Category: Chamber Music

CONCORD

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.

Sunday December 10, 2023

Alex Raineri

Almost missing out completely on Alex Raineri’s excellent enterprise, I managed to get to this final-day recital featuring the artistic director himself performing Charles Ives’ mammoth Concord Piano Sonata No. 2, prefaced by the world premiere of Australian composer Lyle Chan’s Sonata en forme de cri. On this final day/night of the festival, Raineri took part in four of the five recitals on offer, but this was his only ‘solo’ performance (allowing for brief contributions from viola Nicole Greentree and flute Tim Munro in both sonatas).

Not that conditions for this event were ideal. Due to Translink’s decision to close the Gold Coast line on Sunday, I had to drive to South Brisbane, leaving the car at the only parking lot I knew; then travel two train stops, finally negotiating the uphill climb to the top of Queen Street where I joined 19 other enthusiasts in a small studio space (fortunately air-conditioned on this stinking hot day) to experience Raineri’s pianism at close quarters. Then, repeat the travel sequence in reverse post-recital. However, say not the struggle nought availeth because the sweat-inducing wriggles of getting there proved worthwhile.

Chan’s work left (as expected) scattered impressions, prefaced as it was by an address from the composer which informed us of nothing at all about his own composition but concerned itself with the Ives sonata exclusively. As Chan said, the American work is rarely performed here (or anywhere much in live performance); I recall only a few performances in Melbourne from Donna Coleman, neither of which I managed to hear. But the Concord Sonata has several worthy recorded interpretations and the work itself is over a hundred years old, standing firm as one of the bulwarks in American piano music history.

My own experience of the work has been structured through a recording of extraordinary power by Aloys Kontarsky, set down for Time Records in 1962. Quite a few critics disliked this interpretation, chiefly because they thought that the German pianist didn’t get Ives ‘right’. I believe that Kontarsky took what he found and turned it into a splendid tapestry, somehow imposing order on a work that other pianists view as a hotch-potch – and play it as such. To be sure, any other pianist sounds technically inferior to Kontarsky whose mastery of contemporary piano compositions was remarkable, but it’s true that he produced the fastest Concord on record. Which is not to say that it lacks the necessary profundity.

But then, you have to ask whether the sonata and its musical portraits of the New England Transcendentalists are that deep. Perhaps the finest achievement of the work is Ives’ ability to depict each of the four individuals/family – Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, Thoreau – as a creative composite, each movement incorporating the opening Beethoven Symphony No. 5 motif while investing each of them with its own distinctive material. This intellectual spread makes huge demands on the work’s interpreters, if not on a first-time audience, and I sense that some of us on Sunday were Ives neophytes.

What little I retain of Chan’s new sonata (and probably his only one, if he follows his practice of writing only one work in each of the canonic forms) is how much of it seemed to parallel the Ives score. On one hearing, you can’t expect to fathom Chan’s harmonic language, but in the actual moment it sounded very much as being on the older composer’s wavelength with crashing chords, an acerbically dissonant series of powerful climaxes, relieved by quiet interludes as a rhetorical contrast, with flute and viola duets serving in an antiphonal relationship with the keyboard, before all three coalesced in a momentary trio.

But after all the Sturm und Drang explosions and relief, presumably expounding the cry (of anger? grief? horror?) suggested in the score’s title, Chan offers a resolution that presents as a chorale-prelude; if I didn’t know better, I’d think it was based on Aus tiefer Not, but I wasn’t familiar enough with the theme about which was woven a near-traditional complex polyphonic web, couched in tonal language – rather like Ives’ third movement.

To make any sensible comment, you’d have to hear the work again – several times, to be honest. No doubting the composer’s emotional commitment to the task, yet his style of piling on the climaxes and powerful washes makes your involvement subject to numbness. As with the Ives, you can’t predict anything – except that there will be more plosive eruptions just around the corner. And, once again, you have to admire Raineri’s passion for contemporary art, here presenting a score that, whatever its merits, is probably not destined for many future hearings outside of the recording studio.

Taken as a whole, you found many riches in the pianist’s account of the Ives sonata. He took his time over the opening Emerson movement, the argument reaching powerful unremitting blocks before the Slowly and quietly interlude – doubly welcome for its page-long placidity – which again moved into thick, well-pedaled territory before the series of variations that start when the composer introduces a 7/8 8/8 alternating time signature and the passing relief of a vast stretch couched in C Major. While the later pages were treated with fair accuracy, the arrival of Greentree’s quiet viola triplets 12 bars from the end made for a refreshing timbre change – which is just the surprise that Ives would have intended, I suppose, after the fierce piano writing that preceded it.

Kontarsky takes the Hawthorne movement extremely fast, but he gives his right hand prominence when it’s a melody-bearing line. I got lost after Raineri’s first page, up until the E sharp and E natural cross-hands points in the narrative (such as it is). The executant made telling use of his 37 cm wood panel, the famous cluster-chords controlled and subservient to the left-hand melodic material. Later, at the repeated four bars interlude, I’d never heard before what the left hand was doing; not much, admittedly, but interestingly at organized cross-purposes with the upper staff’s content – something I wouldn’t have come across except for Raineri’s measured pace.

