Author: cliveoconnell

Reticence in a big space

cliveoconnell

KIRILL GERSTEIN

Musica Viva Australia

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Wednesday June 19, 2024

Kirill Gerstein

I found this to be a very laid-back affair, even while I could see the effort that Kirill Gerstein was putting in. It might have been caused by my having experienced the Australian Chamber Orchestra two nights previous in the same hall, and they bask fully in this space. By contrast, Gerstein often sounded muffled, as though normally thunderous torrents were being produced with the soft pedal on. Or it might be that this room just doesn’t suit piano recitals, much as I found the Melbourne Recital Centre’s main theatre to be a non-carrier for many players.

As for Gerstein’s program, you could point to plenty of occasions for potential pounding. For instance, he presented two substantial Chopin works in the Op. 61 Polonaise-Fantaisie and the F minor Fantaisie. Even more prominent for its relentless virtuosity was Liszt’s Polonaise No. 2 in E Major and only a few steps behind this in the powerhouse stakes was Schumann’s restless Carnival of Vienna. A little less insistent but packed with skittering good spirits in its outer reaches were Poulenc’s Three Intermezzi which were produced across a nine-year interval. It might have been due to the nature of the piece but the most resonant of this ‘old’ set was Faure’s final Nocturne in B minor: a vehement last gasp from the French veteran.

The Musica Viva guest also paid obeisance to his jazz-playing efforts and alternative musical life with a piece by his pal, American Brad Mehldau: the Nocturne, which comes third in a four-part homage called Apres Faure. More relevant to us was the premiere of a freshly written Transcendental Etude by Liza Lim which was commissioned by Musica Viva for this tour and makes a solid addition to the ever-growing number of locally-written piano compositions, a differentiating factor being that this one sits among the few worth hearing.

Gerstein handled the improvisatory nature of the Polonaise-Fantaisie opening with care but not elongating the four flights of ascending crotchets as several pianists do to emphasize the piece’s fancifully wayward nature (it’s not that, but it can seem so if its constituents are sufficiently disjointed), By the same token, he didn’t give vent to a musical gasp of relief when the polonaise first stretch arrived (bars 22 to 143) but treated it with restraint and deliberation, allowing the melodic contours to trace their paths without spicing up the delivery, even at the climacteric across bars 132-137. Perhaps the inner workings of the central section’s chorale theme got more attention than they merited but the return to arms came off with lashings of brio, even that awkward series of rushing triplets stretching from bar 254 to bar 281.

Gerstein began his evening’s second half with the Chopin F minor Fantaisie which is prodigious in its inventiveness and mixture of fireworks and quiescence. The pianist gave us a spectral march before the real fantasy began at bar 43 and didn’t let up. This includes that brilliant outburst of ultra-lyrical right-hand writing between bars 77 and 84 (and later at bars 164-171, then bars 244-251), and the two further march brackets between the undulating arpeggio figures that spark off nearly all of this score’s discrete components.

Parts of this interpretation grabbed your interest, mainly for the alteration in attack that germinated from the player’s fluency rather than an abrupt gear shift or six. It’s true that, as with the Polonaise-Fantaisie, certain passages sounded understrength, the melodic definition not as clear as from other interpreters with more brittle instruments and more percussiveness in their key-striking. But at certain moments, the warmth of Gerstein’s timbre proved irresistible and you had to admire the precision of his realization throughout which I could only pick up two or three errors.

He finished both halves with resonant samples of Romantic accomplishment. We went out to interval with the Liszt Polonaise giving proof of this musician’s interpretative power and high spirits: indispensable elements for this tour de force. For all that, the score labours under an initial deficiency in bar 8’s initial demi-semiquaver group which interrupts the main melody’s bounding energy. Still, the output remained firm and impressively true in its details, like the right-hand accelerando at bar 43 and the chain of sixths and contrary motion scale across bars 43 to 48.

Gerstein’s general restraint paid dividends when the central Trio turned gangbusters after those remorseless double octaves across bars 113 to 119 where the initial A minor theme enjoys a triple forte restatement before the welcome relief of Liszt’s interpolated cadenza. These virtuosic excesses profited from the sparkling delicacy of the first theme’s recapitulation (harmonic, if not linear) that found an able treatment under Gerstein’s hands. Later, he made full-bodied work of the ranting final pages after the first theme returned in its original form. It all made a sentimental return to the past for this listener and, I suspect, several others among the Concert Hall’s patrons.

Schumann provided the printed program’s finale with the Carnival of Vienna rarity. I think I’ve heard this collection twice in live performance: once from a professional, once in a student’s program. Again, I was grateful for the performer’s versatility of choice, avoiding the temptation to treat us to yet another Carnaval, Symphonic Studies or the colossal Fantasie in C. Even so, I heard some errors in the opening Sehr lebhaft, possibly due to fatigue – and each repetition of that initial ritornello began to grate after the first three. As compensation, you hear some intriguing interludes in this rondo, not least the totally syncopated passage when the key signature moves for the first time to E flat Major, and again in the first 26 bars of the movement’s coda.

Gerstein treated the one-page Romanze with high sensitivity, keeping his dynamic muted and allowing plenty of variation in the tempo. It’s hard not to like the following Scherzino with its simple common chord jumps and surprising variety in content, and this reading emphasized a light buoyancy, the piece retaining its agility of articulation to the end. Which made an eloquent contrast with the broad sweep of phrase in the following Intermezzo where the relentless chains of subordinate triplets were (for the most part) kept subordinate to the soprano melody. Schumann’s finale seems boisterously rushed after these precedents but Gernstein retained his energy through its much-ado-about-very-little pages. Still, there’s always a chortle or two to be enjoyed when hearing players cope with the awkward Coda with its crossed triplets and duple quavers.

As for the fill-in-the-middle pieces, there’s little to report. Mehldau’s tribute was distinguished for its inner part-writing yet, despite its brevity, wound up sounding cluttered. The Faure work can take your breath away for the spartan ferocity of its central G sharp minor pages which share a gravity of outlook with a few stark pieces like Tapiola; you do come to a sort of resolution but find precious little optimism – just a well of gloom. I expected more fire from this player across that urgent central stretch but was grateful for his realization of the nocturne’s deliberate resignation.

Poulenc’s trilogy took us away instantly from the sepulchral atmosphere of Faure’s work. The first intermezzo, a Presto con fuoco, is a briskly clattering, chattering effusion that is completely lacking in depth of sentiment. The following Assez modere intrigues for its melody statement in the alto, then bass registers, even if the soprano wins out in the end of what is a congenial brevity. You might mistake the last Tres allant for a waltz, although its time signature is 6/8. This piece rings several harmonic changes – most obviously in the juxtaposed common chords six bars from the end – and Gerstein realized its supple rhythm interlocks and ingenious part-writing with excellent results.

Lim’s new study is not really an adjunct to Liszt’s famous dozen products, of which I know about half pretty well. It is couched in a language completely outside the range of anything else heard on this program with nothing remarkable about its sound production methods: no reach-inside-the-piano or mallets on the strings or arms-instead-of-fingers smashes or preparing/stuffing the instrument. It exploits the instrument’s power to produce quick bursts of repeated notes and move rapidly between dynamic extremes. As far as its emotional content goes, it struck me as menacing because the score’s progress is packed with shivers, frissons that unsettle the listener’s expectations and equilibrium; quite an accomplishment in these days of predictable pap.

And it sat comfortably in this set of offerings that impressed for its variety bordering on the recherche but at the same time gave us some former repertoire stalwarts in a mini-refresher course. Gerstein’s reputation as a premier artist is supported by this recital, which was greeted with emphatic enthusiasm. But I think we would have been even more impressed if the venue had not been the city’s cavernous main concert hall. Still, it’s the old problem about where to put your suddenly increased numbers – a difficulty that Musica Viva will face again with the church-acoustic-loving King’s College, Cambridge Choir appearing in this venue same time next month.

Formidable cellist in patchy program

cliveoconnell

ALTSTAEDT PLAYS HAYDN & TCHAIKOVSKY

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centr

Monday June 17, 2024

Nicolas Altstaedt

Taking over for this national round from the ACO’s artistic director Richard Tognetti, cellist Nicolas Altstaedt offered two of the major constituents in his instrument’s repertoire: Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations without the original’s ten wind players, and Haydn’s C Major Concerto with a first movement cadenza that I’ve never heard (I suspect, probably unjustifiably, that it was Altstaedt’s own.

So the night’s title was expertly realized by an expert and gifted performer. Of course, the rest of the entertainment was taken up with other musical scraps that seemed to me to have no congruence with the two soloist-highlighting works. We heard the first and last movements from Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ – Introduzione and Il terremoto. The orchestra revisited an old favourite in Sandor Veress’ Four Transylvanian Dances with its boot-stomping finale. More fragments emerged with three movement’s from Kurtag’s aphoristic Officium breve in memoriam Andrae Szervanszky, and just before Haydn’s urbane concerto, Altstaedt conducted Aroura by Xenakis, written in 1971 and packed with those compositional and sound-production devices so beloved of the last real avant-garde that flourished in Europe before the advent of our current conservative vapidity.

As you can see, this program was an inexplicable mixture involving juxtapositions and blendings that brought to mind several of Tognetti’s own melanges. Added to this, I’m not a fan of scraps – a few movements of Haydn, a selection from Kurtag; the whole intended to be a kind of mutually fertilizing garden of doubtful delights. All right: you can’t expect an interwoven tapestry all the time, but I was struggling to see how one fragment led to another . . . I was going to say ‘in the first half of the evening’, but the neighbourliness of Xenakis and Haydn didn’t come through.

Which is not to deny that Altstaedt is an exciting cellist to hear, striking at the outset for his expansive dynamic which we first met in the Tchaikovsky variations. Here was a display of clean technique coupled with the soloist’s ability to disappear into the ACO blend and then emerge effortlessly from the ruck. He pulled a few impressive flights of legerdemain in the improbably fast Allegro vivo Variation 4, then wove a generous cantabile line in the following Andante grazioso.

He surprised by giving the whole fabric a purpose, almost a continuous forward-thrusting impetus that made the cadenzas and solo links a good deal more sensible than usual – probably because he showed an unflustered mastery of them, without having to strain after effects. Just as importantly, Alstaedt found the underlying good humour in the score and gave it free rein, including a swagger to his line’s more orotund moments. For all that, I missed the wind timbres, particularly in their contributions to those pleasant rounding-out phrases, e.g. bars 16 to 21 of the theme statement and Variation 1, bars 20 to 25 of Variation 2. bars 23 to 25 of Variation 3, etc. Not to mention their support as a group and in individual complementary solos in Variations 4 and 6.

