Author: cliveoconnell

Here we go again

cliveoconnell

A BEETHOVEN ODYSSEY

James Brawn

MSR Classics MS 1465

Brawn 1

Not that there’s any cause for complaint in facing another cycle of the Beethoven piano sonatas.  Such an exercise has occupied the talents of many artists, some of whom have brought new life to hoary standards from the well-worn catalogue; we would be much the poorer without the recordings from Arrau, Brendel and Pollini.   British-born and sometime-Australian resident James Brawn has entered the lists with this CD, which has been swiftly followed by three others; currently, he is exactly half-way through the cycle of 32 and, like any sensible artist, is not taking them on sequentially.

In this first essay, Brawn performs the first and last of the Op. 2 job-lot dedicated to Haydn, followed by the blistering Op. 57 in F minor, the Appassionata.   Each reading is finely calibrated in meeting the composer’s multiplex of technical demands, and the performer reaches a persuasive accommodation with the individual sonatas’ intellectual and emotional rigour.

Beginning at the beginning, Brawn impresses straightaway in the Op. 2 F minor Sonata No. 1, not least with his accounting for Beethoven’s sforzandi.   These are treated humanely, as abrupt interjections, not belts around the listener’s ear-hole.   So the texture remains clear throughout, especially in the first Allegro where Brawn avoids the usual trap of blurring passages of maximum activity, chiefly by observing a sensible dynamic spectrum and maintaining a brisk pace in which the trills are handled as integral icing.

The ensuing Adagio enjoys careful treatment with small touches of rubato that still preserve the movement’s fluency.   The only possible fault I could find in the Menuetto was one sforzando too many, while the finale was taken very fast, as required, with a sustained reliability of delivery in the segment’s chains of left-hand arpeggios.   A passage of particular interest comes between bars 161 and 172; excitingly urgent in its emphasis on the bass melody the first time around, then even more so with the reinforced right-hand doubling on the repeat.   Speaking of which, Brawn observes that of the movement’s second-half  – easy to accomplish in the studio, of course, but you rarely hear it in live performances, especially from younger interpreters.

For the Sonata No. 3 in C Major, the semiquaver passage-work comes across in emphatic and digitally decisive shape, yet the first movement’s exposition is distinguished by a generous fluency, only faltering at bars 156-8, the sole question mark in a set of pages that rattle past with fitting assurance and contentment.   For the Adagio, Brawn  is intent on observing melodic continuity rather than following the usual pattern and detaching notes in the onward flow, as from bar 43 inwards; unexpected, but it works for me.

A generously applied staccato dominates the Scherzo wherever slurs are not indicated, but the Trio is the opposite – a melange of pedal-sustained right-hand arpeggios.   In the spritzig Allegro finale, the lightly articulated attack is refreshing, as intended.   Here the only awkwardness comes in the busy pendant to the main theme from bars 8-16, and at its recurrence later on at 116-205 – but then I can’t recall another interpreter apart from Brendel who can give these segments some persuasive kind of organic continuity.

Ten years lie between these two works and the Op. 57 which is one of the four most popular of the composer’s output in this form.   Brawn’s reading has an admirable spaciousness right from the opening which is handled as a true Allegro rather than a shock-and-horror show of inconsistent metres.   In finding and communicating a structural cogency in these challenging pages, Brawn is distinguishing himself from the ruck; not afraid to give full weight to the composer’s explosive, almost manically insistent blocks of full chords alternating between the hands, and then giving an urgency to the counter-weighted piano leavening while avoiding any hint of neurasthenic twitching.   His account of the Piu allegro is exemplary, carried off with passion and lucidity, most notable in a bracing passage from bars 249-256 – as powerful and biting as you could want.

The pianist treats the central Andante‘s theme with deliberation, allowing himself the space to linger at a few points, although the following variations come across as regular without metronomic rigidity.  The last Allegro concludes the drama with plenty of character, its almost-continual restlessness carried off as all-of-a-piece, dynamically sensible and unflustered.   Brawn powers through the coda, hitting his left-hand accents manfully in the sonic mash of bars 325-340 and bringing the whole to a rousing conclusion.

This is sensible Beethoven, giving these sonatas a well-rounded airing and facing the interpretative problems with gusto and honesty.  Brawn’s command and sympathy are present on every page and I look forward to experiencing the rest of his efforts in this wide-ranging musical exploration.

Laying it all out

cliveoconnell

SATELLITE MAPPING

Amir Farid

Move Records MD 3402

Satellite Mapping

Released this year, here are the complete works for piano solo by Melbourne composer Stuart Greenbaum, a luminary of the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Music and a writer whose name is continually before the public.  In his 50th year, Greenbaum’s retrospective is being observed by pianist Amir Farid, one of the Benaud Trio musicians and a highly esteemed contributor to this city’s cultural life.   While this retrospective takes up a double CD, much of the music it contains is brief in length, and every so often slight in character.   Yet, because of the composer’s absorption of a wealth of influences from the serious and popular fields, his work has a consistent attractiveness, not afraid to show an inner emotional world that appeals across the potential spectrum of listeners, from those aware of musical developments over the past half-century to others who eschew background for straight-talking  –  not that these groups necessarily exclude each other.

The album follows the development of Greenbaum’s craft in temporal order, starting with the 1991 Portrait and Blues Hymn, recorded some time ago by Michael Kieran Harvey.   Farid’s handling of this miniature displays some basic elements in the composer’s style: a penchant for pauses, a grounding repetition of phrases with varying harmonic-block underpinning (or not), progressions straight from a jazz player’s vocabulary, an easily digestible formal lay-out.   It’s a birthday-celebration piece but its title eludes any definite interpretation.

One of the recording’s major works, Ice Man, follows.  Among the more impressive and sustained products in Greenbaum’s output, this three-movement set of meditations refers to  extracts from Andrew Scott’s Lost in the Himalayas memoir, which details the Australian doctor’s celebrated 43-day ordeal in 1991.   The first (and shortest)  part – Lost | The Moon | Don’t leave me here – presents an atmospherically quiescent sound scape that suggests a detached despair, erupting into a short blast of vehemence before returning to the prevailing placidity.   Picture of an anorexic | Dignity | The dream continues the prevailing pointillist writing style, projecting sound pictures of a landscape where nothing happens in the physical surroundings; only the sufferer’s mind has active flashes that fade to silence or lead to obsession, denoted by repeated chords, a series of arpeggiated or broken sequences that grow slightly by accretion.   But, over all, the  music speaks of isolation, even when Scott’s dream of addressing his family brings about a passage of relative magniloquence.   But in the end the activity dies away to a single repeated note, like a drop wearing away stone.

For the last movement, They must have seen me | Faint voices | Affinity,  the atmosphere changes from meditative to flurries of action, although Greenbaum returns to the passive mode when the excitement of a possible sighting by helicopter dissipates.  Not that the composer is following a script, but it is difficult not to project your own narrative for piano writing that is, at its core, pictorial/impressionist.   Common chords over an oscillating D octave pedal propose a return to humankind and the movement ends with a kind of reconciliation, Scott’s affinity being with the rock that sheltered him and his acceptance of the Himalayas’ beauty, despite their innate menace.  Farid outlines this work’s slow-paced poetry with a high sympathy, giving each gesture plenty of space and maintaining a steady pace through to its consolatory final bars.

Innocence (in Stillness) was written for a birth and may be familiar to some pianists from the AMEB Grade 2 syllabus; a melody punctuated by some simple bass notes and chords, it’s over before you know it.   Looking to the Future, composed as a theme for a play concerning the 1989 Newcastle earthquake, states a bluesy theme several times, then stops on a middle-instrument question – a real bagatelle.   From 1996 comes one of the composer’s more well-known pieces, But I Want the Harmonica which, in some ways, bears traces of the preceding two scraps.   Again, the work follows a clear path, its motivic  repetition sufficiently varied to sustain interest as a descending sequence of two-note gruppetti enjoys multiple accompanying variants with a heavy jazz colour at its high point.   This work exemplifies Greenbaum’s individual vein of melancholy not taking itself too seriously as he recalls with open-hearted benignity a childhood school experience that meant much to him.

