGregor’s sheer verve when faced with several passages of glutinous support from the Signum men, notably in the Porter lyric – thick and busy at the same time.

An odd juxtaposition, then. Nearly all of McGregor’s material could claim to be Hollywood-bred, apart from the Dietrich reminder. But the saxophone quartet would have trouble finding a link for Schulhoff and Prokofiev; Bernstein’s musical was originally a Broadway production, and Copland’s ballet premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. So not much Hollywood from the visitors. But they’re a smooth organization, experts in their craft, and watching high-quality musicians at work is always rewarding, no matter how haphazard the program’s organizing principles.

Diary May 2025

May 3, 2025May 28, 2025 cliveoconnell

THE SOUL OF THE CELLO: TIMO-VEIKKO VALVE

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday May 3 at 7:30 pm

After an out-of-town try-out at the Gippsland Arts Centre in Warragul the previous night, the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s principal moves to a same-but-different sphere with this Election Day program which reminds us of the cellist’s main arena of operations because both major works are arrangements for string orchestra and it’s only the MSO strings that will be heard tonight. Timo-Veikko Valve begins with a solo in the Prelude from Bach’s E flat Suite, which is followed by one of Mozart’s arrangements of Bach – suitably, an E flat Fugue. But I don’t know whether this is a version of The Well-Tempered Klavier‘s Book 2 No. 7, or the Trio Sonata No. 2’s fugue. Speaking of Mozart, Valve then presents his own arrangement of the String Quartet in D minor No. 15 K. 421, one of the set dedicated to Haydn. A touch of modernity appears with brother-of-Pekka Jaakko Kuusisto’s Wiima of 2011, a 13-minute landscape which Valve has promulgated since its composition in 2011. We finish with Schumann’s Cello Concerto without the original woodwind, horn and trumpet pairs and lacking timpani; I assume this is the transcription by F Vygem (Florian Vygen?) and a. Kahl (Andrea Kahl?). Remaining tickets at this venue for adults are from $57 tp $67, while; the young get in for $20. I assume that a booking fee is imposed but you can’t tell without putting your money down. If not, this would be a major advantage over where I’ve spent the last 5 1/2 years.

FOUR BASSOONS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Iwaki Auditorium, ABC Southbank Centre

Sunday May 4 at 11 am

Necessarily, we’re talking arrangements again, given this unusual front-and-centre combination of Jack Schiller, Elise Millman, Natasha Thomas, and contrabassoonist Brock Imison; all escorted along their way some of the time by an MSO string quintet of violins Anna Skalova and Philippa West, viola Fiona Sargeant, cello Rohan de Korte, and double bass Ben Hanlon. Mozart starts the morning with an unspecified ‘suite’ arranged by Imison for bassoon quartet. Then, an abrupt jump to Wynton Marsalis and his Meeelaan for bassoon and string quartet: a fusion piece now about 25 years old and which lasts between 13 and 16 minutes. Imison revisits his arranger status, this time of Giovanni Batista Riccio’s brief Sonata a quattro, here organised for a quartet of bassoons. Australian writer Gerard Brophy scores with his Four Branches of 2015, dedicated partly to Imison and lasting about as long as the Riccio. Last comes Dutch bassoonist/composer Kees Olthuis’ Introduction and Allegro of 2006 for bassoon, contrabassoon and string quintet; at 20 minutes in length, this promises to be the focal work of the program. The Mozart apart (perhaps), these pieces are completely unknown to me but that has been an occasionally welcome surprise factor in these recitals by musicians who are rarely heard together in intimate converse. As for prices, you might as well forget it because this recital is sold out, thanks to the plethora of bassoonists in Victoria. Bad luck, unless you have high-level double-reed connections . . .

HOLLYWOOD SONGBOOK

Musica Viva Australia

Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday May 6 at 7 pm

Soprano Ali McGregor collaborates with the Signum Saxophone Quartet, a group I heard in Brisbane on their last tour supporting Kristian Winther in an arrangement of Kurt Weill’s Violin Concerto. Here, the participants’ combined efforts are centred on film music from the legendary American Dream Factory. We’ve heard of the Great American Songbook and know that this could refer to any collection of songs that your average schmuck could put together and then call his/her collation by that name; a con trick to equal Trump’s repeated clams to singular greatness. But the Hollywood Songbook was a reality: a compilation of 47 songs by Hanns Eisler to poems by Brecht, Holderlin, Goethe, Viertel, Eichendorff, the Bible, Morike and himself – all written in 1943 when the composer was an unhappy refugee in Los Angeles. McGregor and her colleagues will present selections from this liederbuch as well as some scraps by Weill, Porter, Berlin and Harold Arlen’s Over the Rainbow. Mind you, the Signata share the limelight with a few of Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet from 1924, a set of numbers eviscerated from Prokofiev’s 1935 Romeo and Juliet ballet, a respectable composite in Three Dance Episodes from Bernstein’s On the Town musical of 1944, and then back to selection land for some chunks hacked out of Copland’s Rodeo ballet score, dating from 1942. Tonight will be the second in a series of eight performances and you can attend as a full adult for seats ranging between $65 and $125, with student rush places available for $20. But never forget the $7 transaction fee added on for a reason that no reasonable entrepreneur can explain.

DISCOVER SIBELIUS: SIDE BY SIDE WITH MYO

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 8 at 7:30 pm

Yes, you can discover a sort of Sibelius tonight with newly-created stars from the Melbourne Youth Orchestra featured alongside MSO regulars. But what conductor Benjamin Northey and his forces offer is a Reader’s Digest version of the Finnish master; a little bit here, a morsel there, and perhaps enough to titillate – hopefully. But then, who needs this sort of itty-bitty introduction to one of the 20th century’s most individual and approachable voices? The night opens with Finlandia, the composer’s 1899 not-so-open act of anti-Russian propaganda that still thrills to this day with its combination of power and lyricism. Then comes the first movement to the 1902 Symphony No. 2, which is excellent but pales into the background when compared to the score’s sweeping finale. Likewise, we get the last movement of the Violin Concerto of 1904 (with an unknown soloist), but this acts as roughage when compared to the work’s preceding pages which give a fairer picture of the composer’s moody emotional environment. We then hear the Valse triste of 1903, one of the composer’s most frequently performed scraps, and about as useful a musical piece of information as Elgar’s Salut d’amour. To end this brief procession of delights, we come to something more mature in the Symphony No. 5 in E flat, written in 1915. Its grinding. inexorable ending tolerates no grounds for complaint as it simply carries all before it. Sorry, but I’d rather spend my cash on a full performance of either symphony or the magnificent concerto. If you’re under 18, you get in for $20; any older and you have to cough up $39. There’s no fee, unless you want your tickets delivered non-automatically, where you fall victim to the fiscal demands of supplying human contact; it’s not much, but enough to generate a slight feeling of sourness.