With the Haydn concerto, Altstaedt showed a similar mastery, mainly in his line-shaping where he was able to impose/insert subtle tempo discrepancies to give the slightest pause on a particular note. Just as remarkable was the ACO’s communal consciousness of these hesitations and rubato interpolations, allowing room for them each time. The cellist generated an appealing vocal quality in his account of the central adagio, reserving the power of his opening C until bar 18, then infusing his demisemiquaver written-out ornaments with splendid contralto character. In fact, this almost compensated for the feisty presto pace of the final Allegro molto where the accent fell heavily on an improbably brisk account of the soloist’s semiquaver-rich line like the patch between bars 87 and 94, and later the massive stretch from bar 118 to bar 146.

Not as prominently as in the Tchaikovsky, the missing four wind lines here proved less debilitating; well, they don’t appear at all in the central slow movement. Nevertheless, you missed the oboes’ bite and the horn pair’s binding texture in the first movement. Still, it’s a big ask for the orchestra to bring along ten extra musicians to supplement the core ACO of 17.

Apart from his concerto appearances and the Xenakis conundrum, Altstaedt took Timo-Veikko Valve’s position as principal cello for the evening’s concerted works, appearing to share chairing honours with long-time second violin principal Helena Rathbone standing in at Tognetti’s usual spot.

The opening pages to Haydn’s meditations on the Passion found the ACO in fair form with some remarkably soft passages, the texture feather-light when compared with the determination of the opening two strophes and their reappearance through these concentrated 51 bars. Immediately, we moved to Kurtag’s three brief aphorisms, starting with a fierce bite in his Grave, molto sostenuto fourth movement before the just-as-aggressive Disperato, vivo and the Webern-suggestive (but only partly: that final threnody is much too hearts-on-sleeve for the master of the subtle inflection) Arioso interrotto which are the work’s final two sections.

This last moved straight into the Earthquake of Haydn’s string quartet: a finely ordered seismic eruption, here given at a striking presto pace and with a wealth of dynamic interest. With the Transylvanian Dances, we are in all-too-familiar country, a land superbly tilled by Bartok and Kodaly, here enjoying a kind of mild regrafting. It’s not that these pieces are lacking in colour or vitality; the simple observation is that, when it comes to rebooting folk tunes and dances, Veress’ senior colleagues were more able. Of course, this performance proved to be convincing and adroit, those cursive melodies delivered with the ACO’s trademark gusto and poise. Still, these dances have been in the ensemble’s repertoire for many years, so you’d expect expertise in spades.

Not necessarily the case with the Xenakis score which asks for 4 first violins, 3 seconds, pairs of violas and cellos and a single double bass. Altstaedt oversaw a slightly expanded set of upper strings and encouraged all participants to take to their work with heightened ferocity – more starkly so than in any recorded version I’ve come across. I’m not one to find fault with the Greek composer’s mathematical allocation of responsibilities and devotion to minutiae but this particular construct lacks that shock element and staggering force that strikes me as typical of the best Xenakis.

Of course, all the technical tricks are there, including an arresting mesh of glissandi right at the start, harmonics galore, playing on or above the bridge, dynamic levels from gratingly loud to scarcely audible, quasi-aleatoric stretches of bars – and, above all, dissonance intended to scour the ear. It’s an impressive sound-scape and a nice palate-cleanser in the middle of a staid sequence of events. Yet, while (as always) admiring the performance elegance of this ensemble, I couldn’t help thinking, at the end of Aroura, ‘Is that it? Is that all?’

Following well-furrowed tracks

cliveoconnell

BY THE WINDING RIVER

Lachlan Brown

Move Records MCD 652

I think this is the shortest of the three CDs of Lachlan Brown’s music issued recently in one fell swoop by Move Records; By the Winding River comes in at about 44 minutes. The 13 settings are of Chinese poets: six by Tu (Du) Fu, three by Ou Yang Hsiu (Xiu), two by Su Tung P’O (Su Shi) and one each from Li Ch’ing Chao (Qingzhao) and Mai (Mei) Yao Ch’en. As for participant musicians, these have appeared on one or both of the preceding Brown CDs: tenor Lyndon Green, soprano Jenna Roubos, pianist Len Vorster, and violinist George Vi.

Kenneth Rexroth’s translations are used, with no Mahler-like interpolations from the composer, even if the promotional material for this CD mentions Mahler and Das Lied von der Erde – the go-to score for a fusion of Chinese poetry and Western music. Indeed, Brown’s first song, Chang’s Hermitage by Tu Fu, the second-longest track on the album, speaks a kind of pentatonic language in both piano and vocal lines for long stretches, the piece a steadily pulsing commentary on self-isolation and its benefits as seen by an envying visitor. The song is dynamically restrained to match the quietly angular accompaniment and a vocal part full of repeated notes. It could be likened to Ravel’s La flute enchantee except for the absence of harmonic adventure.

Both this work and the following Green Jade Plum Trees in Spring (Ou Yang Hsiu) involve Green’s plangent tenor with Vorster accompanying, opening the second track with a one-hand (right, I suspect) outlining another pentatonic-suggestive melody that meanders pleasantly before the vocal entry, signalled by a more conventional underpinning. This song falls into two parts: the first a calm observation of the season’s fruitfulness; the second, a quieter evening scene where the human (tempting girls) appear and tint the landscape with warmer, more bass-heavy textures. This split personality of content is mildly mirrored in Brown’s harmonic vocabulary which enjoys the best of both worlds – suggestive Orientalism and French harmonic richness.

With the next song, Su Tung P’O’s Spring Festival, Green and Vorster come to a more straightforward compositional landscape where, for much of the time, three strands weave around each other, the keyboard being more mobile and steady in its regular quaver progress, the harmonic language firmly major key-centric. There’s a brusque shift of tonality in the last two lines, while the last itself – a kind of envoi – is unexpectedly passionate after an otherwise staid series of observations. The tenor’s output is framed by substantial prelude and postlude excursions.

Fisherman by Ou Yang Hsiu evokes a bleak scene, Green employing a small range while Vorster sets up a chain of drooping chords in a setting that attempts to depict a vague picture of a lone fisherman who can be faintly discerned in a landscape of high reeds, shrouding rain and secreting mist. This piece has a surprising effect: clear in every respect but emotionally veiled.

Apart from a short hymn-like passage near its conclusion, Farewell once more to my friend (Tu Fu) maintains the same pattern across its length of a left-hand rising arpeggio in pentatonic mode which works as a kind of binding cord for a lyric which is essentially nostalgic and regretful, the poet/singer happy for the meeting but almost in despair now that the good times have come to an end, probably never to be repeated. Brown doesn’t wallow in these depressing observations, although his low-pitched setting of the final line mirrors the poet’s pointed nihilism.

A change of pace now as soprano Roubos sings We Are Apart by Li Ch’ing Chao, the only female poet to grace the disc but her lines generate the composer’s longest response, albeit the concluding postlude is remarkably long. Here is an art song with no nationalistic colourations which might have been produced by a Delius aficionado if not for the chains of thirds that occur in Vorster’s right hand. Here you notice a peculiarity of Brown’s vocal line – repeated notes as the syllables glide past. You hear flickers of movement at some lines’ endings but you also come across a single note used for an entire line of these touching verses. The piano enjoys an extended solo before the final quatrain which finishes off the poet’s juxtaposition of nature and longing with luminous grief – and that, I suppose, is the rationale behind the lengthy concluding piano solo which offers its own harmonic ambiguity.

After this, naturally, we hear the CD’s shortest track in a playful Mai Yao Ch’en frippery, An excuse for not returning the visit of a friend. The reason for this social embarrassment is that the poet’s children are clinging to him – apparently not in fear but from that perverse affection which insists that a parent keep his focus where it belongs. Brown gives Vorster a lightly tripping accompaniment while Roubos vaults through her apology which at the end sounds ever so slightly manic.

Another Tu Fu meditation follows, this time Snow Storm which is unrelievedly negative, a series of observations of the natural world’s harshness and the futility of human contact. Brown’s piano accompaniment presents as a chain of ascending and sometimes descending arpeggio-type figures while Green’s tenor sets out a pretty dreary monologue with an odd attempt at word-painting on the word ‘coiling’. Its unfinished conclusion is echoed in the following The Spring will never reach me (Ou Yang Hsiu again) where Vorster’s piano ends the song with a kind of half-close. Here, Vi’s violin sounds as though it is being played at some distance from the central participants, oscillating between offering a linear support to piano,. then singer, then back again, etc. The harmonic vocabulary is bare but liable to resolve into concordances across this lyric of regretful nostalgia and longing for home in a bleak, unfriendly environment.

That delight in postludes becomes even more clear in Brown’s setting of another Tu Fu poem, By the winding river in which the instrumental post-lied commentary takes up almost half the track. Yet again, you are conscious of the composer’s preference for delivering whole lines on a single note; indeed, there are few requirements of Green to leap about his compass – just a spaced-out common chord or the shift of a 2nd but nothing to disturb the temperate self-questioning of the text which contrasts the universal quest for happiness with the writer’s own sacrifices for the sake of a career. As for the vocabulary, you can detect traces of Delius and Faure but the harmonic structures are simple when set alongside the chromatic slurries of these two formidable masters.

Nothing new arises with the setting of Su Tung P’O’s A walk in the Country. The piano provides a quaver support that stays in the same major key for much of the song while Green follows a (by now) predictable path with plenty of repeated notes and small excursions like the last two lines that involve two notes. The song moves pretty rapidly through the set lines and sets no problems for either executant. Much the same can be noted about the penultimate track, The House by the River (Tu Fu), in which the main interest comes from the initial rising tetrachord figure in Vorster’s part, across which Green sets out another quasi-recitative with few moments of linear curvature; see the last two lines (again) which phase out in a near-monotone before a postlude with one (possibly two) moments of harmonic interest, the merest frissons of change from the predictable.

Finally, Tu Fu’s South Wind involves both singers. Green sings the 8-line text, then Roubos joins him for a repeat, omitting one line for reasons that I can’t quite fathom. Suddenly we are translated to an atmosphere that is packed with Mendelssohnian sweetness, including some melting linear vocal 6ths and a fluent barcarolle-like accompaniment to this rather saccharine Spring scene complete with blossoms and coupling birdlife. It’s an amiable enough song and comes to me straight from the 1840s, making an odd conclusion to this collection that has veered most of the time to modal and pentatonic frugality.

What does all this amount to, once the 13 songs are over? Brown lives up to his claim of writing music in Romantic and Impressionist styles, and his take on Chinese poetry fits in with his chosen vocabularies. But the music is not original, despite some attempts to summon up your Oriental taste-buds. He is content to follow his masters – Mahler, Debussy, Delius – but he isn’t offering much else beyond imitation and faint reflection. As with the two preceding CDs recently issued of Brown’s music, you’ll find nothing to offend and not much to excite – just pleasant music performed with sympathy by under-stretched interpreters.