The first CD ends with three pieces that cover ground similar to that already covered.  New Roads, Old Destinations attempts to illustrate an Escher drawing, one of those trade-mark building designs where stairs ascend and descend simultaneously.  Chords follow a downward path round a central ostinato, either inside the harmonic progression that forms the piece’s material, or below it.   The structure plays neatly with the concept of nothing changing except superficially; as in the Escher drawing, the actual lines remain the same, no matter how you perceive them.   First Light’s four-note basic motive offers a sort of reflection of the previous piece, the motion being upward over a central-keyboard ostinato.   And again, the added-note chords, even the modulations, are reminiscent of a soft-edged Shearing-style improvisation that rises to a powerful C sharp Major conclusion – yet  the almost inevitable, unsettling distant high notes that conclude the work offer a coda of quiet negation, or at least a question-mark.   At about half the length of the other two pieces in this concluding triptych, Fragments of Gratification presents an evanescent meditation on one, possibly two, themes which rises to a brief dynamic high-point at about 1:40 but its true air-space tenancy is coloured in soft pastels.   Composed on the last day of the previous millennium, it eschews hoo-rah celebration for a gently rueful anticipation.

Disc 2 begins with Equator Loops, a set of variations radiating our from a central D; this is one of the few points on either of these discs where Greenbaum asks for unabashed virtuosic playing, the concluding loops in particular wide-ranging and aggressive.  Three Optical Allusions presents as a short suite dealing with musical representations of a solar eclipse, a time-lapse photograph and a Mobius strip.  It is hard to avoid impressions during the second of these, a gradually expanded rising phrase over a fixed bass pattern, of hearing something like  organized doodling, while the third offers little more, except louder.

Four Thoughts remain in the same compositional continuum.  The End of Winter oscillates between two short phrases; For Oliver offers a touch more interest in its change-ringing on simple, if rhythmically varied melodic matter; the Escher (again) inspired Spirals moves into some interesting, almost adventurous territory after a somewhat numbing first half; Bagatelle for Aksel kept its mystery – it is based on a children’s song – until near its ending, but it brought to your attention how surprisingly orthodox is Greenbaum’s underpinning tonality.

Written for Elyane Laussade, Matilda Deconstructions takes fragments of Waltzing Matilda and, in the first segment, gives a driving minimalist-mimicking moto perpetuo; the second dissection, less rhythmically rigid, uses a five-note falling ostinato to support yet another set of wilting, decorative passages of play.

Glen Riddle recorded The 4th Saturday in April among a slew of Greenbaum occasional pieces two years ago, and Farid brings an equal gift of placid serenity to this wedding gift for a wedding that Greenbaum could not attend.   Evocation of 2006 sits as a kind of memento mori concerning one of Greenbaum’s students who died young; the Albeniz connection is a vague one, although the ostinato has some congruence with a permeating figure in the Spaniard’s piece.   And the composer’s avoidance of the anticipated in his disposition of the descending five-note scale pattern in the work’s last third is masterly.

Written for the birth of the composer’s daughter, Lavender for Hanna presents some quick variations on the British folk-song Lavender’s Blue; another miniature that is over very quickly.   More substance comes in Allusion, Introspection and Ascension which uses well-established piano masterpieces as springboards.  The first takes part of Chopin’s Barcarolle and superimposes a structure that oscillates between the chromatic versatility of the original and a patch of 1930s-era syncopation that brings the piece to a close in medias res.  Introspection extracts certain chord progressions from the finale to Schubert’s last B flat Major Sonata, but does not do very much with them; it’s as though the original is too self-sufficient to need much treatment – which rather defeats the purpose of the exercise.   The middle one of Liszt’s Petrarch Sonnets generates an exciting outburst in the last Ascension piece, even if the referrents are difficult to decipher until Greenbaum offers some literal quotes; Farid here provides a resonant interpretation of a piece that maintains its virtuosic roots.

The CD’s title work begins sparely before slowly passing to a roiling across-the-keyboard melange: an exercise in depicting the overwhelming detail that emerges as you hit the plus indicator on your Google map image.  It’s an ingenious concept – the gradual crescendo in information – yet it completes its work pretty rapidly; rather like the impatience most of us show when using a satellite map.   The CD ends with Fanfare for Elizabeth: not a royalist tribute but a piece written for the 80th birthday of Greenbaum’s mother.   It uses an optimistic rising four-note trumpeter’s motive but does not modulate outside its A Major framework; still, it’s emphatically a celebration, an occasion for jubilation, and a suitable conclusion to this lengthy remembrance of things past.

On the composer’s website, you can find analyses of some of the pieces on these discs, viz. First Light and two parts of the Ice Man set.  See http://www.stuartgreenbaum.com

Good start – and the rest?

cliveoconnell

HAYDN OPUS 20

Tinalley String Quartet

Move Records  MD 3374

Tinalley

We’ve enjoyed a lot of Haydn over the past few years; the Melbourne Festival saw to that.  For reasons beyond guessing, the complete string quartets were reviewed   –  by visiting ensembles who generally fitted in some Haydn among other works, as well as local groups taking up the challenge.   Any slack fell to students from the Australian National Academy of Music who lustily joined in the binge.   Not that the composer has suffered from so much neglect that he had to be resuscitated; you find that one of the quartets occupies pride of first place at many a chamber music event – sometimes being treated as a warm-up, on more reputable occasions handled with as much care as the executants give to their Beethoven or Shostakovich.

The Tinalley group has been constant in personnel for some years now: violins Adam Chalabi and Lerida Delbridge, viola Justin Williams, cello Michelle Wood.   At the same time as the members have taken up career positions – Chalabi at the University of Queensland, Delbridge and Williams with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Wood with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra – their performances here have decreased markedly in number, cut back this year to  a two-program series at the Recital Centre.   Certainly, the group performs at festivals throughout the year – Perth, McLaren Vale, Townsville, Bellingen, and a few oncers from Albany to Mount Macedon – but, as a matter of necessity, these musicians’ time together is limited.

So this CD of half the Op. 20 quartets – Nos. 1, 3 and 4 – is a welcome opportunity to hear the players in well-seasoned shape.  The works make an excellent exercise in contrasts of all kinds – texture, developmental processes, harmonic elisions and jumps, rhythmic surprises, allocation of responsibility.   More surprisingly, the start of each opus number presents a contrast in ensemble colour; it’s as though the players have re-thought their style of attack each time they take on one of these ground-breaking quartets.

During the first movement exposition of the D Major No. 4, you are taken immediately by the controlled volatility of the triplets in Chalabi’s line, as well as by the finely proportioned weighting of the playing, which obtains also through the following set of variations where the supporting roles remain part of the fabric rather than fading into quiescence.   But the gem in this work comes in the plainest-looking writing: the Menuet alla Zingarese with its clever off-centre shape  –  gypsy music of real character, and treated with controlled elation, notably when Wood takes the lead in the movement’s Trio.  And the work is finished off in exemplary fashion with a smart-as-paint Presto, distinguished by faultless duet work, deft dovetailing across all lines and as crisp a delivery of the pages’ frequent dotted quaver-semiquaver-crotchet rhythmic motif as you are likely to hear.

The No. 1 in E flat is a more galant creation at its opening, more curvaceous in its anatomy than its plain-speaking D Major companion.  Here the Tinalleys give another extended example of their craft with the Affetuoso e sostenuto‘s mezza voce delivery, packed with subtle variation in delivery while giving the impression of seamless uniformity of dynamic, while still giving the work’s fluid motion a few mild sforzando accents where required.   Another crisp Presto ends the performance, notable for the evenness of Chalabi’s syncopations and the interpolation of subtle touches like the slightest of rallentandi at bars 148-9 to give a tonal and metrical relief just before the placid last phrases.