AN EVENING OF FAIRY TALES

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 15 at 7:30 pm

You’ll get to enjoy your other-worldly experience here without a soloist; the main interest in a pretty pedestrian program comes from conductor Alpesh Chauhan, a British musician who began by playing cello, then sank to the level of directing orchestras – first in Birmingham, then Italy and Scotland, before landing back in Birmingham with side-trips to Dusseldorf. Tonight he expands our awareness with the 1892 Prelude to Humperdinck’s ever-welcome dose of gemutlichkeit, the opera Hansel and Gretel. We are then taken to Prokofiev’s 1944 vision of Cinderella, although nothing is definite here in the land of ‘selections’. Speaking of which, we enjoy more bleeding chunks of extrapolated pleasure in some extracts from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty of 1889 which admittedly lends itself to filleting. Not sure about such a night where you’re faced with extracts from two ballets and an opera and you have to do a lot of extrapolation and supplementary imaginative work to get much out of the whole exercise. Still, for all I know Chauhan has a magic baton that directs such music with brilliant transformative power. You pay full-price $139 in the stalls and circle of Hamer Hall, with a minor reduction to $127 for the balcony. Sit further back and you’re up for $81 or $93 respectively.

This program will be repeated in Costa Hall Geelong on Friday May 16 at 7:30 pm and in Hamer Hall on Saturday May 17 at 7:30 pm.

BACH TO THE BEACH BOYS AND BEYOND

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday May 17 at 7:30 pm

Carolina Eyck is the centrepiece of this night’s work. She is a theremin player, mistress of that primal electronic instrument that provides the focus for so much of Messiaen’s Turangalila-symphonie. Richard Tognetti leads his ACO and includes among his forces ABC Radio celebrity pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska. As for what this combination gets up to, the program is as wide-ranging as its title proposes. We start with Bach’s Air on the G String from the Orchestral Suite No. 2, and we end with a compendium of music from Miklos Rosza’s soundtrack to Spellbound (1945), Jonny Greenwood‘s background for There Will Be Blood (2007), Star Trek (Alexander Courage’s opening credits theme for the original series of 1966, you assume), Morricone’s 1966 score for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, as well as Jim Parker’s title music for Midsomer Murders that actually used the theremin and which also dates from 1966. In between come Brian Wilson‘s Good Vibrations (you wouldn’t believe it – released first in that vintage year of 1966), Offenbach’s Can-can (originally from 1858), all Five Pieces for String Quartet of 1924 by Schulhoff, some off-cuts from Saint-Saens’ 1886 Carnival of the Animals as well as his Danse macabre of 1874, Rimsky’s 1900 bumblebee, Glinka’s The Lark romance from A Farewell to St. Petersburg written in 1840. And we’ll have a few samples of local content with the 2005 commission by the ACO of Brett Dean‘s Short Stories: IV. Komarov’s Last Words, plus a world premiere from Holly Harrison. Alongside these works, Eyck gives the Australian premiere to her own 2015 Fantasias: Oakunar Lynntuja for herself and a string quartet, and there’ll be an outing for Jorg Widmann‘s 180 beats per minute of 1993 for two violins, a viola and three cellos. Well, they say it’s the spice of life. Entry costs $49 to $158 for an adult, $75 to $128 for concessionaires, $35 for those under 35, and $30 for a student. There’s an extra fee of ‘between $4 and $8.50’ if you order online or by phone – which pretty much involves everybody in what amounts to an unabashed grab for extra cash.

This program will be repeated on Sunday May 18 at 2:30 pm in Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne, and back at the Melbourne Recital Centre on Monday May 19 at 7:30 pm.

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS IN CONCERT

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 22 at 7:30 pm

Nothing’s changed, then, in the past 5-plus years. Our chief orchestra sticks to a sure-fire dollar spinner with the old live soundtrack exercise although, to my mind, there’s little to commend this episode of the saga, the first of the third trilogy that I dutifully saw in the theatre, bought the DVD, then never looked at again. Visually startling and quite devoid of character-interest, the film once again features music by an incorrigible John Williams which on first hearing sped past my ears at warp speed. But that’s what the MSO, under Benjamin Northey, will be resuscitating tonight under the big screen. Are they still using subtitles so that the actors can be heard over the orchestral sub-text? Let’s hope so because, even in the original cinema screening, parts of dialogue bolted past, incomprehensible and unable to be relished. Still, another viewing is almost worth it just to see Han Solo killed by his psychotic son. Standard adult tickets range from $81 to $150; concession card holders and children enjoy a cut rate of a few dollars less. Makes you salivate, doesn’t it? As well, you have to cough up an extra $7 for a ‘transaction fee’, although I can’t find mention of that when I tried booking. To be honest, I find the MSO ticketing process to be all over the place – something like the entertainment on offer here.

This program will be repeated on Friday May 23 at 7:30 pm, and on Saturday May 24 at 1 pm.

GRIEG’S PIANO CONCERTO

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 29 at 7:30 pm

While it’s hard to plumb securely the dim recesses of the past, this popular concerto was probably the first of its Romantic kind that I became aware of, thanks to an LP recording by Dinu Lipatti that I was somehow forced to buy while in a state of early-teen innocence. Still, the reading proved memorable enough to colour several later renditions – and there were many of them as the Grieg proved popular with entrants in the ABC’s Concerto and Vocal Competition staged during the 1950s and 60s. For all its renown, this is one of the easier examples of the Romantic barnstormer; little wonder that Liszt was able to sight-read it for the composer as it’s right up his virtuosic Hungarian alley. Tonight, Alexander Gavrylyuk makes another welcome Melbourne appearance to invest this familiar score with his considerable skill and insight. Surrounding this, Hong Kong-born conductor Elim Chan leads the MSO through British/United States writer Anna Clyne’s This Midnight Hour of 2015 which takes its kick-off from poems by Juan Jimenez and Baudelaire and serves as an aural feast for about 12 minutes – or so they say. To end, the orchestra will struggle through Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a voluptuous and still-testing feast from 1888 that celebrates repetition and instrumental colour in a brilliant exhibition of capture and release. One of the acting concertmasters, Tair Khisambeev or Anne-Marie Johnson, is in for a wild ride. To get in, you need between $75 and $142 for a standard ticket; concession card holders get a $5 reduction. A child is charged $20 but there’s a $7 transaction fee applied to each booking. Mind you, this information comes from the MSO website, so it should be right, right?