 

 

 

 

Diary July 2024

cliveoconnell

FEMALE COMPOSER CONCERT

School of Music, University of Queensland

Level 4, Zelman Cowen Building, University of Queensland

Monday July 1 at 6 pm

As usual with events that feature student participants (and initiatives like this one that are student-led), information amounting to specifics is vague, the project well-meant if amorphous. Some names are inevitable – Clara Schumann and Amy Beach, who has recently rocketed to stardom as one of the few American women music writers of any note since the country gained its independence. Others are known but generally not honoured, like Ethel Smyth and Louise Farrenc. Of course, we will explore the Australian repertoire as well, even if the only named writer is Sally Greenaway, while the others number current and rising composers from within the UQ School of Music – which is fair enough although you have to worry about gender-centric occasions like this one where today’s commentators and critics are expected to praise without stint, regardless of quality. As far as I can tell, this event is free but you have to register on the school’s/university’s website.

DIDO AND AENEAS

Opera Queensland/Circa

Playhouse, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Thursday July 11 at 7: 30 pm

When I first moved to the Gold Coast, I came into the capital to watch the opening night of a collaboration between these two organizations that centred on Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. The Circa troupe has been a notable contributor to the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra’s entertainments and one of these has been brilliant in mining a link between athleticism and musical performance, but the Gluck exercise failed to convince – basically – that the acrobats/gymnasts were informing the opera. Mind you, I had the same reaction to an effort by director Stephen Page working for the Victoria State Opera and investing his efforts into giving this opera a new Bangarra context. The trouble is a disconnect between what you hear and what you see. Will this be the case for Purcell’s small-scale work? Probably. As with Gluck’s revolutionary masterpiece, the cast for Dido and Aeneas is small: Anna Dowsley sings the Queen of Carthage, Katie Stenzel her handmaiden Belinda, the casual Trojan refugee is Sebastian Maclaine, and the Sailor who gets to lead that wonderful bounding chorus is Lachlann Lawton. No mention of who is handling the supernatural roles – yet. Conducting the hour will be Benjamin Bayl with Yaron Lifschitz from Circa directing and stage designing. For all that, the best reading I’ve heard of this opera came in a concert by ‘Les Arts Florissants’ in Melbourne’s Hamer Hall over 20 years ago: a luminous and unforgettable night. Tickets cost between $65 and $129, with the usual overcharge of $7.20 as a transaction fee.

Further performances will be presented on Saturday July 13 at 1:30 pm, Tuesday July 16 at 6:30 pm, Thursday July 18 at 7:30 pm, Saturday July 20 at 7:30 pm, Tuesday July 23 at 6:30 pm, Thursday July 25 at 7:30 pm, and Saturday July 27 at 1:30 pm.

LEV VLASSENKO PIANO COMPETITION AND FESTIVAL – GRAND FINAL

Conservatorium of Music, Griffith University

Conservatorium Theatre

Saturday July 13 at 6 pm

It strikes me that not many people in the country’s general public outside of Queensland know much about this competition which is one of the major piano events in our music competitive calendar. Slightly longer than the big Sydney marathon, it runs from its first rounds starting in Sydney on Wednesday June 19 to the grand final on this date. There’s room for some stabs at contemporary work but the main fare is solidly traditional; just look at the list of prescribed concertos. More than a little bemusing is the list of finalists which includes some names from previous Vlassenko competitions. Still, unlike Sydney, the Brisbane exercise seems to involve only locals (including, for some strange reason, New Zealanders), and it’s held every two years rather than Sydney’s usual rate of every four years (recently disrupted: thanks again, COVID). Tonight, I assume that it’s concerto night because the Queensland Symphony Orchestra is involved, although the conductor isn’t mentioned. It costs $90 for the right-hand side of the hall, $110 for the left – which makes no sense, but such a distinction never has. Fortunately, this event has managed to escape the bad publicity and overt recriminations that the Sydney event enjoyed in earlier times; probity, thy name is Queensland.

XANADU SKY

Ensemble Offspring

Nickson Room, Zelman Cowen Building, University of Queensland

Thursday July 25 at 1 pm

This group is (on paper) a sextet, founded and headed by percussionist Claire Edwardes. The group is a touring one and this particular program involves three musicians: Edwardes, double bass Benjamin Ward (unlisted in the ensemble’s website but a 15-year-long member of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra), and piano Alex Raineri (without whom no chamber music recital in Brisbane is complete but who isn’t an Offspring member as such). Anyway, the program is impressively eclectic, starting with American writer Caroline Shaw‘s 2012 Gustave Le Gray for solo piano, which takes Chopin’s Op. 17 A minor Mazurka as its kicking-off point. Next is a two-year-old double bass solo by First Nations writer Brenda Gifford called Walimbaya (Return) that was given its Canberra premiere two years ago by Ward. We move to Andrian Pertout‘s Musica Battuta of 2016 which exists in nine versions; possibly this one will most likely be the percussion one as Edwardes is slated to play a solo, and good luck with what promises to be mathematical dynamite. Last and longest will be an Australian premiere: (another American) Sarah Hennies‘ Spectral Malsconcities from 2018 which involves all three of these instrumentalists (Edwardes on 4-piece drum-kit, with appurtenances). This score lasts for about about half an hour and consists of repeated sequences of bars – anywhere from 30 times to 8 – and is a splendid example of superimposed rhythms that don’t settle into anything solid but wear you down by simple aural intrusion. Offspring’s recital is free but you have to register on the University’s website, just as for the ‘Female Composer Concert’ on July 1.

THE CHOIR OF KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

Musica Viva Australia

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Thursday July 25 at 7 pm

Back again for another Musica Viva appearance or nine, this famous choral group is presenting two programs which will be heard only in Sydney. The rest of us – Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane – will not be treated to the Stravinsky Mass or Tallis’ Videte miraculum but will have to make do with Zadok the Priest and Durufle’s Requiem. Also being sung is Bainton’s And I saw a new Heaven which is splendid Anglican affirmation but only brings resentful thoughts to my mind about how Bainton refused to employ Schoenberg at the New South Wales Con where he was director because he was scared of the contemporary, preferring to bore Sydney witless with works by his fellow Brits. Still, he was blinkered enough to have ignored Bartok and Stravinsky as well, evident from his concert programs and puffery for conservative languages, keeping Sydney in the serious music backblocks for decades. As well, we get to hear a new commission in Australian composer Damian Barbeler‘s Charlotte; that’s a compulsory part of both programs for maximum exposure but the positive thing is that the composer is well-known for his multimedia efforts, so there’s a chance that the singers will branch out from their usual style of presentation. But probably not. Daniel Hyde has been the choir’s director since 2019, but is this his first time on an Australian tour? I think it might be. Tickets are currently only available in the rear stalls ($55 to $102) and the balcony ($55 to $130) and I don’t know about any excessive scrounging fee.

A HEAVENLY VIEW

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio, South Bank

Friday July 26 at 7:30 pm

To be frank, I’m almost longing for a performance of the Mahler Symphony No. 4 as the composer wrote it. Over the past few years, we’ve become very familiar with Erwin Stein’s reduction for Schonberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances. On this night, we get to hear Klaus Simon’s re-working of 2007 for the Holst Sinfonietta playing in Freiburg. The woodwind are one each (flute/piccolo, oboe/cor anglais, clarinet/bass clarinet, bassoon), one horn, two percussionists, piano, harmonium or accordion, and a single member of the five string sections, with a maximum allowable of 6-5-4-3-2. This is the composer’s most approachable symphony with a form in each movement that is easy to assimilate, as well as some brilliantly pointillist orchestration, the score ending in a lied: The Heavenly Life, extracted from Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection. Soprano soloist in this will be Alexandra Flood, while the QSO concertmaster, Natsuko Yoshimoto, is directing the work which is scheduled to last for 1 hour 20 minutes without an interval. This last factor takes me by surprise because I’ve not come across an interpretation that can stretch to an hour. Tickets cost $79 for an adult, the usual laughable reduction to $71 for concession card holders, and $35 for students and children. Don’t forget the intrepid QSO overcharge of $7.95 for handling your business.

This program will be repeated on Saturday July 27 at 3 pm.

MASS IN BLUE

The Queensland Choir

Old Museum, Bowen Hills

Saturday July 27 at 7:30 pm

A jazz quartet – piano, sax, bass, drum-kit – appears to be the only backing needed for this program that centres around English composer Will Todd‘s mass written in 2003 and which asks for a soprano soloist as well as your usual SATB choral body. I’ve listened to parts of it and its sound-world is moderately groovy if more than a bit self-conscious, as I’ve found be the case whenever jazz is used as the basis for liturgical music of any kind. The whole business of jazz-in-church also reeks of patronizing your audiences if they’re believers because, to put it mildly, that sound-world isn’t compatible with the transcendent properties of the church’s rituals and ceremonies. Still, it’s worth a try, isn’t it? I’d say no but that’s no reason not to experience this performance which is taking place in a wholly secular environment. As well, the Choir and a pianist and double bass will present George Shearing‘s Songs and Sonnets from Shakespeare, premiered in 1999 and made up of the following: [Come] Live with me and be my love (which I always thought was Marlowe), When daffodils begin to peer from The Winter’s Tale, It was a lover and his lass from As You Like It, When daisies pied and violets blue from Love’s Labours Lost, Who is Silvia? from Two Gentlemen of Verona, Fie on sinful fantasy from The Merry Wives of Windsor, and When that I was and a little tiny boy from Twelfth Night. In other words, no sonnets at all. Tickets range from $20 to $60, but don’t expect much of a reduction for your concession card; they’re available for $55. For all that, there’s no handling fee.

FAREWELL TOUR

David Helfgott

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Saturday July 28 at 2 pm

At the age of 77, this well-loved Australian pianist, given temporary immortality in the 1996 film Shine for which Geoffrey Rush won the Best Actor Academy Award, is leaving the concert-giving platform. I’ve seen Helfgott play two or three times, the first with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 which was given to a packed house and greeted with inordinately ardent applause. But it struck me then that people were reacting to the man rather than his interpretation, admiring him for coping with his condition and actually getting through the concerto, even if the journey was not without exaggerations and distortions. But over the past 50 years or so Helfgott has managed to follow a career of sorts, emerging every so often to show his oddly touching personality and stage mannerisms. The big attraction this afternoon will be the afore-mentioned Rachmaninov concerto in a two-piano arrangement made by the composer in 1910. Helfgott’s partner in this exercise is British pianist Rhodri Clarke – good luck to both, but they actually recorded this work in 2017. Also, the program contains favourite pieces by Chopin (Helfgott’s recorded all the populars like the Raindrop Prelude, Fantasie-Impromptu, A flat Polonaise) and Liszt (could be La Campanella, Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, Funerailles, Un sospiro, the B minor Sonata). If you want to see a legend (not flawless by any means) for the final time, you can get in for between $69 and $109, plus the add-on of $7.20 imposed by QPAC for inexplicable reasons.