To round out the disc, the Tinalleys have chosen No. 3 in G minor, which begins with unexpectedly asymmetric melodic lines – well, they don’t last as long as they should in a perfect world.   Here, the details are lavishly spread around, like Williams’ semiquaver/trills from bars 41 to 44, brisk without being flurried and mirrored with panache by Delbridge 80 bars further along.   The following Allegretto features phrases of odd lengths but these players pronounce them with a dissembling persuasiveness so that you have to listen hard to realise that Haydn has inserted extra bars.   An arresting event comes close to the start of the Poco adagio where the three upper strings sustain  viol-like chords while Wood outlines semiquaver commentary for ten luminous bars.   It somehow suggests stasis and motion simultaneously and is only one of the praiseworthy passages in this set of pages – for me, the outstanding track on the CD.    The finale is dominated by Chalabi, but you also get to admire again partnership passages of high quality between the two violins and the Williams/Wood collaboration.

Every so often, Haydn inserts a unison, a sort of semi-colon in the narrative.   These musicians handle such tests without flinching and the sympathetic resonances that result speak volumes for their precision.    Of course, these are obvious instances of successful synchronicity and you can find finer instances when the texture becomes more complex in the first movement development sections of all three quartets.   The members maintain a lucidity in their work: no overstatement, no milking a phrase for sentiment, no step off the rational and civilized path that Haydn set down in these light-filled scores.   All we need now is for the Tinalleys to complete the opus with another CD of this excellent standard.

.

Home-grown talent, for a change

cliveoconnell

BLAZING BAROQUE

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

Sunday July 31, 2016

16ABO BlazingBaroque MELB opening-133

                                                                      Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

As artistic director/conductor/harpsichordist Paul Dyer pointed out in his first address on Sunday evening, this concert from the ABO featured no overseas guests but put to the forefront members of the orchestra itself, generating a congenial home-grown feel about proceedings as the ensemble worked enthusiastically through six works from the Baroque.  ‘Blazing’ is not really the adjective I would have used to typify the results, or even the group’s intentions; it suggests final curtain time in Gotterdammerung or Berlioz’s Requiem at its least penitential – but some points in this concerto-filled event proved exciting for all the right reasons.

The ABO concertmaster, Shaun Lee-Chen, was worked very hard, taking the solo line in Vivaldi’s D Major Violin Concerto, Il Grosso Mogul, then having the lion’s share of the work in the same composer’s Concerto in F Major RV 569 which also calls for pairs of oboes and horns, and finishing his work-load with Fasch’s Concerto in D Major.  The common cry is that the Italian composer’s work carries a great deal of facile passage work, indulges in repeated semiquaver patterns, employs focal melodies that don’t strain the diatonic budget.   These strictures are true, after a fashion, but all too often the solo violin is dangerously exposed for long stretches; the exponent has to operate in sections of the Mogul at a high tessitura; for example, the bariolage leading up to bar 50 of the first Allegro.

It’s not a work for the faint-hearted and Lee-Chen made a positive attack on it, crackingly paced and generally reliable in pitch with a few question-marks over the very top notes of his part – nothing that grated but a few points in an extended pattern that didn’t quite hit the centre.   Still, much appreciated was the extemporised-sounding Recitative leading into the Grave.    As for the final movement, what took attention here was an impressive bite to the company’s open D strings that emerged in the arpeggio-rich  ritornelli.  One of the concert’s chief pleasures came in the concerted enthusiastic gutsiness of the Brandenburgers in full voice.

Telemann’s Grand Concerto in D Major, the one with the unusual catalogue name TWV deest, asks for pairs of oboes (Emma Black and Kirsten Barry) and trumpets (Leanne Sullivan and Alex Bieri).  As always, you have to admire how much this fecund creator could make of a common chord, getting it to supply such vigorous material.  In the active second movement Allegro, both wind pairs impressed for the precision of their enunciation with only one suspicious blurt from an oboe and barely any spliced notes from the trumpets.   Other elements that grabbed attention were the rich, reverberant bass notes booming from Tommie Andersson‘s theorbo in the opening Spirituoso-Adagio-Spirituoso sequence, and the mobile energy of Richard Gleeson‘s timpani, notably the expressive crescendos achieved within very short bursts of notes.

I know that for most Baroque aficionados, the period-authentic horn is unremarkable, but I still find it a singular achievement that players confined to crooks can produce well-balanced, consistent lines without cracking some of the notes.   For The Vivaldi RB 569 per molti strumenti, Darryl Poulsen and Doree Dixon outlined their parts with force and an exactitude that rarely faltered, their sustained trills a sonic delight of this reading.  The addition of bassoon Peter Moore to the mix had some slight impact on the exposed woodwind sequences, but the outstanding voice was that of Lee-Chen, for whom the other soloists gave way in the brief central Grave – a 20-bar D minor siciliano with the violin a constant presence, chiefly supported by violins and violas only and here elegantly soulful in its expressiveness.

The duet work of flautist Melissa Farrow and Mikaela Oberg‘s recorder in Telemann’s E minor double concerto provided this concert’s high point; their shapely phrasing, down to mutually agreed breathing points,  exemplary in both largo and fast movements.   Also impressive was the dynamic equity of the partnership, vital in a score like this with so much dovetailing, imitation and stretches of parallel 3rds.   In fact, the performance kept on getting better, through the pizzicato-accompanied second Largo duet into the driving vehemence of the concluding Musette, with director Dyer contriving a brisk accelerando in the final ripieno bars.   This Murdoch Hall performance was recorded; and it would be worth listening to the broadcast, most particularly for this excellent, piercingly fine-spun reading  (ABC Classic FM, Thursday August 11, 1 pm).

For the Fasch concerto, Lee-Chen was joined by the two oboes and attendant bassoon, three trumpets, timpani, Andersson’s theorbo and the well-exercised Brandenburg string corps.   The upper range problem recurred in the solo violin’s E string top notes, although the rest of the player’s work proved accurate enough.   In this assertively-speaking score, if anywhere, you could find passages of burnished energy to justify the concert’s title, but the weighty orchestral force outweighed the solo violin’s carefully-spun sound-colour, so that the tutti punctuations dwarfed Lee-Chen’s output.   Yet again, we were treated to a work with a wealth of display but it needed a stronger right arm to produce a more aggressive and sustained attack.  Not exactly a disappointment, you were left with the impression that either the orchestra had been over-encouraged, or the soloist needed to lift his dynamic by several notches.

Old favourites in safe hands

cliveoconnell

SPANISH GUITAR MUSIC

Andrew Blanch

Andrew Blanch

A young artist with no time to waste, Andrew Blanch is a graduate of the Australian National University and he has self-produced this collection which holds, inter alia, several well-known highlights from the repertoire; which is to say, if you’ve been familiar with the work of Segovia and his successors for the last 60 years or so, little on the disc will come as a surprise.  From this exhibition of musical craft, Blanch is quite justified in putting his talent before the public.  The versions that he offers of the staples are freshly considered and capable; as well, there are several pieces here that you won’t hear often these days but which have been allowed unfairly to fall by the wayside.

Inevitably, Blanch presents some arrangements, but they are pretty much all of high quality, including two Pujol transcriptions of extracts from Falla’s El amor brujo, Leo Brouwer‘s straightforward take on a Scarlatti sonata, an expertly constructed version of Albeniz’s Sevilla by expatriate Cuban master Manuel Barrueco, and three other works re-scored by Blanch’s teachers, Timothy Kain and Minh Le Hoang.

For the rest, the disc’s content is exactly what it promises.  Along with Tarrega’s all-too-familiar Recuerdos de la Alhambra comes the same composer’s Variations on the Carnival of Venice after Paganini, three of the 24 Caprichos de Goya by Castelnuovo-Tedesco (all right – an honorary Spaniard), three transparent Catalan folksongs by Llobet, and Turina’s haunting Fandanguillo.