This program will be repeated on Saturday May 31 at 2 pm.

A change of scene

March 17, 2025 cliveoconnell

After five-and-a-half years on the Gold Coast, we have decided to move back to Melbourne. Unlike our arrival in Queensland, we have no definite address to which we’re headed back ‘home’.

So there will be a delay of some weeks before this site publishes new material.

A near-forgotten voice

March 17, 2025 cliveoconnell

THROUGH TROPICAL STARS

David Joseph

Move Records MD 3467

There’s something enigmatic about the music of David Joseph. If it weren’t for Move Record’s initiative, I would know very little about his contribution to Australian music. As it is, any material you come across is deficient in detail. For example, the opening work on this disc, a Concertino for flute, viola and percussion dates from 1988 but doesn’t appear in the Australian Music Centre’s catalogue of Joseph’s works. Likewise, the concluding piece, The Afternoon of 1991 for piano trio, is absent from the same list. Slightly less confusing is the attribution of the title track for two flutes to 1977 on the CD, but 1978 in the AMC’s listing. Ditto for the String Trio No. 2 (CD 1991, catalogue 1990) and a Sonata for clarinet and 2 percussionists (1978 according to the CD, but 1979 in the catalogue demi-raisonne).

Not that such discrepancies will keep anyone awake at nights, but they speak of a certain slovenliness in the provision of accurate information. As for performers, the Concertino boasts members of Sydney’s Seymour Group before that ensemble ceased operations in about 2006; flute Christine Draeger, viola John Gould, percussion Ian Cleworth and Rebecca Lagos (or is it Graeme Leak{e}?) as announced on the CD’s sleeve?). Jennifer Newsome and Zdenek Bruderhans perform Through tropical stars, while Nigel Sabin clarinet and Cleworth with Ryszard Pusz present the sonata. A group appropriately called the String Trio Holland consists of violin Josje Ter Haar, viola Susanne van Els, and cello Job Ter Haar. As for the brief The Afternoon, that features the untraceable Trio Classico comprising violin Urs Walker, cello Regula Hauser Menges, and piano Stefan Fahmi.

As you can see from the dates of each work listed above – 1977 (1978), 1978 (1979),1988, 1990 (1991), 1991 – Joseph’s compositions on this CD are not fruits of the composer’s time spent in Benalla where he has worked as a lawyer for nearly the last 25 years. It would seem that his musical creativity has come to a halt – a lume spento. Nevertheless, these five tracks from the past remind us of the individual voice that Joseph spoke and the sheer attractiveness of his vocabulary. By the way, all offerings on this CD are from live performances – at the Seymour Centre, Elder Hall in the University of Adelaide, Melba Hall at the University of Melbourne, and St. Peter’s Church, Zurich.

What the Concertino offers is a garden scene, albeit a furiously active one where the bird-life approaches the manic in its opening strophes, vivified by a rapid semiquaver flute pattern and viola flutterings above campanile, vibraphone and marimba backing. Every so often, we reach a hiatus point and the motivic matter changes, if the textures remain pretty constant, as does the level of action. When you think things are slowing down (the use of quaver triplets), the flute stirs itself into fresh flights and the percussion mimics the frenzy. For all that, the atmosphere is a benign one and it is conceivable that Joseph is presenting a kind of promenade where a change of vista prompts an alteration in texture.

Still, the soundscape is a consistent one with recognizable patterns enjoying a transmutation process and the ensemble working as a well-oiled rhythmic machine, punctuated by a cadenza flight from Draeger and Gould towards the conclusion . Just when you think the piece is descending into a twilight phase, the initial energy and textures reappear, although the final bars offer a kind of placid resolution. It seems to me that Joseph is most concerned with exercising a timbral palette which he varies most obviously by changing his percussion instruments. This results in an effervescent kaleidoscope of colours to which all four participants contribute in almost equal measure.

According to the AMC site, Through tropical stars is meant to last about twelve minutes; Newsome and Bruderhans get through it in under nine. It’s not intended to be another ‘bird’ piece and in some ways it isn’t, having a wider scope than mere avian imitation. But there are passages where you can’t escape the querulous nature of bird chirrups and competing calls, circling around each other in close imitation. One player uses piccolo, concert flute and alto flute; the other sticks to concert flute throughout. While the work is a dazzling exhibition piece for its interpreters, its atmospheric character suggests a natural world abuzz with growth and light: a brilliant tandem ride of coruscations, here articulated with admirable interdependence.

Something like the Concertino, Joseph’s Sonata works hard to present textural and timbral interplay/contrast. It certainly exploits Sabin’s flexibility and rapid recovery in its initial stages where a dialogue between clarinet and marimba displays a mastery of quick-fire articulation. A chain of sustained wind notes takes us a short space away from the initial chattering, but not for long; when the clarinet is occupied with delivering a high pedal note, both marimba and xylophone indulge in a furious clash of lines.

It makes for an experience that is heavy in events. If a score were available, I’m sure the interconnections and inner references would become clearer but, as it is, you just surrender to the aural avalanche-with-recesses that prevails at the end, despite the sudden emergence of some moments of what pass for rest in this active work. Percussionists Cleworth and Howell are no shrinking violets but take over the running, occasionally drenching the clarinet in powerful mallet work as the score drives towards its affirmative conclusion.

With the string trio, despite the CD leaflet’s stipulation that it is a nature portrait similar to the Concertino, we are in a different landscape where abrasive chords serve as fulcrum points, demanding attention right from the opening. True, you hear whistles and throbbings that might represent wildlife red in tooth and claw, alternating with compulsive motor rhythms that bear witness to the ongoing influence of Stravinsky’s early years. Again, the composer utilises obsessive motives and near-splenetic bursts of repeated chords to animate his intended ambience.

As with its precedents on this CD, the trio deals with patterns that can be transformed or just repeated till the next one appears. What is different is the sense of menace as we move through a sound world that is packed with percussive-sounding bursts. The burbling and twittering has gone and we find ourselves in a world of menace and uncertainty which eventually fades to an uncertain final querulousness: the first piece on this album that ends, like Petrushka, with a question.

The last track, and the latest of Joseph’s works represented here, The Afternoon is a brief vignette that intends to acquaint the listener with the sad quietude of approaching twilight. In fact, the piece succeeds very well in following a path into quiescence, the final words given to the piano after a process that maintains Joseph’s practice of exploiting brevities, even if these ones present themselves with more angularity than we’ve heard so far.