Splashes of depth, promises of adventure

cliveoconnell

CHAMBER WORKS

Lachlan Brown

Move Records MCD 651

Here is another in the series of three CDs put out by Move, all dedicated to the works of Australian composer Lachlan Brown. These chamber scores are a bit of a mixed bag as far as format is concerned. You have four piano solos – three performed by Len Vorster, one by the composer. Brown’s String Quartet No. 1 is preceded by a brief piece for the same format (different performers) and a similar short work for guitar quartet. Two duets appear, one for harp and cello, the other for violin and piano. As well, two other solo tracks are included – one for organ, one for harp.

First of the piano solos is Vorster’s reading of Little Emily in the Garden which has a series of stepwise descending 7th chords as its main motif and stands as a sanitised piece of post-Impressionist composition, not exploring new ground but happy in its quiet sprightliness. Pushing the painting nomenclature even more closely is Monet’s Garden which is very close to a Debussy prelude/esquisse with carefully pointed arpeggios along harp lines and suggestions of foliage and water droplets to animate the original paintings – those that have a definite scene rather than the water-only mammoths I think saw decades ago in the Jeu de Paume (or perhaps it was l’Orangerie).

Third in the piano solos is A New Day, played by the composer. This is a restrained ramble tending to wander around a falling Major 2nd motif, generally confined to the middle and lower reaches of the instrument. What you hear sounds quite conventional, not virtuosic but a gentle lyric with limited ambition in a regular diatonic framework. Finally, Vorster returns for the most substantial of these products: A Passing Cloud – near 6 minutes of placid slow-waltzing that gets an idea, toys with it for a fair while, then moves to something else. It’s all rather like a Satie composition without the quirkiness of melody.

Beginning the album are harp Megan Reeve and cello Zoe Knighton with Early Spring. You might expect something bucolic, possibly suggestive of those gentle miniatures written by British composers to celebrate their own soporific countryside. Which is what you get, beginning with a gently arpeggiated supporting line from Reeve and a winding, mild melodic cello melody that could go on for miles. Knighton generates a finely shaped senior voice while Reeve enjoys two short breaks/cadenzas and has the final delicately flourished word.

George Vi and the composer present the Romance for violin and piano with earnest emotional commitment although the string line is liable to clumsy production; not in its tuning so much but in the conviction of its bowing. Mind you, the line moves into the instrument’s highest reaches pretty soon after the opening and rarely moves into the territory of the lowest, or even the D, string. Here is another, if more focused, meander for the melody line while the keyboard confines itself pretty much to background chords – like the harp in Early Spring, but more so. The final impression is of a genteel charm without much harmonic levity.

On the Promenade, the first and briefest of the quartets, employs the talents of Vi as first violin, Marianne Rothschild on second, Karen Columbine‘s viola and cello Michelle John. A neat little study in 3rds for the violins while the viola provides a rather aimless secondary melody line and the cello gives a pizzicato bass, this is – again – restrained and Anglophile in its language, leaving no lasting impression. Pavane is played by the Melbourne Guitar Quartet: Dan McKay, Jeremy Tottenham, Ben Dix, and Michael McManus. A gentle, stepping motion from all participants sets a suitably grave, processional framework, and the opening melody has what can only be called an antique charm. Not much happens as the dance works through its patterns and repetitions with some chromatic slips occurring in two spots and passages with quiet triplets emerge from the consistent 4/4 rhythm. I can’t see that any players were over-stretched by this placid sequence.

Brown’s first essay in the formal string quartet four-movement lay-out is here played by violins Kathryn Taylor and Nick Waters, viola Helen Ireland, and cello Knighton. Here is a full-blooded composition, still written in a language that was extant a century ago but the first movement, for instance, has an unexpected intensity and spatial balance that shows a solidly informed mind engaged with his work. You can hear traces of Delius in the linear spaciousness of individual lines, but then Brown has cited the English writer as an influence. Mind you, the score starts off with some chord clusters that aggregate promisingly, but the whole breadth of these pages sticks to an orthodox tonality.

After the initial ‘Moderately’, the second movement is headed ‘With gravity and intensity’ and reminds you of the ardent chorale-like steps in the late Beethovens. Brown is keen on resolving his chord progressions quickly so that nothing hints at dissonance, apart from a slight subordinate semiquaver rustling right at the end – as though the devil is not quite muffled in this peaceful, hymn-suggestive atmosphere. For all that, the lower voices enjoy little prominence and the real action comes from the top violin.

For his next stage, ‘With movement, like a changeable wind’, the composer has invested a good deal of his effort; in fact, this segment alone is equivalent in time to the other three combined, being close to 12 minutes long. To my ears, it appears to fall into four chapters, the last echoing the first, with a concord-establishing coda. Along the way, we encounter passages in rich thirds for the upper lines, later lowered; another of Brown’s floating melodies that seems to operate around the most nebulous of axes; some thick contrapuntal pages that could have been attributable to an entrant in the Cobbett Prize; and whole sentences that promise stringency but eventually come down on the side of righteous resolution.

It’s an intriguing set of pages, more so than much else on the CD, probably because of its breadth and emotional concentration; not to mention the clear commitment and intonational clarity of its interpreters, viola and cello being long-time collaborators in the Flinders Quartet. And finally, we arrive at the fourth movement, ‘With easy movement, like a pleasant dance’, which is rich in concordant 3rds and 6ths for the violins and smooth sustained-note duets for the lower voices. It is pleasant and free from stress with not much argument and a fairly intact repeat in this ternary-shaped movement (not uncommon across this writer’s output).

Finally, you have the two non-piano solos: Snowcaps from James Leitch playing an unspecified organ, and Gentle Rain which lasts no time at all on Reeve’s harp. The first of these is the second-longest track here and another surprise for its harmonic writing which is packed with 2nds and 7ths, along with parallel chords of some complexity that suggest Messiaen but without the hysteria – not too many traces of alleluias sereins – but you encounter a hard-minded embrace of the instrument’s potential for dissonance similar to passages you can find in Jolivet.

This organ construct takes up a wide, sonorous canvas and Leitch exploits his instrument’s registrational potential with high efficiency, so that he makes a fine case for the piece’s melodic construction and coherence. On a smaller scale, Reeve makes easy work of the harp solo which maintains a falling series of 4ths as an upper ostinato throughout; it’s occasionally mirrored in the lower strings but the impact of this carefully crafted bagatelle has an unmistakable reference to its title, each scintillation droppeth effectively.

On this CD, I found more originality than on Brown’s The Night Sky Glory collection of vocal works. Some of the tracks leave little impression, yet you can see indications that the composer’s vision is not as easily defined as you’d think. He may have confided to us his empathy with Delius, Mahler and Debussy – and you can find traces of others in his output – but works like his string quartet, Gentle Rain and Snowcaps demonstrate a clarity and individuality that rouse your interest and generate hopes for further essays with similar adventurousness.

Diary June 2024

cliveoconnell

THE LOST BIRDS WITH VOCES8

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Saturday June 8 at 7:30 pm

It’s getting a bit difficult to keep track of who or what is playing with or under the auspices of the QSO. But it seems pretty clear that this fine British vocal octet is going to work through a mainly avian-favouring program with the orchestra. The night opens with Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture which has vague suggestions of sea birds – or does it? Then Jack Liebeck, Royal Academy professor and director of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, takes the solo line in Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, But this will be in an arrangement format with the violinist supported by the vocal octet and the orchestra; you may well ask why. More regular fare comes with American writer Caroline Shaw‘s and the swallow which is a version of part of the opening verses to Psalm 84 for SSAATTBB choral forces, and very pretty it is, too, if brief. But the big offering is Christopher Tin‘s The Lost Birds, a 12-movement cantata about 45 minutes in length, written for chorus, harp, timpani, percussion and string orchestra, which memorializes specific birds facing extinction (if not already in that state). This exercise is a repetition of a LIVE from London broadcast of October 15 2022 but without the Mendelssohn. You can hear this for the customary $95 to $135 full price, depending on where you sit, with the usual concessions that can amount to a lot, but can also be trivial. No matter what you pay, you still get stung $7.20 for booking.

This program will be repeated almost intact on Sunday June 9 at 11:30 am. Only the Mendelssohn overture will be omitted. Attendance is cheaper this morning, ranging from $76 to $109 full price, but you still need to find $7.20 for putting your money down.

SING WITH VOCES 8

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio, South Bank

Monday June 10 at 6:30 pm

While they’re in town,. the members of VOCES8 are spreading the word for choral music and it’s a bit of an improvement on those wild-and-woolly pub congregations belting out crowd favourites. You can acquire the music in advance (it’s on the QSO website, if you’re after a sneak preview), and thereby you can prepare – or not. The promoters say, ‘No previous singing experience is required’, but I think that might make the 2 hours 30 minutes duration of this workshop an unpleasant experience for those choristers who show up expecting a bit of upper-level training. The group’s factotum, Paul Smith, will lead the session as the public and the British octet grapple with: Marta Keen‘s Homeward Bound which Smith has arranged for SATTB with extraordinary confidence in the plethora of tenors that will turn up; Grace by Bobby McFerrin, Yo-Yo Ma and Roger Treece in a simple SATB arrangement by Smith; Jonathan Dove/Alasdair Middleton‘s Music on the Waters gets the Smith treatment and starts with three treble clef voices that expand to five by the end in the most free-wheeling of the four pieces; and finally, the traditional tune Wayfaring Stranger which Smith eventually builds to another SATTB organization. You can enlist in this exercise for $65, and add on the $7.95 ‘transaction fee’ that the QSO slugs you with when left to its own devices.

2024 COMPOSE PROGRAM

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio

Saturday June 15 at 6:30 pm

This reminds me of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s start-of-year Cybec 21st Century Australian Composers Program where a lucky few university-level applicants get to submit a new orchestral score for mentoring by a name composer, then performance in a January free-for-all, the best being chosen for inclusion in the Metropolis season later in the year. The QSO opts for secondary school composers and is giving space to 29 young writers: four from Brisbane Girls Grammar, four from Kenmore State High, three from Narangba Valley State High, three from Toowoomba Anglican, and the other 15 from individual schools (I suppose). Mentors for these hopefuls are QSO cellist Craig Allister Young and Griffith University’s Timothy Tate. Two conductors are involved: QSO violin Katie Betts and Nathaniel Griffiths from the Australian Conducting Academy. Ticket prices range from $20 to $39, which is a step up from Melbourne’s event which I think was free, thanks to the sponsor’s liberality. But you’re still liable for the QSO’s $7.95 impost which, if you’re a student, is getting close to being half the cost of your ticket. Can you really call this encouraging the young?