Blanch’s readings are expertly shaped, trusting to the music to make its own points without having to exert any theatrical gestures.  For example, the opening track – the Miller’s Dance from Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat ballet (arranged by Kain) – is handled with a welcome sense of give and take.   Its biting farruca rhythm and the concurrent patches of rasgueado propose a stately drama; then Blanch pulls the tension back for the open-ended melodic theme that follows, and even the stringendo climax is articulated with controlled excitement rather than the customary lurch towards applause-inducing hysteria.  The third piece of Blanch’s Falla bracket, Song of the Will-o’-the-Wisp, offers a similar study by emphasizing the striking colour of the surrounding framework while delivering the lyrical melody itself with a comparatively restrained dynamic.

Tarrega’s well-known tremolo study coloured by memories of the Granadan palace/fortress is given an unexpectedly moderated reading, Blanch’s maintenance of the melody carried out without any automatism but with precisely managed and appropriate touches of rubato, the piece’s digital difficulties negotiated with a reassuring uniformity of attack.   Later, in the first of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Caprichos, El sueno de la razon produce monstruos, the twin lines of melody and active supporting bass come across with mutual clarity; nothing is underplayed or recessed but the central lyric remains perceptible.  For all that, the emotional content itself is hardly indicative of the monsters that Goya envisioned; too controlled in its vocabulary to bring horrors to the mind, I would have thought.

The Sevilla by Albeniz (Barrueco’s transcription sticks to the original piano solo’s G Major) is less busy than many another guitarist makes it, Blanch giving a slight emphasis by way of a minute fermata to the full chords that start each phrase in the outer segments.   But his semiquaver figure-work is immaculate and the central C minor meno mosso delivery offers an unusual but appropriately musing interlude.  With the three Llobet settings, Blanch fleshes out pretty stark material on the page with a wealth of vivid detail, including carefully articulated harmonics in the outer folksongs.  The simplest of these, El testament d’Amelia, provides one of the more sensitive interpretations on the CD, Blanch taking pains to give weight to the top line at the two points where the melody moves to octave harmonics and also on its final appearance when it is positioned inside the accompaniment.

The performer outlines Llobet’s Scherzo-Vals with a deft application of humour, especially in the articulation of the piece’s signature acciaccaturas, and then throughout its length with an old-time elasticity of metre, hesitating before nodal points and then launching back into the dance pulse with gusto.  He takes this sample of salon music and infuses it with affection and bonhomie, right up to a supple account of the brief coda.  The following pair of Scarlatti sonatas remain in their original keys, Brouwer’s version of the G Major K. 146 the more successful for its easy flow of arpeggios and busy sequences of repeated 2nds.  Minh Le Hoang made fair work of transporting the A minor K. 175 to this new medium but the piece ranks among the composer’s more percussive sonatas  –  full of drama, punctuated by harmonic clashes and requiring a hefty dynamic output.   Once heard, Rafael Puyana’s explosive 1966 recorded account set the bar for the work’s fierce emotional imprint, which is only faintly echoed in this gentlemanly treatment.

Still, the Carnival of Venice variations are a congenial way to end this self-introductory display.   Not as ferociously finger-stretching as the Paganini set that inspired Tarrega, they offer plenty of challenges, although Blanch – like any sensible player – picks the most congenial and personable from the composer’s uneven sequence.   If you want legerdemain, it’s here in spades: after a lengthy introduction comes a high-spirited gambol to leaven some of the the collection’s more sombre, meditative tracks.

In all, this disc bears strong witness to the guitarist’s interpretative skill as he turns from cornerstones of the instrument’s repertoire, through exacting arrangements, to virtuosic show-pieces.  It’s an auspicious and welcome start to his recording career and you can find further details about him at http://www.andrewblanch.com

A true individual speaks

cliveoconnell

PSYCHOSONATA

Michael Kieran Harvey

Move Records MD 3368

Psychosonata

Composer/pianists weren’t thin on the ground in the 19th or even the 20th centuries, times when the modern instrument came into its own as the instrument of choice for postulant musicians, even if it’s been superseded by the guitar over the last 50 years.   The species is not unknown in Australia.   There’s the grandfather figure of Grainger leading the team, with Dulcie Holland, Miriam Hyde and Malcolm Williamson a few decades later.   Keith Humble knew his way round the keyboard, as does his near-contemporary Larry Sitsky.   Richard Meale comes to mind for his famed Messiaen interpretations, although I never heard him play his own work.  Carl Vine is an outstanding representative of this cross-over musician type.    But the younger creator-performers remain an amorphous quantity   –   plenty of composers but few are exponents of their own creations for piano.

Then there’s Michael Kieran Harvey who has set the bar for virtuosity in this country for about 25 years, with the capacity to turn his hand(s) to anything he’s asked.    A generous exponent of other writers’ works, he shows on this CD that his compositional craft is just as formidable.   Mind you, much of this music speaks to Harvey’s actual pianism: restless, driving, dexterously complex, reminding you at every turn of his live concerts and recitals where the act of music-making becomes startlingly physical as the material gushes from the piano in an unstoppable stream, whether it’s Brahms or Bartok.

Harvey takes part in all seven works recorded here.   He opens with the longest construct, his Psychosonata, Sonata No. 2.   Its title is due to the work’s commissioning by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, the first performance coming at that body’s Hobart conference in 2012.   Divided into three movements, it begins with furious action that does not let up; even when the dynamic level reduces, Harvey’s fingers keep flying.   The composer’s notes refer to sonata form and every so often you feel a developmental pattern – but mostly not; rather, episode follows episode with the spirit of Bartok looming large through the work’s percussiveness and use of ostinati.   As for the work’s language, it presents as enthusiastically atonal, with concords intentionally avoided.   At points, the right hand action is impossibly mobile; you cannot conceive how the action is sustained for so long.    Sill, the  sound is splendidly engineered, catering for Harvey’s tendency to work simultaneously at both extremes of the keyboard and producing a clear-speaking mix.

The work’s movements meld into each other, so that the slower second one is upon you without notice.   A more passive emotional atmosphere prevails, the activity conducted above a resonantly gruff bass register continuum for some time; the advance goes slowly with insistent decorative interpolations in the treble that move to rapid scale passages in both hands before a return to aggression at about the 3:20 mark.   Yet Harvey maintains a discipline over any outbursts, while not letting go of the expressionist nightmare his musical scenario proposes here, passages of near-placidity merged with obsessive freneticism.

The final movement moves straight back to the athletic vaulting of the sonata’s opening.  After a temporally confusing introductory few pages,  it settles into a triple metre  – Harvey’s concept of a vivace gigue , possibly.   The lava flow is disrupted by relieving interludes, moderate in attack and fluency.   Even in the last pages where the activity halts for isolated blurts, the underpinning restlessness is never far away.  Yet, as a picture of psychopathic or psychotic thought processes, the sonata presents as organized and directed, its processes too purposeful to convince the listener of any erratic mental depictions.

Cellist Alister Barker collaborates with Harvey in Kursk, referring to the Russian submarine that sank in the Barents Sea in 2000 with all hands killed.   This duet has the piano generate a relentless underpinning, as though the sonata is being revisited.   Barker’s cello line presents as angular, sharp-edged writing.   The work is clearly speaking in anger, in protest as both instruments remind you of racing pulses reacting to the catastrophe.  This moves to a lament that suggests life dwindling, the  souls’ candles extinguished.   A cello cadenza rises to an uncomfortably insistent high sustained note and the last moments revert to the aggression, the string instrument executing a rising scale with double-stop support while Harvey’s piano smashes out punctuating chord clusters, the whole ending with a fierce assertiveness and insistence: you don’t forget, you can’t forget.

Fear, the disc’s second-longest work, features violinist Natsuko Yoshimoto.   Harvey takes his impetus for this duet from Bertrand Russell’s 1943 An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish, citing a paragraph that concludes with the philosopher-mathematician’s well-known observation: ‘To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom . . . ‘    Which is fine as an aspiration, an ambition, although this piece’s tone appears to be more neurasthenic than the disc’s eponymous sonata.   The keyboard is confined to the upper part of its compass as it escorts the violin through various characteristics of a fearful state – a nervous tic, an urge towards hysteria, a burst of compelling trauma.    Yoshimoto works through several cadenza-type passages that present aural images of nervous twitching, a teetering on the edge of control, until the violin is left alone at the end, a single voice that doesn’t reach any resolution.