For recordings that were made some time ago – 46 years in two cases, 34 years the most recent – the quality of these tracks is remarkably clear, in particular the final one from Zurich where Walker’s violin and Fahmi’s piano have a fine, piercing character that makes every note resonate. And it serves as an attractive envoi to this series of one-movement scores that remind us of the intellectual and emotional appeal of the music created by this remarkably gifted writer.

Amiable amalgam

March 7, 2025 cliveoconnell

JESS HITCHCOCK & PENNY QUARTET

Musica Viva Australia

Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University

Tuesday March 4 at 7 pm

Jess Hitchcock & Penny Quartet (L to R Anthony Chataway, Jack Ward, Amy Brookman, Madeleine Jevons)

It was hard to get a handle on this recital, a rather specialized event from Musica Viva which is being heard in Perth, Adelaide (part of this year’s Festival), Brisbane,, Newcastle and Sutherland. In the program, Glenn Christensen, a former resident with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, is listed as first violin of the Penny Quartet but was he present on this night, your honour? Or has his appearance changed significantly since those halcyon ACO days? The photograph above shows the current quartet’s personnel, according to the body’s website. I didn’t recognize any of the players by sight – three males and a female – although their ensemble output impressed for its deftness.

Jess Hitchcock sang twelve of her own songs and the program included a full set of texts. But then, the organizers turned the lights right down so this information was completely useless. Mind you, the artists wended a lackadaisical way through the mixed dozen lyrics which were not performed in printed order so that you were invited to play a kind of detection game to work out what was going on. In the original concept, the program contained only eleven Hitchcock songs, all of them organized for a string quartet accompaniment by local writers. A fresh arranger – Christine Pan – attended to the additional song.

I think I got them in the right order but, as far as this singer’s work goes, there be no ignorance like unto my ignorance. I believe I heard, in sequence: Days Are Long (arr. Iain Grandage), Homeward Bound (arr. Isaac Hayward), Collide ((arr. Nicole Murphy), Soak To My Bones (arr. Harry Sdraulig), Leader of the Pack (arr. Ben Robinson), By the Sea (arr. May Lyon), On My Own (arr. Holly Harrison), Together (arr. James Mountain), Running in the Dark (arr. Matt Laing), Fight for Me (arr. Pan), Unbreakable (arr. Alex Turley), and Not a Warzone (arr. Grandage).

Apart from the songs, the program also gave an airing to American writer Caroline Shaw‘s Plan & Elevation: the Grounds of Dumbarton Oaks. This quartet was written to commission by Harvard, celebrating the 75th birthday of the university’s famous estate; further, Shaw was the original music fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 2014-15. Now what I think happened was that the Pennies interspersed the songs with the five movements from Shaw’s work. If so, the work was subsumed into the whole experience very cleverly. I can recall some viola double stops suddenly emerging at one point, as well as some rapid Verklaerte Nacht-style arpeggios with harmonics – both identifiable from Shaw’s score. Sadly, the final effect was to make you think that one of the arrangers had included an above-average postlude or prelude, rather than transporting you to the estate’s Herbaceous Border or Cutting Garden.

Adding to the mix, Hitchcock proved to be a fan of the pre-song address, giving us information about her background, her family, her musical training, her participation in the Voice referendum, her personal relationships with people that she was singing about – all the gallimaufry that might/might not add to a listener’s appreciation of what was being offered. Certainly, this singer is involved in her work and is at some pains to tell us all about it, in the way of the young. Whether we need to hear it is another business.

To be honest, I found it hard to differentiate between many of Hitchcock’s songs. Her melodic language shows balance and general placidity; the harmonic structures are innately simple, if spiced up by her arrangers; the tempo of each song rarely ventures into any territory but the four-square. For instance, the opening Days Are Long presented as a simple melody over a pizzicato support that developed into a thudding bass line, soon turning the lyric into a bit of a chug. Immediately, you were aware that the vocalist was well amplified; after a time, it became apparent that so were her string supporters.

During the following Homeward Bound, you encountered some rhythmic irregularity to complement the loud, punchy nature of the actual content but this spike of interest didn’t seem to be part of the original matter but inserted by its arranger. And so the procedure continued with a quickening of interest before a return to the tried and true e.g. Collide where an intriguing drone effect shuffled back into a fluent chordal support. Or else the arrangement stole much of the thunder, as in By the Sea with its plain vocal line overtaken by Lyon’s ornate string support.

Contrast that with the feistiness of On My Own, an unusually fast and assertive song which brought to mind some traces of American protest songs, although the text appears to point to an inter-personal crisis rather than a recrimination aimed towards the current social order. But then, it could be both.

Nearing the end of the night, Hitchcock started playing on a keyboard at the opening to Unbreakable. Mind you, I was in such a state of identification tension that she might have been making subtle contributions before this. This song fell into the same category as several others on offer that encourage self-belief, self-determination, self-confidence, self-assertion – statements of character development that flourish in the egotism of this age. Possibly these might not have grated so much if the vocal lines offered variety, but they didn’t. All of Hitchcock’s melodic threads bore a close resemblance to each other, and all sprang from a base in the American Neo-Romanticism that has flourished in the republic for some time.

What we heard across the twelve-part cycle was pleasant music-making that cast no threatening shadows of modernity. In this reversion to a well-trodden path, the composer stayed within the limitations you can hear in Sondheim’s Into the Woods – a sampler of song construction for the contemporary writer with a disregard for recent advances in melodic design, metrical ingenuity and harmonic experimentation; when I say ‘recent’, I’m referring to anything past the first decade of the 20th century in the history of Western music. Of the original music of our country, I found no trace. Despite her Torres Strait Islander and New Guinean background/heritage, Hitchcock has been trained in her craft by serious musicians; as far as I can tell, she has yet to take up the mantle of original invention.

As a suddenly applied encore, Hitchcock and the Pennies presented a version of Sidney’s My true love hath my heart. I wasn’t able to decipher Hitchcock’s attribution of musical authorship from her preliminary remarks, but the setting rocked no boats and so was of a piece with everything that preceded it.

In this light program, the five artists collaborated to fine effect and the smaller-than-usual Musica Viva audience applauded each segment with enthusiasm. So what was missing? Perhaps a kind of emotional depth, or an aspiring ardour to lift the evening’s cosy level of engagement. You (meaning I) left the Griffith University venue with a sense that we’d heard a deft sequence of songs, thank you very much, but not much remained in the memory.