CHAMBER PLAYERS 2

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio

Sunday June 16 at 3 pm

Eight violins, a viola, a cello, a piano: that’s the oddly-shaped personnel for this Sunday afternoon outing for some members of the QSO. The program ends in orthodoxy with a string quartet by Fanny Mendelssohn: the only one extant from her mature years as a writer. I loved the fact that her brother disapproved of it but she didn’t change a note; God knows it’s more ardent than most of his efforts in the form. In front of this comes Australian writer Anne Cawrse‘s Songs Without Words, a piano trio in three movements – Ornamental, Lied, Swansong – that serves as a minor homage to the Mendelssohn siblings and to a certain extent echoes their language. But the entertainment begins with Andrew Norman‘s Gran Turismo of 2004. Written for eight violins, it takes its impetus from the racecar game, Baroque concerto grossi and Italian Futurism (Balla, Russolo, Marinetti and all the gang). The whole outpouring lasts for about 8 minutes and will feature Natsuko Yoshimoto, Alan Smith, Rebecca Seymour, Brenda Sullivan, Mia Stanton, Stephen Tooke, Sonia Wilson and Ann Holtzapffel. The viola and cello in Fanny’s piece will be Charlotte Burbrook de Vere and Kathryn Close respectively, and the pianist for Cawrse’s trios is Therese Milanovic. This event is scheduled to last for 1 hour 20 minutes without interval; I can see it lasting half that time, unless the players give us some really substantial introductory addresses. Tickets range from $35 for a child to $59 for a concession-less adult with the QSO’s typical add-on fee of $7. 95 for ludicrously over-priced book-keeping.

ALTSTAEDT PLAYS

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday June 17 at 7 pm

Haydn bookends this program, directed by guest and solo cellist with theatrically unruly hair, Nicolas Altstaedt. It’s the German/French musician’s debut with the ACO and he hasn’t spared himself by performing the highly popular Haydn Cello Concerto in C Major in a new (and probably necessary) arrangement for strings (obviating the original score’s demand to carry around pairs of oboes and horns on a national tour), as well as Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations (also in an all-strings version so that the pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns in the original can disappear, leaving only the memory of their timbres behind). As for the other Haydn, we’re to hear selections from the Seven Last Words of Christ: that series of meditations originally written for orchestra, then cut down for string quartet, further curtailed for piano, finally appearing in a soloists/choral/orchestral version – all organized by the composer – but this is another arrangement, probably of the string quartet version. Moving abruptly to our times, Altstaedt leads another arrangement of Kurtag’s 1989 Officium breve in memoriam Andreae Szervanszky (the Hungarian composer whose first name was Endre); originally a string quartet, it holds 15 short movements, the whole lasting about 11/12 minutes. As well, the ACO revives the Four Transylvanian Dances of Sandor Veress (1944, 1949), actually composed for string orchestra, which the ensemble recorded back in 1995. In the only contemporary music on this night, Altstaedt takes his forces through Xenakis’ Aroura of 1971, another string orchestra original which will make a strange, unsettling interruption to this otherwise staid collection of works. Prices of tickets range from $25 to $150, with a ‘handling fee’ of $8.50, which is really getting up there if you’re angling for the cheapest seat available.

KIRILL GERSTEIN

Musica Viva Australia

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Wednesday June 19 at 7 pm

This pianist is a well-known name in the virtuosic field, especially in the United States, of which country he is a citizen despite being born in Russia. Across his career, he has made a few odd repertoire choices, including the first recording of the original score to Tchaikovsky’s B flat minor Piano Concerto. This seems to be his first Musica Viva tour and may be his first time on these shores, for which occasion he has assembled a far-reaching, eclectic program. He is presenting two Chopin pieces: the A flat Major Polonaise-fantaisie which is packed with stops and starts and never seems to settle into a real dance; and the F minor Fantaisie which is a powerful and formally compact narrative. Both lie marginally outside the usual waltz/polonaise/etude/prelude/impromptu/scherzo/mazurka field that many other pianists plough – which is all to the good. Other off-centre gems include Liszt’s E Major Polonaise, Schumann’s Carnival of Vienna. Faure’s last nocturne, and the imperturbably fluid/spiky Three Intermezzi by Poulenc. The odd men out are a new Transcendental Etude by Australian composer Liza Lim, commissioned for this tour by Musica Viva; and a homage to the elder French composer in a Nocturne from the Apres Faure collection by American jazz pianist/composer/arranger Brad Mehldau. You can gain admission for between $15 and $115; I don’t know about any booking/purchase/handling fee.

BRAHMS & RACHMANINOV

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday June 21 at 11:30 am

What you see is what you get: two works, one each, by the named composers. The main element will be the Brahms Symphony No. 4 in E minor with its chaconne finale and as close to perfect as a final symphony gets for any composer. The conductor is Jaime Martin, currently chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and apparently flourishing in the job. I’ve never seen him at work so know nothing about his handling of the standard repertoire. Alongside this splendour comes Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, neglected for several decades until its use in the 1953 romance trilogy film The Story of Three Loves where its 18th variation became a Hollywood trope for unfulfilled passion. This performance features soloist Denis Kozhukhin whose expertise was well demonstrated by his performance of all four Rachmaninov piano concerti at a Barcelona festival two years ago. I’ve not seen mention of his encounters with this rhapsody, but you should expect something informed and gripping. You can gain admission for between $76 and $109 full price, with the usual concessions available, and the inevitable $7.20 surcharge

This program will be repeated on Saturday June 22 at 7:30 pm, with the addition of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin for absolutely no reason I can think of. Here, you pay more – from $95 to $135 full price; Ravel doesn’t come cheap.

PIERS LANE

Medici Concerts

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Sunday June 23 at 3 pm

Brisbane’s well-loved near-native son is appearing under the Medici banner again. You’ll hear quite a few surprises in this program which begins with Bach’s French Suite No. 2 in C minor – which makes a change from hearing the regularly-trotted-out No 5 in G Major. Mind you, this is a rather dour work but can shine in the right hands. John Field’s Variations on a Russian folk song is an amiable enough creation, written in one continuous block and recently recorded by Lane for Hyperion. A better-known work follows with Mozart’s F Major Sonata K 332: three elegantly-shaped and good-humoured landscapes. A bracket of Chopin follows, beginning with the F minor Fantaisie that Kirill Gerstein is playing four days previous (see above); as well, Lane performs the A flat Etude that kicks off the Op. 25 set, plus the D flat Op. 28 Prelude. The recital’s formal program ends with Glazunov’s Theme and variations from 1900, apparently based on a Finnish folk tune. There are 15 variants, starting off sensibly enough but turning virtuosic in the later reaches; this also has been recorded by Lane, on the same disc as the Field variations mentioned above. Admission is $90, with a concession price of $80 available (big deal) and the atrocious QPAC booking fee of $7.20 tacked on.

DENIS KOZHUKHIN PIANO RECITAL

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio

Monday June 24 at 7:30 pm

Coming close on the heels of Piers Lane’s recital, Kozhukhin is playing a solo recital under the QSO’s auspices. Mind you, it’s not a lengthy event – scheduled to last 1 hour 10 minutes – but you get two big masterpieces for your time. The Russian-born pianist lays down the law with Schubert’s B flat Piano Sonata, the last one in the canon and a gripping saga from start to finish. As most performers view it, this sonata stands up as half a program in a full recital but tonight it is paired with the Liszt B minor Sonata, the model of four-part compression under the high Romantic banner and just 10 minutes shorter than the Schubert. It’s hard to se this pair sitting comfortably side by side, particularly when you consider the Hungarian writer’s tendency towards the flamboyant although this score is less glittering than many another in the composer’s output. Kozhukhin has played the B flat Sonata fairly recently, last year in Alicante, but the B minor score has not appeared on his recent recital content. You can hear this program for $35 if you’re a student or child, $79 full fee, and a brave $71 if you happen to have a concession card – big whoops. And never forget the obligatory $7.95 penalty.

AUSTRALIAN STRING QUARTET

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio

Thursday June 27 at 7:30 pm

You get to hear three substantial scores in this recital that will run for an uninterrupted 1 hour 20 minutes. The ensemble opens with what I expect will prove the most difficult to imbibe element: Beethoven No 12 in E flat – the first and least performed of the final group; of string quartets. It’s still a challenge for even expert ensembles, not least for its formal quirks and often unsettling nomadic quality (that meandering Adagio). And the ASQ ends with Korngold’s No. 2, also in E flat and written in 1933, just before he decamped to Hollywood and ‘real’ fame, This is a true rarity and I can’t remember hearing any performance live. Still, there’s always room for the composer of Die tote Stadt (which I’ve only experienced live in a concert performance at one of the early Brisbane Music Festivals) and the mellifluous Violin Concerto (that I last heard from the outstanding James Ehnes). Also, the ensemble is presenting Harry Sdraulig‘s new String Quartet No. 2, here enjoying its premiere by its commissioners on the ASQ’s national tour. I’m impressed by this young Australian’s works whenever they turn up and so have high hopes for this re-entry into a difficult form. Tickets are the same as for Kozhukhin’s recital above; same measly concession, same disadvantaging purchase fee.

The Russians are coming

cliveoconnell

JOYCE YANG

Piano+

Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio, South Bank

Sunday May 12, 2024

Joyce Yang

Yang is celebrating her return to Australia with an all-Russian program, concluding with Mussorgsky’s epic Pictures at an Exhibition: a delight for pianists of all abilities who can find in its pages some highly graphic (or pictorial) descriptions, and enough variety to please even those of us with imperfect equipment – through laziness or age (or both). She began what I think was her first Brisbane appearance (ever?) with parts of Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, continued with two well-known Rachmaninov Preludes (although not the too-familiar C sharp minor or the G minor) and a rarity in the D Major piece from the Op. 23 collection of ten. As well, we heard three parts of Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet in an arrangement by Guido Agosti who never got around to working at the first two parts of the composer-extracted 1919 suite.

Some of us would be aware of the Tchaikovsky 12-part collation for its arrangement by Edward Grigoryan for his guitarist sons Slava and Leonard; not so much for the work in its original piano form, even if my generation of young Australian players would have come across the November piece known as Troika which was once part of the AMEB syllabus for I-can’t-remember-which level. Yang chose half of the available months: By the Fireside for January, Carnival for February, Snowdrop for April, May Nights, Barcarolle for June, and Harvest for August.

Yang opened with an excellent January, the piece highly amiable in its own right and here distinguished by the executant’s carrying top line, carefully shaped and clear. Tchaikovsky’s festive February wasn’t so much, although its central stanzas came across more successfully than their bookends. Whatever Tchaikovsky thought about snowdrop flowers or the meteorological event (both mentioned in the piece’s accompanying poem), his invitation to consider both here has little melodic or harmonic interest, the only eyebrow-raising passage arriving when the main (only?) theme transfers to the alto line. The composer’s bifocal May Nights moves between a 9/8 barcarolle and a sprightly 2/4 dance, the latter winning out in the colourful stakes as briskly accounted for by Yang.