For Melbourne pianist Stephen McIntyre’s 70th birthday four years ago, Harvey produced his Mazurka, which has traces of the more heroic products of Chopin,  with one absolute quote near its end from the B flat Op. 7 piece.   Both an ebullient and a neat tribute, it is unabashedly more representative of the writer’s personality than that of the dedicatee.

A four-movement Homage to Liszt continues the references to Harvey’s virtuoso composer forebears.  With Eugene Ughetti‘s percussion seconding the pianist’s assured bounding, the opening Ballade attracts through its jazz-influenced starting pages, its liveliness punctuated by a reference or six to actual Liszt pieces.  The following Waltz seems to be nothing of the kind, even if the piano and drum-kit partnership makes an infectious combination; the Harmonies du soir study is discernible if you stretch your ears.  A Csardas offers a brisk parody of the Hungarian dance, at its most striking in a piano/percussion statement-response passage.   Consolation contains a melody line in the piano doubled by a keyed percussion instrument I couldn’t identify, but the piece’s surrounding preamble and coda come from a different world than the Liszt pieces referred to in the title.

Tristram Williams gives an invigorating interpretation of the Etude for Trumpet in C.  The composer plays rhythmic games non-stop in this brightly-textured piece that begins as a piano toccata escorting a jumpy brass line.    As in the preceding duets, the keyboard doesn’t take a back seat but insists on equal status, and equal work-load.   At 3:40, Williams employs a mute so that the heat fades somewhat, even if the impetus is not slowed, the combined output remaining spiky.   Of course, the mute comes out for the last brisk minute and the collaboration – a taxing one with its metrical complexities – comes to an abrupt end.

City of Snakes – using B flat bass clarinet, piano, bass and drums – refers to Hobart, Harvey’s home town and apparently a city subject to reptile infestations in bush-fire season.   This brings into play Ashley William Smith, who impressed me mightily with his ANAM account some years ago of the Lindberg Clarinet Concerto.   The final piece on this CD is a vehicle for Smith’s instrument which occupies the sonic forefront.   In its very accessible be-bop rush, Ughetti takes the floor for a substantial solo break and Harvey keeps himself busy.  The bass player remains unidentified and his/her actual sound is an inconclusive one – is it electric, natural, or over-miked?    Whatever, the work’s effect is optimistic, summoning up memories of 1960s Melbourne jazz club fare, if more exciting in its bravado than much that you heard live in that decade.

Harvey as a performer is full-frontal, unapologetic, master of a rolling sonority even when the music is emotionally recessive.   This exhibition of his compositions shows how complementary the acts of creation and performance are for him.   While the shorter duets and concluding quartet hold your attention for the craft exerted in their combinations and alterations of sonorities, I think that the half-hour sonata gives the listener a bitingly clear picture of the remarkable musician’s intellectual and  –  for want of a better word – spiritual attributes.   As a study of the composer/pianist at work, this Sonata No. 2 gives us unmistakable essential Harvey.

Figaro the big winner

cliveoconnell

THE BARBER OF SEVILLE

Opera Queensland

Playhouse, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Thursday July 21, 2016

Brett Carter

                                                                                       Brett Carter

There’s a lot to like about the new production (shared with Seattle Opera and New Zealand Opera) of Rossini’s masterwork, presented by Opera Queensland.   The single set works pretty well; Matthew Marshall‘s lighting design has some surprises but little obtrusiveness; Lindy Hume‘s direction has some excellent touches of laugh-out-loud comedy as well as a few spots that are groan-worthy.  Roland Peelman has made a seemingly effortless glide from the rarefied Song Company recital scene to the pit of Brisbane’s Playhouse, and the Opera Queensland Chorus made a good showing in this version which gives extranumeraries a lot of scope; probably more than Rossini would have imagined, but who’s looking?

More importantly, the set of principals I saw were well-prepared, as close to note-perfect as the composer allows, given the frantic pace of a few ensembles.  This performance  – and, I assume, the others in which he was cast – were dominated by Brett Carter who has enjoyed plenty of experience in the title role.   He has a solid and flexible baritone, evident from his self-introductory aria which maintained its polysyllabic fluency without garbling or leaving out notes.   A lithe figure, costumed to accentuate his height, Carter shows an appealing character, responsive to everybody else and slotting into place with admirable skill.   Possibly his finest showing is Act 1 where in the sequence from Largo al factotum, through the sparkling All’idea di quel metallo/Ah, che d’amore duet with Almaviva, across the interchanges with Rosina, up to the brilliant finale, Carter sustained his line with equanimity and proficiency.

He had companions in this professionalism.   David Hibbard‘s Don Basilio surprised by the vibrancy and power of his vocal equipment, the La calunnia solo given with just enough suggestiveness, not falling into the trap of over-emphasizing its inbuilt crescendo.  In fact, each time Hibbard opened his mouth, that orotund bass impressed for its masculine darkness, as though the singer had just come from an audition for Boris.   As with Carter, the singer worked efficiently in ensembles, notably the Mi par d’esser gallop.

Andrew Collis confused us very nicely.  On his first entrance, announcing to Basilio that he intended to marry his ward that day, his Bartolo looked and sounded the stock characterisation: elderly to the point of doddering, vocally reserved, an impossible match for the young person who has just introduced herself at length.  Two scenes later and Bartolo appeared with a full head of post-Elvis hair, a much more aggressive vocal colour, altogether a more formidable manipulator (he thinks) of the household and all who live in it.   As with his fellow baritone/bass principals, Collis made a coherent personality, riding over others when required, although his final capitulation to events could have been negotiated with more amplitude; as it was, Bartolo’s two-line surrender was a side-of-stage business, unremarkable in this staging even though it triggers the exhilarating last number.

Emily Burke made a colourful Berta; at first, a potentially malevolent guardian for Rosina, then more inclined to mischief.   Her account of this character’s one chance to shine, Il vechietto cerca moglie, successfully communicated exasperation with the whole mess going on in the Bartolo establishment, possibly a tad heavy in its enunciation of a pretty simple jogging tune.   Brian Lucas as the almost-silent Ambrogio presented a character something like an albino Lurch on secondment from the Addams Family, decrepit but entertaining for his clumsiness – right up to the point where he and Berta clearly have off-stage sex, after which their appearances were played for lustful laughs and, of course, they attracted your eyes at every entrance after the mid-Act II storm, right up to the final curtain where they were placed centre-stage: a down-to-earth working-class counterbalance to Almaviva and Rosina’s semi-aristocratic infatuation.   Shaun Brown as Fiorillo opened the opera efficiently, preparing the stage for his master’s unproductive serenade and did so with ample fussiness and that anticipated hopeless ineptitude in keeping his hired musicians under control.

Virgilio Marino sang Almaviva, the disguised count in love with Bartolo’s ward who eventually gets the girl.   His opening appearance was not reassuring; the treatment of Ecco ridente in cielo sounded heavy-handed, the line delivered with force rather than lilting, as though Marino wasn’t sure that he’d be heard over Rossini’s placid string support.   Not every tenor is a Tagliavini but this opera is not coloured for drama and the Count has to show suppleness and amorousness.   Much better came later when Marino shared vocal exposure, and you could not find much to complain of in his drunken soldier impersonation.   But you were left thinking that a lot less force and grinding effort would have given the work better service.

Much the same lack of lucidity informed the opening Una voce poco fa of Katie Stenzel whose ornamentation came over as studied rather than frolicsome.  I’m unsure as to who started this fashion for large infusions of fioriture in the aria – it might have been an expectation from Righetti-Giorgi right up to Sutherland – but unless the embellishments can be tossed off without stress, then the piece’s progress turns into a series of tension-inducing hurdles.   And again, as soon as Stenzel moved into recitative, Rosina became the attractively determined and quick-thinking personality that should shine out from every bar she sings.  Further on, Stenzel showed a clean pair of vocal heels in the decorated opening strophes to Freddo e immobile, although admittedly the line here lies fairly low.