Celebrate with the tried and true

February 20, 2025 cliveoconnell

BRAHMS & BEETHOVEN

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday February 17, 2024

Richard Tognetti

You could see this program as a retrograde step in the Australian Chamber Orchestra‘s ongoing path of achievement. Presenting two repertoire standards like the Brahms Violin Concerto and Beethoven’s A Major Symphony doesn’t put many demands on audiences who would/should be familiar with both masterpieces. Of course, in this case you’re bound to hear exceptional readings of these scores, the ACO being what it is – one of the country’s leading ensembles in terms of skill and interpretative talent.

This was the tenth and final expounding of this double feature, the climax of a tour that took in the three eastern state capitals with a detour to Newcastle along the way. So the accomplishment level was as good as it was going to get. Adding to sixteen core members of the orchestra, artistic director and soloist Richard Tognetti had enlisted the assistance of an extra seven violinists, four more violas, two supplementary cellos and two double bass guests. This practically doubled the string body but such reinforcement proved necessary, given that all players were using gut strings.

The recruited flutes weren’t playing metal instruments, as far as I could tell; oboes, clarinets and bassoons all looked contemporary from my seat. The trumpets appeared orthodox but at least two of the horns were employing crooks and the other one of the four that I could see had an instrument whose middle workings looked unfamiliar to me – neither valved nor crooked. So it seemed that what we heard was something of a mixed bag, although the resulting sound complex favoured the woodwind and brass (as you’d expect).

Among the guests were musicians from the Adelaide, West Australian,, Queensland, Melbourne, Dresden Festival, Age of Enlightenment and Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestras. Thomas Chawmer from the Orava Quartet was one of the violas, and six of the other string players were from the ACO’s Emerging Artists of 2025 ranks. You’d think this made for a sort of uneasy agglomeration but the whole complex sounded highly polished and assured in its work, probably more impressive in the symphony because Tognetti spent a good deal of his time directing rather than leading his first violins.

Of course, he had his hands fuller when treating with the concerto, across which he produced one of the most refined interpretations I’ve heard live. A thoroughly seasoned performer, Tognetti knows better than most where to find a balance between assertion and reticence, even if this interpretation was pre-ordained towards the latter. Even so, that brave opening flourish from the solo after the ritornello to the first movement registered as imposingly dynamic even if you missed the steely insistence of the quasi-cadenza upward-shooting spirals before this lone voice settles into its beneficent variants on the opening theme.

As the performance continued, I tried to recall when I’d last heard the ACO and Tognetti achieving a similar sound spectrum. It’s faded in the memory but I think it must have been when they were presenting another of the great concertos where solo detailed work, especially when lodged in the lower strings, dissipated into the accompaniment which was, above all, considerate. Because of this infrequency of bite, you had to concentrate with high attention to follow the opening movement’s argument, compensating for the murmuring activity by fleshing out what you know must have been there.

It’s a marvellous expanse, that first Allegro, relieved in this performance by a departure from the usual Joachim cadenza. Tognetti put together an amalgam of his own from those supplied by Busoni, Hugo Heermann and Auer. He adopted the Busoni venture of having a timpani accompany the soloist for a fair way into the novelty, and later brought in the strings for some preliminary chords prior to the return to normal at bar 527. Whatever the traces of Heermann and Auer, I wasn’t quick (or familiar) enough to pick them up but the demonstration proved to be technically spectacular, probably more so than the original.

When it came to the Adagio, we moved onto a different place, more subtle than that usually displayed in orthodox readings. The initial 30-bar wind chorale sounded seamless, the clarinets enjoying pride of place being positioned above their woodwind peers. The soloist’s unveiling of that spine-tingling initial sentence made for an ideal representation of the composer’s lyrical genius and the movement promised a fully burnished outpouring – until some clown’s mobile phone went off, the idiotic alarm tinkling out the opening bar to Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.

Tognetti paused, then took up the reins again without complaint, even if some of us were seething at this redneck lack of consideration or concern. Further, I suspect a few of us found it hard to re-enter the calm unfolding of this movement’s later stages without being distracted by an inner rage. For which reason, maybe, the giocoso conclusion came over as more aggressive than expected, the soloist’s line slashing and curvetting turn and turn about, the pulse fluctuating without a sign of discomfort right up to the Poco piu presto gallop to Brahms’ warm-hearted conclusion.

I’m pretty sure that the ACO has played the Beethoven symphony before and that I heard it about a decade ago in Melbourne’s Hamer Hall. As far as I can see, the ensemble hasn’t recorded it but might consider doing so, given the finely-spun detail with this group populated by many ad hoc players. As I’ve said, Tognetti spent much of his time exhorting the ensemble, mainly by indicating swathes of sound rather than bow-pointing to individuals or groups. Did he need to offer such encouragement to a set of musicians that were very well played-in to this score? The results were indubitably successful, so no argument.

But there’s not much to report. The work unfolded with very few flaws; an odd horn bleep and some not-quite-right wind group entries, plus a few moments where the strings were in danger of being out-weighed. Still, the Allegretto moved at a brisk pace, not handled as a lugubrious funeral march; the following scherzo ‘s repetitions came close to wearing out their welcome, as usual, but the players’ briskness of attack took the edge of the composer’s wearing insistence.

Finally, that jubilant Allegro con brio rort rounded off the night with elegant bravura, some novel dynamic points set out for the more jaded among us, and an irresistible drive from the strings that lasted up to Beethoven’s peremptory final bark. I, for one, left the QPAC building with feelings of gratitude and elation – a welcome change from the usual sensation of having been aurally battered into submission. After this genuflection to the tried and true, and having attracted a substantial audience, the ACO will proceed with its birthday celebrations by following more challenging paths, this double-bill definitely being the year’s most conservative Brisbane program.

Soft blasts from the past

February 17, 2025 cliveoconnell

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL THESE YEARS?

Claire Patti, Louise Godwin, Tony Gould

Move Records MD 3469

There’s something disarming about this album which is a collection of songs/folk-songs – several of them well-known – performed as trios, duets and solos by Claire Patti (harpist and singer), Louise Godwin (cellist but not employed as much as she could have been), and Tony Gould (pianist and the heaviest participant in this amiable exercise). I say ‘well-known’, but that might only apply to that generation that boasts Gould and me (he is my senior by a few years). The Skye Boat Song, My love is like a red red rose, Londonderry Air, The Last Rose of Summer, Black is the colour of my true love’s hair and Molly Malone were standard articles of faith in my youth and all enjoy a re-working here.