Probably the only one of the twelve pieces in the suite that enjoys popular currency, June’s Barcarolle is distinguished by its splendid main melody which glides with just as typical a breadth and melancholy as many of the belted-to-death ballet tunes. Yang’s interpretation found a cogent balance between sentiment and linear strength, notably in the central Poco piu mosso and Allegro giocoso romps. Her rapid path through harvest-time emphasized the inbuilt syncopations in the 6/8 (and occasionally implied 3/4) tempo and the piece’s mildly virtuosic moments served to demonstrate this executant’s rapid recovery rate.

In the first of the Op. 32 Rachmaninov excerpts, the slow B minor gem of musical depression, the main memory I have is of Yang’s powerful left hand across the prelude’s middle section which operates over a sequence of massive octave semibreve pedals, here generated with impressively full-blooded commitment. As well, this pianist exercised a noticeably free rubato in working through the initial and closing pages – which added much to the inbuilt emotional mournfulness. With her view of the G sharp minor No 12, Yang gave a prominence that I found unusual to the opening sextuplet ripples in the right hand which threatened to overpower the piece’s first theme, until this latter acquired some supporting chords. Despite this unsettling mode of attack, the pages were treated with a welcome fluidity and dynamic contrast that was sustained to the elusive final four bars.

Still, I thought the version offered of the Op. 23 D Major Prelude showed us the afternoon’s most complete Rachmaninov with a seamlessness to Yang’s principal melody announcement, which only improved in empathy on its second statement underneath those pear-like soprano triplets. Mind you, I might have been affected by the soothing warmth of this piece after a double-dose of spiralling gloom from its precedents. Still its gentle contours enjoyed sensitive treatment from this gifted artist who opted for linear integrity over sentimentality.

Stravinsky made his own piano score of the complete Firebird ballet in 1910, the same year as the work’s Paris premiere with the Ballets Russes. Agosti’s transcription offers much more scope for the gifted pianist, even if the work’s contours become obscure under the flurries of notes incorporated for dramatic effect. I’m not talking about the Lullaby or Finale which enjoyed spacious accounts from Yang, embellished with glissandi, an attractively even chain of trills in the former piece, and a sermon of thunderously powerful chords over the final Doppio valore 14 bars.

The piling-up of material tended to get in the way of the Infernal Dance‘s hurtling progress. Nothing wrong with the opening bass tattoo, but matters got more complicated about Number 136 in the original piano transcription, and continued to sound more cluttered from Number 146 onwards, up to the arrival of that melting moment at the change of key signature to D flat Major when melody rules all.. Nonetheless, despite a liberal use of glissandi, Agosti manages to generate more excitement with his realization of this dance’s final strophes than Stravinsky’s own rather ordinary realization.

The three segments made a fine vehicle for Yang’s musicianship and – wonder of wonders – the original shone through nearly continuously throughout. Commentators have noted the popularity of this transcription but I must confess to hearing it here live for the first time – after years of exposure to the three Petrushka movements that the composer put together for Rubinstein. Many thanks, then, to Yang for this unusual piece of programming.

So, we came to the big Mussorgsky collection. We immediately encountered a sure-footed promenader, quite at ease in the gallery surrounds: a gallery-wise, confident flaneur. Gnomus burst upon us with maximum rapidity and an admirably lucid realization of that final six bars velocissimo rush. More chastened promenading before a rather hard-edged The Old Castle, featuring a most insistent G sharp ostinato. Yes, it does continue pretty much across the whole piece but it seemed to dominate these proceedings like a threat.

The two-page Tuileries enjoyed deft treatment, if singular for a number of unprescribed pauses in the dispute. Not much novel in the Bydlo interpretation besides Yang’s persistent left hand ostinato pounding out below the driving principal theme. We enjoyed a clear account of the Unhatched Chicks with its alternations of acccciature and trills, here carried out with excellent regularity of attack and delivery..

Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle appeared in vivid form, the latter much more aggressive in the final 11 bars where the plutocrat has less dominance than he usually enjoys. For once, this sample of musical racism gave rise to a drama, rather than an unappealing portrait of bullying. After a final, athletic statement of the Promenade, Yang produced a hectic vision of the Limoges Market where the activity proved non-stop – no pause in this commercial outlet for any dawdling, finished off with a powerful four-bar rush of demi-semiquavers that came up against the full-stop of Hartmann’s Catacombs, here announced with very sustained chords, the fermate stretched to their limits.

A ghostly reshaping of the Promenade inspired the Con mortuis in lingua mortua page, the right-hand tremolo sustained with fine balance across this spectral page that impresses me a good deal more than many other parts in this composition. Baba-Jaga loped past with a hefty curmudgeonliness that very few pianists can avoid. Nonetheless, you could find plenty of time to admire Yang’s clarion-clear double-octave work in the outer pages of this picture before reaching the apogee of The Great Gate of Kiev.

Here, once more, you were aware of the power in Yang’s left hand at the principal theme’s restatement from bar 9 on. Even towards the crushing conclusion when Mussorgsky moves into triplet minims across the 2/2 bars, this pianist still found plenty of shoulder power to keep you involved with the piece’s theatrics to the final allargando 13-bar weltering into what is by now a voluptuous bath in E flat Major. A short encore or Grieg’s Notturno helped ease the tension as a salute to Mothers’ Day, but what I carried away at the recital’s end was a thorough admiration of Yang’s skill and controlled virtuosity, evident across every stage of her individualistic Mussorgsky reading.

Deft but drab

cliveoconnell

THE NIGHT SKY GLORY

Lachlan Brown

Move Records MCD 650

The good people at Move have just published three CDs devoted to the work of Australian composer Lachlan Brown who – as far as the internet is concerned – remains an enigma. That is to say, I can’t find any information about him apart from what is on the Move website – and that’s very meagre. So you’d have to expect something out of the box from a writer who manages to get the country’s prime Australian composition promoter to publish a set of recordings – put out simultaneously, what’s more – that features a performing group involving some high-profile musicians.

This first offering features pianist Len Vorster, soprano Jenna Roubos, soprano/altos Holly Haines and Alison Rae-Jones and Elspeth Bawden, treble Jimmy Hilton, tenors Timothy Reynolds and Alastair Cooper-Golec and Lyndon Green, the composer himself doubling as tenor and bass, harp Megan Reeve, violins George Vi and Marianne Rothschild, viola Karen Columbine, cello Michelle John, and organ Lachlan Redd. As you can see, some of these participants have been (and continue to be) significant members of the country’s (mainly Melbourne’s) musical community.

But what of the music they reproduce? One of the few ‘facts’ we can learn about Brown is that he has been influenced by Mahler, Sibelius, Debussy, Delius and Faure: a worthy clutch of late Romantic and Impressionist writers – in fact, a few of them sit on the cusp between those schools/groups/ delineations. But I become instantly wary when such names are presented, chiefly because I suspect that what we are going to hear is derivative – not so much influences as imitations. Further, is any composer in current operation harking back this far? All pay homage to Bach, but is anyone writing continuously in his style? Or that of Beethoven? Or Wagner? Still, you could pursue this topic into odd corners where composers are happy to boast an affinity with Schoenberg or Stravinsky (but never Hindemith), while the fad for Cage, Stockhausen or Boulez is well and truly over. Now, the trend is towards Radiohead, Philip Glass or Lady Gaga.

Back to Brown and his first track. a Rilke setting: Fruhling ist wiedergekommen which is the 21st of the Sonnets to Orpheus, here carried out by Roubos and Vorster. Well, it’s sort of that particular sonnet with the first part revisited at the end for the sake of balance, I suppose, and a few lines and a stanza, at least omitted. The musical language is a cross between 19th century operatic cadenza and post-Schumann lied, both A parts of this ternary composition opening with a sort of vocalise. This is amiable, salonesque music which manages to sound open-hearted and optimistic, like the poem.

Vorster and tenor Cooper-Golec then present a Victor Hugo setting: Hier soir, which is fully Romantic but lacking in subtlety. It’s as if Baudelaire had never been born. As for the setting, it treads a conservative line in chromatic sliding, except for some questionable moments at the end of the first stanza. Cooper-Golec’s tiumbre is a touch over-nasal for a piece that might have been better suited to a baritone; as it is, the song sounds like a kind of plaint rather than an assertion of devotion. The whole reminds me of Duparc but without much attraction in its melodic curve.

Brown then takes on a well-known set of verses in Heine’s Auf Flugeln des Gesanges, forever associated with Mendelssohn who set the poem in his Op. 34 Six Songs. This new version employs two tenors – Reynolds and Green – with the string quartet mentioned above, the lower strings pizzicato while Vi weaves a third line around the intertwining vocal chain of 3rds and 6ths. It’s very mellifluous and just as richly conservative as Mendelssohn’s work in its vocal demands and its harmonic vocabulary.

Next come a pair of actual vocalises. The first involves Roubos and harpist Reeve and is an amiable enough exercise with a fetching vocal line above instrumental arpeggios, mainly (always?) rising. Brown stays fixed in a completely predictable metre with a few gestures towards late French Romantic modernity. To their credit, both artists handle this slender piece with sympathy. The second uses the boy treble Hilton with Redd providing supporting chords on an unattributed organ while the singer follows a melodic path of no particular character, alternating a step-wise melodic motion and a widely-spaced arpeggio three-note pattern. Again, there’s nothing here that speaks to any of Brown’s influencers, except possibly some suggestions of Faure of the Requiem.

Rilke enjoys another outing through Schon horch, also from the Orphean sonnets – No. 25 in the cycle – and Cooper-Golec and Vorster return for this number. Here we might be stepping into the 20th century with some efficient Delian slides and a setting of some drama, particularly for the singer who is tested across a wide tessitura. If it suggests anything, it’s one of Berg’s early songs, chiefly for the solidity of its piano material. But I can’t find much of a link between the text and the music; my fault, of course, that I never embraced the German poet’s taxing imagery.

We now arrive at the CD’s title-work, which is another vocalise for what I assume are multi-track voices. Only two are cited. Haines and Brown. but both are credited with double vocal types: soprano/alto, and tenor/bass. What we hear is a series of four-part (or are there more?) chords, revolving around a mobile axis in yet another very circumscribed harmonic ramble. Again, you’re reminded of Delius in a vague sense, but I don’t know the English master’s choral scores well enough to play pinpoint the similarity.

The composer is still indulging in vocalise for the next three tracks: Meditations for choir III, IV and V. The pairs of singers (each contributing at least two vocal strands) have no words, just an open vowel sound as they slowly meander around a rather ordinary sequence of chords. Rae-Jones and Brown are the personnel for the first two of this clutch, the No IV having more interest for the momentary individuality of line at its centre. The last, involving Bawden and Brown, builds slowly to a fine climax, and impressed for its multi-choral effects, but by this point my attention was wandering in an aural landscape where the elements were proving interchangeable..

More harmonic originality appears in a brace of Forest Voices from multi-phonicised Haines and Brown, still textless. The writing is loaded with droning open 5ths and some biting 2nds and 7ths that speak a language that is more contemporary than anything we’ve come across this far. Further, these pieces have a definite atmosphere: the forest they depict is no sweetly-wooded series of groves but something more menacing and aggressive.