Some moments during the production seemed odd, if not inappropriate.  Having the chorus move into slow-motion/freeze positions during the Act I finale was preferable to having them all standing around simply singing, but the effect looked laboured, not at all suggestive of the green-lit phantasmagoria of confusion that was intended.   And the idea of turning the music lesson into sexual mimicry, with Rosina gasping through her aria and Almaviva employing his harpsichord as a penile substitute was effective in amusing the audience  –  but is it in the music?  And, more importantly, does it gel with the rest of the work’s action?    I thought it didn’t, but then I’m a prude from down south.

Peelman’s conducting of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra – or some of it – was adroit, inclined to hurry the work along, which I like.  The overture had some dodgy brass moments but the string body generated a full-bodied output in this medium-sized theatre.  Still, the outstanding instrumental work of the evening came from guitarist Andrew Veivers who spent a lot of time onstage providing the accompaniment for the recitatives – from memory.  That’s the kind of touch that makes a performance spring to life.

In all, a brisk and attractive Barber, noteworthy for its eponymous hero and the senior characters of the tale.   For all my reservations about the young lovers’ vocal straining, much of the performance proved highly enjoyable, often clever in its disposition of personnel, and eventually satisfying even the most carping observer at that brilliantly uplifting last polonaise, Di si felice innesto, choreographed with modest restraint by the Sydney Dance Company’s Rafael Bonachela.

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August Diary

cliveoconnell

Monday August 1

Strauss & Lavish Opulence

Kristian Chong & Friends

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

Hosting the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Natsuko Yoshimoto, talented pianist Chong presents a program just varied enough to stand out from the ruck.  The pair open with Brahms in A, the middle and most contentedly happy of the three violin sonatas.  And they end with the Richard Strauss in E flat, a welter of melodic lushness from the 24-year-old.   As a makeweight comes Australian composer Arthur Benjamin’s 1924 Sonatine in three movements, a substantial piece written over a decade before Benjamin made it big with his Jamaican Rumba, a popular hit, so much so that after his death the rest of his substantial body of work was ignored.

 

Thursday August 4

Time’s Arrow

Flinders Quartet

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

With a title to send a chill down the spines of those of us who can feel the avalanche of advancing age, the Flinders ensemble are playing three quartets in their latest subscription series.   Britten’s No. 2 in C sets them off, that wonderfully apposite celebration of the 250th anniversary of Purcell’s death, ending with a lyrically forceful Chacony.  The Beethoven Harp in E flat will serve to revive our memories in the process of reviewing the group’s interpretation of this work in their extended cycle of the complete set some years ago.  The first of Stuart Greenbaum’s six quartets gives the night its title; composed in 1991, the composer has spoken of its indebtedness to the Britten No. 2.   We’ll see.

 

 

Thursday August 4

Elgar, Bach, Puccini & Dvorak

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 8 pm

Canadian violinist James Ehnes is back to direct and play solo in a pleasant enough set of works.  The Elgar Introduction and Allegro offers an easy Edwardian sweep of melodic warmth for a willing string body.   Ehnes takes front-of-stage for the Bach Concerto No. 2 in E Major, probably the composer’s most well-known string concerto after the Double in D minor (and ignoring those Brandenburgs ).   Filling in time, Puccini’s Crisantemi is outed; it featured as a gap-filler/encore in Australian Chamber Orchestra concerts many years ago and is charming large-salon music.   At the end, Ehnes leads his forces in the Dvorak String Serenade.   I have a suspicion that he has played/directed some of this program on previous visits; whatever the case, he’s one of the finest violinists operating today and we are fortunate that he keeps on returning to Melbourne.

The program will be repeated on Friday August 5 in Costa Hall, Geelong at 8 pm and on Saturday August 6 at 6:30 pm in Hamer Hall.

 

Saturday August 6

Traversing the Passage of Time

Endeavour Trio

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

Clarinet Paul Dean, cellist Trish O’Brien and pianist Stephen Emmerson have also put together a program that veers just far enough off the beaten track to avoid conservative discomfort.   Their recital opens with the Debussy Cello Sonata, the first of the composer’s projected cycle of six; it always strikes me as unfinished, stopping before it deserves to, but by the end the string player’s bowing strength and projection have been severely tried. All three musicians come together for the Brahms Trio in A minor, the first of the four masterworks involving the woodwind instrument; thanks once again, Richard Muhlfeld. At the centre of the evening stands a new work by Dean which gives this night its title; well, pretty new – it receives its premiere at the Queensland Conservatorium on July 28 before emerging again in an Accompanists’ Guild of South Australia Festival at the end of this month, so it should be well played-in by the time we hear it.

 

Sunday August 7

Enchanting Woodwinds

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Iwaki Auditorium Southbank at 11 am

Next in the series of very well-attended chamber music recitals peopled by MSO members, this one features braces of flutes, oboes, bassoons and horns as well as Philip Arkinstall’s clarinet and the piano of Louisa Breen.   Giovanni Batista Riccio’s Sonata a 4 – one of them – has been arranged by contrabassoonist extraordinaire Brock Imison for winds (obviously, considering Riccio was a dab hand at using recorders).   A more challenging arrangement comes in Jonathan Russell’s 2010 version of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, here in an abridged format for wind quintet.   After that, the rest of the morning settles into a relatively orthodox pattern with Jean Francaix’s oboe/bassoon/piano Trio and the Poulenc Sextet, a work that troubled the writer into years of reconstruction.

 

Tuesday August 9

Here Will Be My Ending

Hamer Quartet

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

This group has reformed after some time away from the chamber music front-line. Original members Rebecca Chan (violin), Stephanie Farrands (viola) and Michael Dahlenburg (cello) have invited some guests to help them out; on this night, it’s the turn of Sydney musician Doretta Balkizas.   The event takes its impetus from Schubert’s last words, asking on his deathbed for a performance of Beethoven’s C sharp minor Quartet: one of those final engrossing products that still challenge executants, no matter how experienced.   Speaking of Schubert, his nervous Quartettsatz opens the group’s account, which then moves to Richard Meale’s Cantilena Pacifica, the final movement of his String Quartet No. 2 which for me represents the nadir of the Australian composer’s accomplishment; aimless and sugary.   It has become one of the writer’s most loved and performed pieces, so what do I know?

 

Thursday August 11

Our Space

Syzygy Ensemble

Melbourne Recital Centre 6 pm

The contemporary music group offers a tour of current or near-current Australian composition, starting with pianist Peter de Jager’s Mosaic, one of three works on this five-segment program that is enjoying its world premiere.  May Lyon’s Ode (as opposed to Road)  to Damascus suggests too many options to even guess at.  Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh contributes Contemplations, which has Messiaenic overtones.  Kate Neal’s Piano Trio No. 1 has apparently been performed elsewhere, although I can’t find out where and by whom. And Mary Finsterer’s quintet Circadian Tale 7.1 for cor anglais, alto sax, piano, violin and cello enjoys its first performance in four years and, as far as superficial research can detect, is the ‘oldest’ (2009) music on this program.  A lot of music to pack into an hour but the performers are experts in this field.

 

 Thursday August 11

Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

James Ehnes puts in a second appearance, this time under conductor Sir Andrew Davis.  He puts his talents to work on the Richard Strauss Violin Concerto, a rarely heard part of the violin virtuoso repertoire and a work that the Canadian musician hasn’t recorded – yet. Mind you, I’d be happy listening to Ehnes playing pretty much anything from hoary Bruch in G minor to Barber.   Sir Andrew begins with Elgar – his In the South (Alassio) extended overture, a favourite with English audiences although it hasn’t travelled as well as the Enigma Variations; but then, neither has Falstaff.   As a balance to the English work, Mendelssohn’s fine symphony proposes images of an old-time Italy, seen through rose-tinted glasses but, at worst,  a great sound-track for a tourism-promoting video, and at best, an exhilarating half-hour (well, 27 minutes) of rattlingly persuasive enthusiasm.