As well, you will come across a few that ring bells in the memory, if not very clamorous ones: Carrickfergus, Strawberry Lane and Ae fond kiss. Gould and Co. have included an Irish lyric that I’ve never come across – Tha M’aigne fo ghuraim (This gloom upon my soul) – and an English traditional song that none of those great 19th-into-20th century collectors seems to have bothered with: Sweet Lemany. Not to mention a Scottish tune that sounds more promising than its reality in She’s sweetest when she’s naked. Then there’s Idas farval (Ida’s farewell), written by Swedish musician Ale Carr, and Jag vet en dejlig rosa (I know a rose so lovely) which is a traditional tune, also from Sweden; I suspect that both of these spring from Godwin’s interest in that Scandinavian country’s music. From left field comes A little bit of Warlock, which sets some pages from the Capriol Suite, namely the Pieds-en-l’air movement.

The ensemble beginsn with Sweet Lemany, which may have origins in Cornwall, Ireland, or Suffolk; it has certain traits that argue for an Irish genesis. But the setting is original,, first in in that Godwin maintains a one-note pedal throughout, pizzicato and keeping to a mobile rhythmic pattern. Patti sings with a light, refreshing timbre while Gould informs the piece with subtle inflections and brief comments/echoes. For all that, Patti sings four of the five verses available in most editions.

Gould takes the solo spot for William Ross’ Skye Boat Song and, apart from a winsome introduction, sticks to the well-known tune right up to the final bars where the straight melody is subsumed in a brief variant. Most interest here comes from following the executant’s chord sequences which follow an unexceptionable path throughout a mildly meandering interpretation. Gould gives brief prelude to My love is like a red red rose before Patti sings the first two stanzas. Godwin offers a cello statement, before the singer returns with the final two stanzas and an unexpectedly open concluding bar. Gould occasionally offers a high trill to complement Patti’s pure line. And the only complaint I have about the vocal line is the singer’s odd habit of taking a breath after the first few syllables of the third line in most of the stanzas.

Carr’s sweet if repetitive lyric is a sort of waltz with three-bar sentences/phrases, in this case giving the melody first to the cello, then the harp, before the cello takes back the running. The piece’s form is simple ternary and we certainly are familiar with the melody’s shape before the end. More irregularity comes in the Swedish traditional song from the 16th century with its five-line stanzas, here handled as a kind of elderly cabaret number by Patti and Gould, whose support is a supple delight beneath Patti’s somewhat sultry account of what textually should be a love song but musically sounds like a plaint.

The Warlock movement, here a piano solo, gets off to a false start and Gould can be heard saying that he’ll start again. For the most part he is content to follow the (original?) Arbeau melody line and reinforce the British arranger’s harmonization with some slightly adventurous detours along the path. A variant appears shortly before the end but the executant eventually settles back into the format and plays the final two Much slower bars with more delicacy than the original contains. Patti sings two stanzas of the three that make up the ‘standard’ version of Carrickfergus and invests the song with an infectious clarity of timbre, especially at the opening to the fifth line in each division with Gould oscillating between the unobtrusive and mimicking the singer when she moves into a high tessitura.

A harp/cello duet treats James Oswald’s She’s sweetest when she’s naked, which has been described as an Irish minuet (whatever that is). The only peculiarity comes with a change of accent to slight syncopation, first seen in bars 3 and 5 of the first strophe. Patti plays the tune through twice, then Godwin takes the lead for another run-through. Some laid-back ambling from Gould prefaces the Danny Boy reading for solo piano, with just a trace of Something’s Gotta Give before we hit the melody itself. The pianist does not cease from exploration and offers some detours to the original line, as well as a couple of sudden modulations to restatements in a refreshed harmonic setting. For all that, the Air remains perceptible across this investigation, the CD’s longest track.

Staying in Ireland, Gould gives an alluring prelude to The Last Rose of Summer before Patti starts singing Moore’s lines. Godwin has a turn at outlining the original Aisling an Oigfhear melody before the singer returns with the second stanza, then omitting the third, with Gould providing a postlude that puts the first phrase in an unexpected harmonic context. As with all the vocal items on offer, this is quiet and unobtrusive, some worlds away from the habitual thrusting treatment demonstrated by generations of Irish tenors bursting into the role of Flotow’s Lyonel.

Across the sea to Scotland’s Black is the colour of my true love’s hair which Gould opens through some sepulchral bass notes before giving the melody unadorned and unaccompanied before moving into a fantasia that harks back to its source material before resolving into another re-statement of the melody and a reappearance of the opening’s repeated tattoo. This version is comparable in colour to some of the more conscientious American folksingers who have recorded versions of this work, making a slightly unsettling celebration of what is a love-song in a minor key (mode!?) context.

Back across the sea to the island, Godwin plays Tha M’aigne fo ghuraim as a solo, punctuated by sudden turns and grace notes; at well under two minutes, the CD’ shortest track but probably its most obvious and characteristic in terms of its country of origin. Another piano solo, Gould gives us a preamble before playing Strawberry Lane through straight once, then almost doing the same thing again before following his pleasure at the end of the second stanza. Of course, he returns to the melody en plein air near the end but concludes with a reminiscence of his earlier elaboration and an unsatisfying tierce to finish.

Another Burns lyric, if a despondent one, in Ae fond kiss brings Patti’s calm delivery into play once again. She sings all the stanzas except No. 2 in the set of six. Gould offers a mid-flow interlude which, I suppose stands in for the missing lines but the song’s delivery suggests a rather odd 3/4 rhythm as opposed to the more bouncy original 6/8. But the executants’ restraint is put to happy employment throughout. Molly Malone brings up the rear and is another piano solo where Gould plays the stanzas’ sextet several times, giving less space to the three chorus lines. It’s plain sailing through this very familiar melody, the pianist content to follow the air’s contour.

Not everything on this diverting disc works ideally. Some of Gould’s chords sound like abrupt breaks in an otherwise placid flow, some notes don’t sound, and Godwin’s cello seems uncomfortable on one track. Still, you’ll find plenty of material here to entertain and over which you can reminisce – which is clearly (for me, at least) the whole point of the exercise.

Diary March 2025

February 9, 2025 cliveoconnell

VIVALDI VESPERS

Brisbane Chamber Choir/Chamber Players

Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University

Sunday March 2 at 3 pm

This has me beat: I can’t find a mention in the composer’s catalogue of any Vespers setting. But there they are on YouTube – a Vespers for St. Mark from which comes the well-known Beatus vir setting; and a Vespers for the Blessed Virgin with a friendly Domine ad adiuvandum. You can get a recording (presumably of one of them) from the Ex Cathedra ensemble. There’s even a putative vespers available of how an imaginary service for the Feast of the Assumption might have sounded if Venetian composers had clubbed together for such a celebration. Whatever the foundation for this event, the Brisbane Chamber Choir and Brisbane Chamber Players (who are they?) will work together under the choral body’s founding director Graeme Morton with two soloists taking front-and-centre: soprano Sara Macliver and countertenor Michael Burden (know the former, of course; looked up the latter who is a Sydney product, it seems). Well, it could be a revelation but, I suspect, mainly for those of us who know only the Magnificat and Gloria. Students can attend for $15; if you’re under 30, it’s $50; with your concession card, the price is $70; the cost for a full adult is $90. Whatever category you fall into, there’s the extraordinary bonus of no booking/handling fee.