To end, we have Night Falls in the Forest which continues the atmospheric suggestions of the preceding two tracks but much less stridently. Bawden’s soprano and alto have the melodic running although Brown’s tenor and bass are not stuck in the subsidiary positions they held in the Voices tracks. But seven tracks in a row of harmonic shifts and vocalisations seems to me to be too much of a moderately good thing.

When facing modern composition, I’m still sympathetic to Stockhausen’s saying that he asks ‘two things of a composer: invention, and that he astonish me.’ That’s still a tall order which might be more useful if the combination was actually a pair of alternatives. Brown’s music is not impressive for its inventiveness but moves along well-trodden paths, compositional tropes that are very common territory. Much of it is pleasant and deft in its organization but it ignores most of what has happened in Western music over the last 120 years. As for the question of astonishment, it does not arise. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to experiencing further facets of the composer’s creativity in the other two Move CDs that were issued alongside this one.

Rare Brahms in the mix

cliveoconnell

DANIEL DE BORAH

Piano Series

Ian Hanger Recital Hall, Queensland Conservatorium

Friday April 26 2024

Daniel de Borah

Here was an eclectic program from the Queensland Conservatorium‘s Head of Chamber Music, taking the less easy path at every turn. For instance, the pianist opened this recital with Schubert’s Impromptu No 1 in C minor from the D. 899 set; pretty much every other pianist I’ve come across (except Paul Lewis) would try the No. 2 in E flat, the No. 4 in F minor or the G flat Major No 3 before presenting this death-wish albumblatt. Another impromptu came from the D. 935 set – again, the No. 1 in F minor, which is more bracing and confrontational than the mellifluous No. 2 in A flat Major, the richly endowed theme and variations of No. 3 in B flat Major, or the edgy Chopin-anticipating No. 4 in F minor (also).

A kind of similarity could be found in his choice from the last four piano collections by Brahms. He might have opted for the Op. 117 Three Intermezzi, of which the first and third are fairly well-known, even if the whole work doesn’t add up to much more than 15 minutes. Or perhaps the Sechs Klavierstucke Op. 118 from which we know the Intermezzo No.2 and the Ballade No. 3. Not forgetting the Op. 119 Four Piano Pieces set with its barnstorming final Rhapsodie. But no: he played the Op. 116 Seven Fantasies that you will hear live about once every forty years.

De Borah’s other offering in this hour-long event was Haydn’s Theme and Variations in F minor, which is one of the composer’s most familiar constructs for solo piano. This reading pleased for its assertiveness in the minor segments where many pianists play for brooding melancholy, then switch to spikiness for the major theme and its variants so that you feel that the composition is essentially bifurcate. On this occasion, the initial statement impressed for its non-sentimental approach with a barely noticeable hiatus at the move into bar 30’s alternative theme.

Each of the variations presents articulation problems but de Borah maintained an even touch across their pages: the syncopations of Variation 1 administered evenly, the later trills invested in both halves of the major section accomplished without excess energy. The following variation pair boasts a good deal of right-hand brilliance which this pianist negotiated with a modest amount of applied verve. As with the best Haydn interpretations, nothing jarred by over-temperamental bursts, not even in the abrupt chords that occupy bars 25-26 of the coda-finale, nor in the demi-semiquaver figuration of alternating quintuplets and sextuplets that occupy the centre of these drama-rich pages.

Not so happy was the opening to the program: Schubert’s C minor Impromptu. All too soon, the balance between melody and underpinning was lost; from memory, at about bar 18. I don’t know why; perhaps the melody didn’t maintain its attraction or perhaps the harmonization sequences seemed more relevant to the narrative. But then again, this particular piece has its dull spots, like the trite melodic action that starts at bar 74 and persists until bar 82; Schubert working at a tailer (revisited at bar 152) that fails to live up to its surroundings.

But, in the end, I wasn’t convinced of the piece’s gravity. God knows you can find a wealth of dramatic scope across its length, especially at the dynamic highpoint that kicks in at bar 111 and lasts for another nine. And the final page’s oscillations between C Major and minor never fail to bring to mind the composer’s inimitable combination of fragility and strength in the space of a few juxtaposed phrases. De Borah delivered this last with eloquent sympathy, yet much of the piece missed out on compelling your attention. Put simply, I’ve heard better, if admittedly from top-notch performers.

Much more persuasive was his account of the F minor Impromptu. In my opinion, it’s a more satisfying score both to hear and to play, with more room for de Borah to employ his subtle rubato, taking time to adjust to the piece’s changing geography, like the sudden busyness that strikes in bar 13, or the direct speaking that breaks out in the octave at bar 30, or the wrenchingly affecting lyrical oasis that splays from bar 45 on. In these passages of play, de Borah produced effective continuity, the shifts rising effortlessly out of each other.

But there are two segments where we move into a heightened Schubert world – of the Notturno, the last third of the String Quintet Adagio, Du bist die Ruh, the recapitulation of the B flat Major Piano Sonata’s first movement, the Gesang der Geister uber den Wassern: the list could go on but these come to the mind’s forefront with no effort. They convince you of the writer’s melodic genius and at the same time of his humbling emotional honesty, achieved without any hesitation. In this impromptu, it’s the crossed-hand sections for me – bars 69 to 126, then bar 197 to 239 – especially the later stages of each where he settles into his key – A flat and F – and showers us with simple lyricism.

These solid slabs emerged from de Borah’s web with impeccable authority and eloquence; no signs of fumbling or grasping for effect, just the clearest texture with the accompanying semiquaver rustling outlined with admirable clarity. Here also the left-hand delivery proved even and finely shaped, even though its contributions come in groups of three and four quaver gruppetti. Moments like these make you glad you are in the space where such music is being recreated, where you witness a kind of aesthetic fusion between the composer and the interpreter. It’s rare to encounter at any concert or recital but very welcome, mainly for its unexpectedness.

As for the Brahms Fantasies, de Borah made a strong case for airing a string of works that most piano enthusiasts would regard as unfamiliar. You can soon see why. The opening bluff Capriccio is an essay in syncopation to the point where the pulse is hard to determine for about 16 bars. This rhythmic disjunction is shared with a predictable penchant for key changes that pass in a blink. Still, de Borah made enthusiastic work of this focused jaunt. Something odd happened in the following Intermezzo when the Non troppo presto section in 3/8 arrived. It’s a passage of not particularly adventurous harmonic sliding allied to a right hand of trademark displaced octaves but we came close to an impasse.

De Borah soldiered on to the relieving Andante and a typical return to base over the concluding 21 bars. Into the G minor Capriccio and matters were well in hand with a firm contrast between the outer pages’ controlled impetuosity and a central E flat Major passage of eloquent rhetoric reminiscent of the B flat Piano Concerto’s opening. Little remains in the memory of the E Major Intermezzo, apart from de Borah’s smooth treatment of its delays in resolution and a quietly quirky oscillation between regular quavers (later semiquavers) and triplets: an effect that keeps the listener pleasantly off-balance throughout what strikes me as an off-kilter minuet.

Another effective realization came with the (probably) E minor graceful Intermezzo, fifth in the set. Despite its inbuilt repeats, this piece is a genial brevity where the disjunct metre of No. 1 is revisited with a middle section relief of splayed arpeggio chords tenderizing a forgettable melody line. Brahms continues with his ternary structure in the No. 6 Intermezzo and its affirmative downward stepping chords, the whole complex (if you can call it that) based on simple and common elements. De Borah articulated this pair of pages with care and consideration for its harmonic compression which remained lucid throughout.

To end, Brahms presents another capriccio, here in D minor and following a rocky path of transformations of the original material, in a remarkable demonstration of invention and husbandry. De Borah delivered this with enthusiasm and a sure sense of direction, right up to the composer’s affirmative tierce conclusion. As with most of its companions, this piece leaves you with small pickings to mull over until you get back to the score where the Fantasies‘ scope and eloquence can be remembered at leisure. Having said that, and mindful of de Borah’s slightly flawed apologia, I won’t be rushing to hear the Op. 116 again when so many more appealing late Brahms fruits are on offer.

Sadly, this event was poorly attended; I suspect because of the Conservatorium’s unfortunate scheduling practice. A half-hour after de Borah’s recital, the institution was presenting a symphonic/choral concert in the building’s main theatre; in fact, the usher for this recital looked set to be participating in the upcoming concert. But I suppose such planning misfortunes are inevitable, given the number and breadth of exercises going on in the Griffith building. Let’s hope that de Borah’s next program attracts greater numbers to hear the work of this insightful, gifted musician.

Diary May 2024

cliveoconnell

MY HOMELAND

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday May 3 at 7:30 pm

I’ve seen this done once before, in Melbourne, but for the life of me I can’t remember who put that city’s symphony orchestra through the whole cycle. The homeland is that of Smetana, the Bohemian master, who wrote six tone poems depicting various scenes or characters from his country. He starts with Vysehrad, the castle in Prague where the country’s kings had their seat; then Vltava, better known as The Moldau, referring to the river that eventually flows through Prague – the only well-known entity in the cycle and refreshingly picturesque; Sarka comes next, depicting the career of a female warrior with a penchant for killing men; followed by Z ceskych luhu a haju which is usually translated as From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields, gifted with an arresting opening and the only other one of the group that some of us might know; Tabor is fifth, referring to the stronghold of the Hussites which is still thriving; finally, Blanik is a mountain in which King Wenceslas and his knights sleep and will awaken when the country faces its gravest peril. Leading this nationalistic excursion will be Czech conductor Tomas Netopil, so at least you know the performances should be suitably coloured. The QSO’s normal range of full-price tickets falls between $95 and $135, with plenty of fruitful concessions available, but never forgetting the unreasonable $7.20 ‘transaction fee’ or grift.

MATTHEW RIGBY & ALEX RAINERI

FourthWall 2024 Concert Series

540 Queen St., Brisbane

Friday May 3 at 7:30 pm

Part of the ongoing FourthWall series of presentations that have been popping up as the year progresses, this duo recital from violinist Matthew Rigby and pianist Alex Raineri is well-stacked with material. The players open with Beethoven, the Sonata No. 2 in A Major, which is rarely heard compared to the Spring, Kreutzer or the C minor that Brahms is said to have transposed at sight because Remenyi refused to adjust his instrument’s strings for a semitone-flat piano. Then we hear Szymanowski’s solitary Violin Sonata in D minor from 1904 which lasts about as long as the Beethoven. A few touches of Australiana arrive, first in the world premiere of Michael Bakmcev‘s Nocturne; as you can understand, no details are available about this piece anywhere. Another nocturne appears, this one a 1944 miniature by Margaret Sutherland in a deft remembrance of an older native composer. And the duo finishes its entertainment with the Ravel Sonata No. 2 – which is the one we all know and love with its Blues middle movement; yet again, the No. 1 of 1897 is left unexplored. Well, that’s an amiable program, substantial enough to have an interval (you get wine at the break) and the whole thing lasts 90 minutes only. Admission is a straight $35, with a niggling $2.63 booking fee added on by Humanitix.