The program will be repeated on Friday August 12 and Saturday August 13 in Hamer Hall at 8 pm.

 

 Saturday August 13

Laughter and Tears

Victorian Opera

Palais Theatre St. Kilda at 7:30 pm.

The aim here is to juxtapose the fun of a real circus (Circus Oz) with the tragic tale of Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci,  which actually concerns a theatre troupe but the parallels stand up.   In the night’s first part, VO singers will perform works appropriate to 17th and 18th century theatre  – arie antiche by Vecchi, Banchieri and others – while the Circus Oz people do their various things with a commedia dell’arte framework.   Nothing wrong with that: the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra has shown the way through its collaborations last year with the Circa company, and the MSO has just completed a set of concerts with the Cirque de la Symphonie gymnasts from the US.   As for the one-act opera, its cast includes Elvira Fatykhova as Nedda, Rosario La Spina singing Canio, baritone James Clayton as Tonio.  The company’s artistic director Richard Mills conducts.

The production will also be presented on Tuesday August 16 and Thursday August 18, both nights at 7:30 pm.

 

Sunday August 14

Mozart’s Piano

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 2:30 pm

With William Hennessy at the controls, this enthusiastic band is performing four Mozart works, including two piano concertos with New York-based Australian musician David Fung as soloist.  The orchestra brackets the afternoon’s work with the delectable Serenata Notturna and the Symphony in A No. 29 – one of the more effortlessly expressive, simple-looking scores that the adolescent composer produced.   Fung fronts No. 11 in F with its unusual first movement in 3/4 time, and the No. 14 in E flat – another one of the three concertos with a 3/4 opening.   Although the later of these is valued as opening the formidable concerto output that leads up to the final B flat triumph, you rarely hear either of these works live.   Both have wind parts but they provide little interest with practically no substantial contributions, apart from expanding the sonic fabric at isolated moments, so Hennessy will probably omit them.

This program is also being performed on Friday August 12 at 7:30 pm at the Deakin Edge, Federation Square.

 

Monday August 15

East to West

Inventi Ensemble

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

I still haven’t heard this ensemble or its co-directors, flute Melissa Doecke and oboe Ben Opie.   For this program, they host Marshall McGuire and his harp, as well as percussionists Peter Neville and Thea Rossen.   The offerings are contemporary, sort-of. Takemitsu’s 1971 trio Eucalypts No. 2 for flute, oboe and harp sounds aggressive for a nature-celebrating piece, so perhaps it’s not.   Tan Dun seems to appear in front of the MSO with a wildly disparate program every year, but the noted film composer/conductor is here represented by In Distance, another trio, this time for piccolo, harp and bass drum written in 1987 when the composer first came to New York.   The wildest child of the post-Webern school, Iannis Xenakis, wrote Dmaathen in 1976 for oboe and percussion – both drums and the keyed vibraphone and marimba.  Thanks to the ANAM musicians, we have heard more Morton Feldman in the past five years than at any other time since the composer’s death in 1987.   Instruments III for flute(s), oboe (alternating cor anglais) and percussion comes from the year after Xenakis’ composition; the night’s major offering, its sound-world is dominated by the timbre of suspended cymbals.  With idiosyncratic quiescence, it completes this near-Back-To-The-70s collation.

 

Friday August 19

Gala Concert

Australian National Academy of Music Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

Simone Young must have a soft sport for the National Academy.  She brings her considerable expertise to its doors on a regular basis and her gala concerts are highlights in ANAM’s performance history.   On this night she is giving the young string Academicians a strong workout with Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night sextet in its orchestra format.   She directs the full orchestra in support of Lisa Gasteen for Mahler’s five Ruckert-Lieder with its contrasting inner poles of Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen and Um Mitternacht representing the white and black facets of the composer’s emotional landscape.   Young ends with Schoenberg’s splendid orchestration of the substantial symphony-length Brahms Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, a revision that does great service to the original.  It’s a fine program but the lasting pleasure will come in watching young musicians respond to a first-class conductor.

 

Friday August 19

Tognetti and The Lark Ascending

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Robert Blackwood Hall at 8 pm

Sir Andrew Davis gives us some more of the Best of British tonight.  His guest is Richard Tognetti, long-time artistic director of the estimable Australian Chamber Orchestra who is soloist in two works.   First, Lutoslawski’s Partita in five movements takes its starting point from the collection-of-movements format familiar from Bach’s catalogue, the influence stronger especially in Lutoslawski’s odd-numbered movements.  Still, this old-time reference serves only as a springboard for a bracing experience from a composer in whom the spirit of Bartok seemed to survive.    As a chaser for his patrons, Davis has then programmed Vaughan Williams’ always-moving pastoral romance that Tognetti has played before in this hall with exceptional success.   More of the right stuff comes with the Four Sea Interludes from Britten’s Peter Grimes, although I always feel a tad cheated when the pendant Passacaglia is omitted.   To end, Davis conducts Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, the composer’s final work with which the orchestra has enjoyed continual success in the last half-century.

This program is being repeated in Hamer Hall on Saturday August 20 at 2 pm and on Monday August 22 at 6:30 pm.

 

 Sunday August 21

Ludwig, With Strings Attached

Team of Pianists

Rippon Lea at 6:30 pm

They couldn’t have made it any simpler.   The youngest of the Team’s governing quartet, Rohan Murray, partners Miki Tsunoda in the first three violin sonatas by Beethoven. This Op. 12 was dedicated to Salieri, Mozart’s rival, and each sonata is about 20 minutes in length with lashings of athletic action, especially in the No. 3 in  E flat, which has a first movement as packed with brio as anything else the composer was writing at the time – the first symphony and piano concerto, the popular Septet, the Pathetique Sonata (easy stuff, compared to some of this piano writing).   Tsunoda, once very familiar from her partnership with Caroline Almonte in Duo Sol, is principal second violin with the Royal Flemish Philharmonic these days and has a finely-rounded projection that has made many a slow movement more memorable than anticipated.

 

Tuesday August 23

Inner Worlds

Baiba Skride

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

Appearing in the Recital Centre’s Great Performers series, Skride is yet another of those violinists fortunate enough to play a Stradivarius: the 1734 ‘Ex Baron Feilitzsch’, a Gidon Kremer gift which follows her previous Stradivari experiences on the 1725 ‘Wilhelmj’ instrument.   Some artists strike it lucky, but twice?   Anyway, she is accompanied on this night by the estimable Daniel de Borah in Mozart’s Sonata No. 21, a two-movement E minor construct written at the time of his mother’s death, the Shostakovich Sonata, and two oddities I can’t explain.   The Sonata in E flat by Brahms was originally for clarinet with the viola an alternative.  Likewise, Schumann’s Three Fantasy Pieces call for clarinet, although the composer also allowed for viola or cello as substitutes.   Perhaps Skride will change instruments, or possibly she has arrangements of these tenor-voiced works for her historically remarkable instrument’s range.   At all  events, we’ll be waiting to see how she interprets the Shostakovich, a late creation notable for its 12-tone experimentation, as well as its bleak final Largo where the gloom is almost palpable.

 

Friday August 26

Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

I can recall only one previous performance of this extraordinary work in Melbourne.  At the 1994 Arts Festival, one of those curated by Leo Schofield, conductor Marcello Viotti directed the Melbourne Chorale and the Tasmanian Symphony in a performance enriched by four excellent soloists.   Now Sir Andrew Davis is trying his hand at the Mass for the first time.  The MSO is tested, yes, but the MSO Chorus has a greater strain placed on its members with some extended passages that hold no consideration for singers of moderate abilities.   Davis’ soloists are soprano Emily Birsan, who will be singing Bliss’s The Beatitudes next year with him at the Barbican, poor girl; mezzo Michele Loisier sang Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette under Davis in January, also at the Barbican; British tenor Andrew Staples has a big repertoire for a young artist, but no Beethoven besides Jacquino in Fidelio; and American bass Christian van Horn is a regular at the Chicago Lyric Opera, one of Davis’ stamping grounds.   Not exactly at peace with his faith, Beethoven grapples with the Ordinary of the Mass, at times generating a heaven-challenging ferment as at the conclusion to the Gloria, pages which make Berlioz and Verdi sound like also-rans at driving power of expression.  The work runs for 90 minutes, given here without a break – quite right.