JESS HITCHCOCK & PENNY QUARTET

Musica Viva Australia

Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University

Tuesday March 4 at 7 pm

This combination is new to me and, I suspect, won’t be familiar to Musica Viva audiences, although the Penny Quartet members are well-known quantities as individuals: violins Amy Brookman and Madeleine Jevons, viola Anthony Chataway, and cello Jack Ward. Vocalist Jess Hitchcock hasn’t come my way before, but she’s one of those multi-discipline musicians who sings opera and jazz, as well as writing her own music. Indeed, she appears in this recital as singer and song-writer but, to give it a twist, she is giving us arrangements of eleven of her own songs as organized by a bevy of young Australian composers. Tack on to that a composition by Caroline Shaw, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer who is here represented by Plan and Elevation: The Grounds of Dumbarton Oaks: a musical depiction for string quartet of five aspects/features in the famous estate. As for the song arrangers, they are Ben Robinson, Matt Laing, May Lyon, James Mountain, Iain Grandage, Harry Sdraulig, Holly Harrison, Isaac Hayward, Alex Turley and Nicole Murphy. I don’t know any of the songs but wait for their unveiling with high expectations. Entry prices range from $49 to $125 and there’s a transaction fee of $7, which I don’t believe was the practice in previous years but someone has finally hit on the usual way to screw the consumer.

LA CENERENTOLA

Opera Queensland

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Tuesday March 4 at 7 pm

To my mind, this is a stand-out Rossini work which appeared as a transient jewel in the national company’s repertoire many years ago and which I saw at the Vienna Opera sometime around 1982 – one of the few unalloyed pleasures I’ve experienced in that city’s opera house. It’s a sparkling construct, capped off with the heroine’s finely graduated Non piu mesta with the Ramiro/Dandini Zitto, zitto, piano, piano duet a true delight. We have here a concert version, I think, because of the venue but a director (Laura Hansford), costumiers (Karen Cochet and Bianca Bulley) and a lighting designer (Christine Felmingham) are included in the performance personnel. Richard Mills conducts a partly unfamiliar cast: Mara Gaudenzi (Angelina), Petr Nekoranec (Don Ramiro), Samuel Dundas (Dandini; well I know this baritone and believe I’ve seen him in this role), James Roser (Don Magnifico), Shaun Brown (Alidoro), Sarah Crane (Clorinda), and Hayley Sugars (Tisbe). The Queensland Symphony Orchestra appears, as does the Opera Queensland Chorus. Full adult tickets range from $75 to $149; the concession rate is small and students pay the same. Never forget the $7.50 charge for the organizers being unable to handle credit cards without smashing the consumer around the head.

This performance will be repeated on Saturday March 8 at 1:30 pm.

THE BIRTH OF BEL CANTO

Opera Queensland

City Tabernacle Baptist Church

Wednesday March 5 at 7 pm

You get few indications of what exactly will be presented from the Opera Queensland site. You get much more information on the website of One Equal Music, the choral ensemble that is at work on this occasion. Apparently, bel canto begins with Renaissance madrigals by Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Strozzi (the recently discovered and extravagantly lauded female composer of the Baroque) ‘and others’ who, according to the OEM pages, are Verdelot, Lotti, Luzzaschi, Fresobaldi, de Wert, d’India and De Monte. From the organization’s ten or eleven members, we have six singers participating, sopranos Louise Prickett and Cara Fox , alto Eleanor Adeney, tenor Tomasz Holownia, bass James Fox. The ensemble, founded and directed by husband-and-wife team Adeney and Holownia, will be accompanied by an unnamed cellist and harpsichordist. A full adult admission is $65, with a reduction of $6 – count them – for concession card holders and students; children get in for about half-price. Still, as far as I can see, there’s no booking fee; must be the venue which is warding off that ever-menacing mammon of iniquity.

PETITE MESSE SOLENELLE

Opera Queensland and The University of Queensland

St Stephen’s Cathedral, 249 Elizabeth St.

Friday March 7 at 7 pm

It’s anything but little, as the composer well knew. When he got around to orchestrating it, the truth came out as the forces employed were very substantial. But this appears to be the original version for four soloists who emerge from the choir of twelve, two pianos and a harmonium. As this is a collaboration with the University of Queensland, the pianists are two of that institution’s staff: Anna Grinberg and Liam Viney. But it doesn’t stop there: the singers come from the University of Queensland Chamber Singers, the UQ Singers, and the Lumens Chamber Choir – which seems a lot to populate a chorale force of a dozen strong. Graeme Morton will play the organ (the cathedral doesn’t run to the more humdrum instrument?) and the whole will be conducted by Richard Mills. Recorded performances range from a bit over an hour to 80-85 minutes; lots of interpretative leeway, one would guess, but this reading is scheduled for 90 minutes uninterrupted. Ticketing follows the same process as for the Bel Canto recital: adults need $65, concession and student entrance is $59, a child gets in for $33. There’s no booking fee but it costs you $1.15 if you want your ticket)s) mailed.

RED DIRT HYMNS

Opera Queensland

Opera Queensland Studio, 140 Grey St., South Bank

Saturday March 8 at 7:30 pm

With this opus, composer Andrew Ford is providing us with secular hymns; I don’t know how many or specifically who is going to perform them. The poets involved are Sarah Holland-Batt, John Kinsella, and Ellen van Neerven. As for the performers, all that you can glean from Opera Queensland is that students are involved, and they come from the Jazz Department of the Queensland Conservatorium at Griffith University. Still, I’m puzzled by the genre promoted by Ford. A hymn is a song of praise, at bottom. It’s usually addressed to God or a deity of some kind. What we have here are praises of the everyday – ‘the shape of a vase or desire by a river bank at dusk’ are two projections from the OQ website. So the term has been distorted just a tad. When this kind of re-appraisal comes up, I automatically think of Brahms and the German Requiem where the Latin format is ignored and the composer sets a plethora of Biblical texts to do with death. But the construct doesn’t ignore the fundamental requirements for a requiem. I can imagine someone writing encomia to the things of this world, but hymns? Still, we’re in for a hefty dose of Australiana, if the red dirt descriptor is any indication. Anyway, Patrick Nolan is directing the event, so there’ll be a certain amount of staging involved, and the music director is Steve Newcomb who is, among other things, the Head of Jazz at the Queensland Conservatorium. The evening lasts for 80 minutes without interval and admission prices follow the same path as for previous OQ recitals across this month: $65 full adult, $59 concession and student, $33 a child, with no extra fees bar $1.15 if you want your ticket(s) mailed.