This program will be repeated on Saturday May 4 at 1 pm.

MOZART REQUIEM

Brisbane Chorale

Old Museum Concert Hall, Bowen Hills

Sunday May 5 at 3 pm

If memory serves correctly, this hall space is a small one; judging by the Chorale’s website, few seats are still available and most of those are at the rear or on the side, well out of the full-blast zone. But prices range from $20 to $60 and, as far as I can tell, there’s no surcharge for taking your money. For this reading, the Chorale is associated with the Brisbane Symphony Orchestra which I hope is rich in trombones to follow those agile choral lines. And some basset horns would go down nicely, as well, particularly for those magnificently evocative opening bars to the Introit. The choir’s regular director, Emily Cox, has charge of proceedings and her soloists are soprano Sarah Crane, alto Beth Allen, tenor Connor Willmore, and bass Shaun Brown. On the assumption that the group will use the Sussmayr completion, the experience should last about an hour, give or take five minutes, Everybody who has suffered through the Amadeus film knows that Mozart stopped at the Lacrimosa and a drop in inspiration that hits at the Offertory is remarkable. But the work ends with a recapitulation of the composer’s earlier material that sends us home slightly purified. It’s a great experience but the best Requiem I ever heard was as part of a real funeral in Austria. Even for free-thinking Mozart, appropriateness was the name of the game.

MOZART’S MASS

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Elizabeth St.

Friday May 10 at 7:30 pm

The QSO moves out of the concert hall and studio to help celebrate the 150th anniversary of the city’s Catholic cathedral. Chief conductor Umberto Clerici directs the Mass in C minor; well, what there is of it. Most of the Credo‘s latter verses are missing after the Et incarnatus, and the Agnus Dei has disappeared completely (if it was ever written). Still, the score makes a formidable composition and fleshes out your big Mozart choral experiences after the Requiem of five days previous. The composer asks for two soprano soloists (Sara Macliver and Sofia Troncoso), a tenor (Andrew Goodwin) and a bass (David Greco) as well as a double choir (Brisbane Chamber Choir and St. Stephen’s Cathedral Schola). As a happy prologue to this swelling act comes Lili Boulanger’s 5-minute setting of Psalm 24 (Psaume XXIV) which uses four horns, three trumpets, four trombones, a tuba, harp, organ, and timbales – as well as an SATB choir. The piece lasts about five minutes but all sorts of preconceptions could surge up when the choir breaks into the French composer’s version of Lift up your heads, o ye gates. Seats are going for between $35 and $135, with a bracket-creeping booking fee gouge of $7.95 per order – and this for an event scheduled to last for 1 hour 20 minutes interval-less; obviously lots of scene-changing and altar rearranging will take up the extra time.

This program will be repeated on Saturday May 11 at 1:30 pm and at 7:30 pm.

ESME QUARTET

Musica Viva Australia

Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University

Monday May 13 at 7 pm

This group’s composition presents a puzzle from the start. The original Esmes found each other in 2016 when all members were studying in Cologne. Further, all of them were Korean – and female. At this current point in time, three of them have survived: violins Wonhee Bae and Yuna Ha, and cello Ye-Eun Heo. Jiwon Kim was the original viola, but her place has been taken by a musician with the nationally ambivalent name of Dimitri Murrath (born in Brussels, of course), who also labours under the added distraction of being the ‘wrong’ gender. Still, what can you do but swallow the inevitable incursion of the male? The program that they are presenting begins with Webern’s Langsamer Satz of 1905 that kicks off in C minor and ends in E flat Major, without a trace of the major works in its passage. Continuing this early days strain, we hear Mendelssohn No 2 in A minor from the composer’s 18th year and notable for its Beethoven references. Expanding the Esmes’ horizons comes young Australian (but is the poor fellow still an expatriate academic working in Miami?) Jack Frerer‘s Spiral Sequences from 2018, written when he was 22/3. To end, the ensemble plays the solitary quartet by a 31-year-old Debussy: the night’s only well-known offering. Seats range from $15 to $115, and I can’t find details of any booking fee.

SYMPHONY FANTASTIC

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday May 17 at 7:30 pm

The name just doesn’t ring true, does it? Translated directly from the French, this concert’s title is correct, but stupid, particularly when you consider the modern-day degeneration of the adjective’s meaning. Berlioz was dealing with phantasm more than fantasy, as shown by the final two movements, if nowhere else. Nevertheless, the QSO PR team is possibly hoping to drag in the unsuspecting who, given their attention span, will nod off Trump-style in the Scene aux champs, then come to life for those bracing snarls on the way to the scaffold. The rest of us can just marvel at the brilliance of this work’s scale and orchestration while coping with some scene-setting from actor Robert Hofmann; for one glorious moment, when I saw Hofmann’s name, I thought the program might have included Lelio! Chief conductor Umberto Clerici leads the way through Berlioz’s revelations, preceding which we hear two short works. First comes Saint-Saens’ Danse macabre, followed by Ravel’s Tzigane featuring (for about ten minutes) a visitor, Jozsef Lendvay, who happens to be stopping by for this Hungarian/Gypsy compendium. I assume that the visitor won’t be leading the Danse, which may have its prominent violin solo taken by concertmaster Natsuko Yoshimoto. Anyway, the orchestra will be enjoying an early interval (after about 17 minutes’ playing) before the symphony in this all-French program which you can hear for between $95 and $135 with various concessions, escorted by the customary $7.20 fee per order (has anybody thought of promoting a Senate inquiry into this unjustifiable variable tax?)

This program will be repeated on Saturday May 18 at 1:30 pm

MAHLER’S SONG OF THE EARTH

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday May 20 at 7 pm

What is on offer here is not the original version of Das Lied von der Erde but a scaled-down orchestration started by Schoenberg and finished by Rainer Riehn 60+ years later. The ACO will present string and wind quintets, three percussionists, piano, celesta and harmonium. Richard Tognetti and his agglomerated forces will accompany mezzo Catherine Carby and tenor Stuart Skelton as they alternate the score’s six components, from Skelton’s Trinklied to Carby’s Abschied. Before the big song-cycle, the ACO performs Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll – wasted flattery on that unpleasant wife but then he himself was not much in the extra-musical personality stakes. The program’s oddity appears in three songs by Alma Mahler-Gropius-Werfel in world premiere arrangements by David Matthews. commissioned by the ACO. The titles are Laue Sommernacht, Die stille Stadt, and Bei dir ist es traut. – all from a set of five songs published in 1910 and edited by Mahler who, in his post-Freudian analysis phase, changed a prohibitory attitude to his wife’s composing. A little too late, as it turned out. You can hear this program for $59 up to $166 full adult price; concessions are available but don’t forget the usual QPAC add-on of $7.20 booking fee for your aspirational impudence.

LYREBIRD TRIO

Ian Hanger Recital Hall

Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University

Wednesday May 22 at 7:30 pm

The Lyrebird Trio swept the boards during the 2013 Asia Pacific Chamber Music Competition and its members have maintained their partnership during the intervening years, despite violin Glenn Christensen being occupied in a major role with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and cellist Simon Cobcroft playing principal cello with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Only pianist Angela Turner is a determined Brisbane resident, on the staff of the Queensland Conservatorium and the University of Queensland. Of the three works programmed for this recital, Smetana’s Piano Trio of 1855 is the most substantial, weltering in tragedy from its solo violin first bars. The group will also play Josef Suk’s Elegy Op. 23, one of the most earnest of the Czech composer/violinist’s compositions, if a brief one (coming in at about six-and-a-half minutes long). Moving a little east, the Lyrebirds will play a work by Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov, who escaped from his home country in 2022 at the Russian invasion. His Fugitive Visions of Mozart was composed about 17 years ago, so well before Putin’s army forced its way into Silvestrov’s homeland. Your normal ticket costs $22 but pensioner and alumni concessions reduce this amount. I don’t think there’s a booking fee.

BEETHOVEN 7

Conservatorium Symphony Orchestra

Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University

Friday May 24 at 7:30 pm

To take these young players through Beethoven’s A Major Symphony, here comes Johannes Fritzsch, a welcome and familiar face in this city’s serious music world. Commentators talk about this score’s vivacity, its innate energy, then rabbit on about Wagner’s overblown description of it as the Apotheosis of the Dance; ridiculous, especially when considering the even numbered movements. But it’s both exhilarating and exhausting for any band of musicians to reach a reasonably coherent standard of realization, on top of which you need a very committed body of upper strings. Prefacing the concert will be Margaret Sutherland’s Haunted Hills of 1950, a memorial to this country’s first peoples and their despair at an encroaching, unsympathetic colonial civilization. In the centre of this program stands the usual concerto; in this case, Elgar’s masterpiece for cello of 1919, his last completed major work and still towering over its competition because of its strong-minded, often grim despair coupled with emotional warmth. Soloist on this night is Stirling Hall who is a student at the Con, as far as I can tell. Tickets for students are $25, for concessionaires $35, and for adults $45 with no extra fees or charges.

CHORAL SPECTACULAR

Brisbane Chorale, The Queensland Choir, Brisbane Symphony Orchestra

Brisbane City Hall

Sunday May 26 at 3 pm

Part of the 4MBS Festival of Classics, this event doesn’t really have a program – so far. The Chorale’s websites are taken up with performances of Mozart’s Requiem (see above). The Choir mentions some composers’ names that could lead you down the fruitless path of guessing what choruses could be classed as spectacular. For instance, Brahms: part of the German Requiem, maybe? Or some of the motets, lieder or Song of Destiny/Alto Rhapsody (for the males) excerpts? None of it really spectacular. Then there’s Bach, and some of the unaccompanied motets; or the Jauchzet, frohlocket chorus might qualify, this last-mentioned with the potential to knock your sockettes off. Gounod I don’t know much about in the choral sense except the operas (Soldiers’ Chorus); maybe one of the unspectacular masses (St. Cecilia?) could feature, or that endless list of motets. Wagner can be entertaining according to gender (The Flying Dutchman) or he can fake bourgeois jubilation (Lohengrin and Tannhauser). As for Verdi, well, there’s the Anvil or Aida‘s Act 2, and you can always fall back on the trite Va, pensiero. Mozart has the masses and some marvellous motets but it’s all pretty restrained in resources and content (if they’re not the same thing). Also, there will be a soloist in soprano Mirusia, which distracts somewhat from the choral nomenclature. The combined (are they?) choral forces will be conducted by their musical directors: Emily Cox and Kevin Power; of the orchestra’s new conductor, Paul Dean, I can’t find any mention. Tickets are available from $15 to $60, with a booking fee of $1.25 – which is almost reasonable compared to the outrageous extras charged by other organizations/venues.