This performance is repeated on Saturday August 27 at 8 pm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eternal City, plus water

cliveoconnell

CARPE DIEM

Arabella Teniswood-Harvey

Move Records MD 3410

Carpe Diem

Quite rightly, this pianist subtitled her disc ‘piano music from Italy’.    Not all the composers she performs are Italian; in fact, only two of the six were citizens – Respighi and Castelnuovo-Tedesco.    The others are a mixed bag: that citizen-of-the-world-if-originally-Hungarian Liszt, New Yorker Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Poitiers native Pierre Petit, with Sydney son and this performer’s husband, Michael Kieran Harvey, providing the album’s title work.

And the geographical spread of the music is a limited one.  Liszt’s Les jeux d’eaux a la Villa d’Este celebrates the lavish fountains near Rome;  the Roman Sketches by Griffes depict four aspects of the city, although only one is site-specific; Petit’s Rome, l’unique objet  .  .  .  refers specifically, in turn, to the Pincio Hill, the Tiber complete with sea nymphs, the church (probably) of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, with the Villa Borghese’s riding track bringing up the rear; the Australian composer’s work takes Respighi’s Pines of Rome as a launching-point.

As for the native-born, Castenuovo’s contribution is Onde, two studies helpfully differentiated as Short wave and Long wave.   Respighi gives vent to one of his interests in Tre preludi sopra melodie gregoriane; repeated listenings with a score have failed to help in detecting which Gregorian chants were used.   However, neither composer suggests anything Roman in these pieces.

The other element that permeates he CD is water.  Liszt’s description of the Este estate’s fountains is one of piano literature’s most impressive aquatic flights of fancy before Debussy and Ravel.   Another fountain, that of the Acqua Paola on the Janiculum, inspired the third part of Griffes’ suite and he draws an accomplished, brilliantly pointed series of images, remarkable for several reasons, not least that the composer never set foot in Rome.   Castelnuovo-Tedesco follows Griffes’ impressionistic approach for his two types of waves, while Petit’s river-picture populates the stream with Nereids – and he knew the city because he won the Prix de Rome in 1946.

Teniswood-Harvey handles this sometimes arcane material with admirable command.  The Liszt work is a restrained reading compared to those recorded by more flamboyant, effect-craving pianists, and its pages are negotiated without interpolated histrionics or nerve-tightening  fluster.  Real rarities, the Griffes pieces enjoy excellent treatment, their author’s uneven key signatures and mutating metres enunciated with an underlying stability that gives the composer great service, especially in his The Fountain of the Acqua Paola and White Peacock sketches more than in the not-as-original Clouds and Nightfall movements.

Both here and in Respighi’s preludes, Teniswood-Harvey makes her most eloquent cases. If the Gregorian is undetectable, the virtuosity needed to handle demands on sheer stamina in the middle one and sustaining the elongated tension in the last is impressive.  Further, the pianist keeps the preludes’ textural complex lucid, particularly in the three-stave spread of the concluding Lento.  By comparison, the Petit pieces strike me as amiable atmospheric rambles, the San Carlo section making a striking initial impression for its unexpectedly determined statement while the Galoppatoio bridle path, despite its suggestive title, could be depicting anywhere.

Harvey’s work, an injunction to action before it’s too late, was written as a birthday present for its current interpreter.   Aggressive, restless, packed with notes, it grabs attention straight away – like its composer in action – and doesn’t let up, even when the dynamic level sinks.   Inspired by the pines in the Villa Borghese gardens, Respighi’s opening movement depicts children playing – actually, rorting around the place with no concern for the plant life –  and Harvey mirrors the original’s frenetic action, although the emotional effect is more serious.   At the same time, it offers a final reaction to Rome that brings the disc to a close with a driving contemporary edge.  It’s all well worth hearing, both for the high quality performances and for the opportunity to hear some illuminating rarities.

A convincing Countess

cliveoconnell

MID-WINTER BRILLIANCE

The Melbourne Musicians

James Tatoulis Auditorium, Methodist Ladies College

Sunday July 17, 2016

Rosemary Ball

                                                                                    Rosemary Ball

Taking on the Classical canon with a vengeance, Frank Pam and his players presented a mixed Beethoven and Mozart afternoon at the MLC space  a room that I’d not visited for quite a few years.   With an excellent seating plan focused on the performing area, the Tatoulis auditorium gives musicians every consideration, although on this occasion the somewhat dry acoustic might have been softened if the hall’s six acoustic baffles had been retracted.   Nevertheless, Sunday afternoon’s best soloist enjoyed the plentiful air space and coped easily with any reduction in resonant bounce.

Young violinist Mi Yang performed the solo part to Beethoven’s Romance No. 2 with caution.   Her pitching wavered a few times but she kept to Pam’s directorial script, not helped on her way by a string accompaniment that was unusually tentative, feeling its way while dealing with a pretty simple F Major score that only occasionally deviates from a slow-quaver supporting pulse.   Yang had the notes – most of them – under her fingers; what she has to work out is when to take the lead and keep it, maintaining her dynamic leverage over the orchestra, particularly the wind element which took on undue prominence against a self-effacing string body.

Soprano Rosemary Ball sang the two arias for the Countess from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.   Her vocal output is firm and packed with interest although, like pretty much every opera singer I’ve known, she suits herself about pace, taking her time over phrases throughout the four-page, slow-moving work.   Still, she established a link with her accompaniment and maintained it, even through some hesitations at the beginning of phrases.

Yang returned for the Mozart Concerto No. 4 which she negotiated with more security than in her opening gambit for the afternoon.   But then, Mozart gave his soloist plenty of exposure and Yang made more than an exercise out of the work’s appealing Rondeau finale, even if she brought a tension to her reading that will disappear as she becomes more relaxed with this concerto’s benign detachment.  The Musicians had few problems with this score, agreably pitched in D, but they have a tendency not to give an emphasis to the first beat of a bar which makes their texture soupy, lacking an impulse especially in extended passages of simple accompaniment  –  which in fact constitutes most of the body of the first movement that holds only a few four-bar tutti passages outside the opening and closing pages.

When Ball returned for the E Susanna non vien?/Dove sono sequence,  the first page of the aria itself revealed the absence of the required two bassoons.   After a short search and their return to the fold, Ball gave an ardent interpretation of this vocal glory, marred only by some distracting breaks for breath in mid-phrase; surprising, as the aria is not that demanding in this regard, the melody’s arches rarely exceeding four bars in length.  Yet Ball brought a welcome fervour to the Allegro change at Ah! se almen, with a convincing dramatic force informing the di cangiar l’ingrato cor towering conclusion to the work.

After interval, Marcela Fiorillo fronted the Beethoven G Major Piano Concerto.  The exposition set the tone, which was off-puttingly heavy for a score that is viewed as poetic and lyrically buoyant.  The soloist sets the pace for this concerto, opening with a meditative solo; Fiorillo appeared to follow her own inclinations from this stage on and you were left in a state of continual tension, wondering how long the orchestra and pianist could continue without becoming obviously discrepant.  The likelihood became reality in the third movement, fortunately just before an unaccompanied passage, and the lumpy Vivace got to the final bars without another mishap.   A reading, then, with not much to recommend it – hard work for soloist and orchestra, even in the simple central Andante where the strings turned the crisp demisemiquaver/semiquaver snaps into mushy triplets.

However, the concert did reveal the potential of Yang who, in her best moments, displayed a driving sense of direction and a firm bowing arm; as well, it gave us the opportunity to hear Ball giving creditable readings to a pair of taxing arias and carrying them off with great musicianship and impressive power.