BARBER & PROKOFIEV

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday March 14 at 11 am

One of our favourite violinists, Canadian James Ehnes returns to Australia where he’s playing the 1939 Barber concerto: a suitable choice, just before the performer’s country becomes the 51st state, Mind you, Brisbane is the only city on Ehnes’ tour where he plays this work; the rest of the time, it’s Brahms pretty much all the way with a few Vivaldi and Mozart detours in Melbourne and Ballarat. All very nice, even if the American concerto isn’t long; but that leaves more time for encores, doesn’t it? The concert begins with conductor Jessica Cottis directing Matthew Hindson‘s Speed from 1997 which could be giving us a musical image of a racing car meet, or possibly the sensation of just driving quickly, or it could be an imaginative foray into the world of drug-taking. The frenetic pulse coming from a ‘synthetic’ drum-kit, this piece lasts for about 18 minutes, according to its publisher. Which makes it double the length of the Australian composer’s better-known Rush from 1999. Finishing this presentation comes the first movement of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, the only one of the seven that is potentially familiar these days to a discerning concert-goer. I’ve heard the No. 1 Classical all too often, and this one rarely. The others? Never. I suppose the reason behind having only the one movement played this morning is because this event forms part of the QSO’s Education series – and a little learning is more than enough in this era of ignorance. Adult prices for tickets range from $80 to $115, with the usual sliding scale for concession, student and child entry. You’ve still got to pay the $7.50 fee for broaching the Concert Hall doors.

This program will be repeated on Saturday March 15 at 7:30 pm, the only difference being that the QSO will play all of Prokofiev’s symphony. Full prices here move between $100 and $140, which means that three movements of Prokofiev are worth $20/$25 on the current Queensland market. And the $7.50 booking slug still applies.

JAMES ROSER & ALEX RAINERI – AN DIE MUSIK – SCHUBERT’S ART OF SONG

Opera Queensland

Opera Queensland Studio, 140 Grey St., South Bank

Friday March 14 at 7 pm.

These musicians won’t be hard-pressed for material. Fresh from his appearances as Don Magnifico in the company’s La Cenerentola , baritone James Roser takes on a selection of Schubert lieder, accompanied by Opera Queensland’s go-to accompanist, Alex Raineri. From the promotional material, we are hinted towards Wohin?, Der Lindenbaum, Rast, and ‘the harmonic pangs of unrequited love’ – which last covers a hell of a lot of Schubert territory. As well, patrons are probably justified in expecting the recital title’s setting of Franz von Schober’s verses. As for the rest of this hour-long program, you just have to trust to the discernment of the performers. I’m not that crazy about placing faith in many musicians who are faced with a white program slate, but I think that Raineri would have enough discretion to balance the well-known with some rarities. Ticket prices follow the same path as for the other recitals this month: $65 full adult, $59 concession and student, $33 per child – with the bonus of not having to front up the cash for any extra charges, except for $1.15 if you want your ticket(s) mailed.

This program will be repeated on Saturday March 15 at 2 pm.

TREE OF LIFE

Collectivo

Thomas Dixon Centre, 406 Montague Rd., West End

Saturday March 15 at 1:30 pm

The Collectivo ensemble is a mobile group, its participants moving in and out according to programmatic requirements. This first recital for the year features the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s concertmaster Andrew Haveron, oboe Tania Frazer (Collectivo’s artistic director), soprano Eden Shifroni, piano Vatche Jambazian, and cello Rachel Siu They’re beginning with Arvo Part‘s Fratres of 1977, probably played in the violin/piano combination. Then Shifroni sings two well-known arias: Lascia ch’io pianga from Handel’s 1711 opera Rinaldo, and Mozart’s Ach, ich fuhl’s lament from Pamina in Mozart’s The Magic Flute of 1791. Frazer comes on board with Schumann’s Romance No. 1 from the Op. 94 group of three, written in 1849. Just before interval, Shifroni returns for a selection of Debussy songs. So far, so varied; Yggdrasil would be pleased. No rest for the singer when we return as she says goodbye with Caccini’s (Vavilov’s) 1970 Ave Maria, just before Haveron and Jambazian combine for Franck’s epic Violin Sonata of 1886. The exercise concludes with a piece by Argentinian/Israeli clarinettist Giora Feidman called The Klezmer’s Freilach, released in 1998 and a brilliant sample of this branch of Jewish popular music; I’m assuming all the instrumentalists will join in this work to provide a rousing finale. It’s a regular two-hour recital with an interval and tickets cost a flat $74.50; there’s a transaction fee of $5 which is better than some but much worse than others.

LISZT & VERDI

Brisbane Chorale

St. John’s Cathedral, 373 Ann St.

Sunday March 30 at 2:30 pm

Conducted by Emily Cox, the Brisbane Chorale works through four gems of the repertoire, accompanied by organist Christopher Wrench. First up comes Liszt’s Via Crucis, a musical Stations of the Cross for soloists, four-part choir and organ written in 1878/9. This is a solid sing, lasting about an hour. We change from the funereal to the celebratory with Verdi’s Te Deum from the Quattro pezzi sacri, this extract dating from 1895/6 and lasting about 15 minutes (Verdi allowed for 12 only). It asks for two four-part choirs with a short soprano solo and you’d have to guess that Wrench will substitute for the original’s orchestra. Brahms’ Geistliches Lied of 1856 calls for a four-part choir with organ support. At a little over five minutes long, the piece interests for its contrapuntal severity and a combination of warmth and gloom. Finally, the Chorale contributes another five minute-plus delight with Faure’s Cantique de Jean Racine from 1864/5 when the composer was a student at the Ecole Niedermeyer. This also follows the Brahms lied‘s pattern of asking for a four-part choir and organ. Tickets cost $60 full price, $53 Centrelink concession, and $22 for a full-time student. The add-on handling fee is only $1.25, which at least is among the more piddling rates of extortion for using a credit card.

Diary February 2025

January 11, 2025January 12, 2025 cliveoconnell

OUR CLASSICAL FAVOURITES

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

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 Symphony Orchestra

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

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

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

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!

Southern Cross Soloists

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.