Raineri made fine use of the room that Ives leaves for diatonic relief at his G Major and F sharp Major soft harmonizations-extensions of the Beethoven motif. Yet the fast march time that Ives asks for six bars further on struck me as too restrained, over-cautious for its bouncy drive; still, by the time we reached that marvellously manic passage packed with five-note clusters, eventually in both hands, Raineri gave us a most persuasive entry into Ives’ most vehement dynamic landscape. Certainly, the prospect sounded rather thick as the march rhythm enjoyed a thorough exercise, but the last five-and-a-bit pages, starting at the From here on, as fast as possible direction, came over as very hard work. It’s not as though Raineri got all the notes, although I only picked up on exposed high pitches for most of the time, but much of this movement’s ‘developments’ are a trial to penetrate, let alone to articulate; the final flourish, following a faintly discordant echo of the hymn, fell into place most happily.

Not much to report about The Alcotts, even if the pace was very deliberate; even the faster exhortation after the A flat Major key signature is negated could have been accelerated without much exertion. Then again, Raineri invested a fine sentiment into the Stephen Foster melody that arrives with the E flat Major key signature in the movement’s second half. Of course, if you give this executant a triple forte demand, he will exercise a gratifying level of power-in-attack, as shown in the blazing C Major treatment of the movement’s main Beethoven Fifth variant right at the movement’s conclusion.

Of all the sonata’s parts, Thoreau impresses me as an indubitable success, mainly because of its husbandry; the composer keeps his aim focused on the final quiet peroration without straying into ragtime or diatonic harmony or the aggressive panoply employed in the first two movements. The lengthy flute appearance is a sign that the transcendent conclusion is near, and Raineri projected the intransigence of that underpinning, slow A-C-G bass motto with impressive calm. Certainly, these pages aren’t all impressionistic dreaminess or concerned with the upper planes; you can find textural complexity allied to dynamic power throughout, but the lyrical moments take on greater importance and Ives’ use of right-hand echoes leavens the urgent bravura of those technically challenging segments.

Once more, we have to thank Raineri as performer and festival director. I don’t know how he manages to attract the talent that can be seen during these recitals, nor how he contrives to keep the festival’s head above water, particularly when only a score of us turned up for this (to my mind) major event. No, he doesn’t do it all on his own, but his contribution to so many programs across this fortnight ranks as extraordinarily generous by any measurement standard. Perhaps I just happened to pick a program that failed to interest others; well, they missed a singular, engrossing achievement.

WILDSCHUT & BRAUSS

Musica Viva Australia

Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University, South Bank

Thursday November 23, 2023

Noa Wildschut and Elisabeth Brauss

Musica Viva’s artistic director, Paul Kildea, heard this duo of Wildschut and Brauss performing the Franck A Major Violin Sonata online in 2019. So impressed was he that they are now here, touring nationally , with the sixth of their nine-stop series in Brisbane. You are confronted by a pair of excellent musicians, working well in their opening bracket of Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in A minor, Messiaen’s Theme et variations of 1932, and the formidable Sonata in G minor for Violin and Piano by Debussy – the composer’s final (1917) major work.

As for the evening’s second part, I wasn’t so impressed. The pair gave an airing to a new work by May Lyon: Forces of Nature, commissioned by Musica Viva for these players. But the Franck Sonata – the big finale – was only moderately successful; not simply because of some odd choices in delivery but mainly for a disconcerting theatricality hanging over the interpretation’s finale.

I’d done the usual preparation by listening to a few tapes and online readings of each item, apart from the Lyon work, and came to the Belgian masterpiece with an impressive student reading still lingering in the memory – violin Nathan Meltzer (19) and piano Evren Ozel (18), recorded at the ChamberFest Cleveland in 2019 – because of its security and refinement.

I’ve known this work well because of a few years’ playing sonatas in earlier times (many thanks, Andrew Lee). So I’m aware of the piano part’s technical problems (disasters, in my case). But the violin line impresses as one of the most luminous and clear-speaking in the repertoire. Franck certainly exercises the performer (he was writing it for Ysaye, after all) and you can see vehement, virtuosic writing thrown up across the two middle movements. But the craft of a superior reading comes, it seems to me, from generating an unaffected, even simple line. Still, of that, more later.

Wildschut made an impression straight away with a splendidly rich G-string melody at the start of the Schumann’s Mit leidenschaftlichem Ausdruck: 8 bars of a mellow viola timbre. Here, the musicians were on steady ground, the piano inclined to reticence which is not that problematic in this score which gains in semiquaver keyboard activity as the movement progresses. More pleasures came in the following Allegretto where the duo struck a nice balance of contrasts between the quiet, perky opening sentence or three and the broader melodic sweeps interspersed between them. The only problem emerged in the ritardandi and fermate that recur across these pages, for the first time at bars 2-3. Most of the way through, these adjustments to speed and address came off simultaneously, but every so often they didn’t – which spoke to me of insufficient awareness of intention between the players.

Still, the final Lebhaft passed by with loads of verve and satisfying virtuosity in the paired semiquaver patterns and the lyrical swathes of passages like the E Major interlude that mutates so deftly back into A minor so that the rhythmic and linear streams sound seamless in the change-over. It was almost enough to ride over the few slips in violin articulation and a tendency to backpedal from Brauss who gave the foreground to Wildschut, at times beyond the bounds of courtesy.

The pianist sounded more assertive in the Messiaen collation; not surprisingly, as the piano enjoys a good deal of exposure throughout, e.g. the first variation’s chord chains; the interlocking lines of the following Un peu moins modere where the violin takes the upper line but has to endure a mobile harmonic support until the 4th-last bar’s double octave piano explosion; a restless sequence of vehement interchanges in Variation 3 with some fierce keyboard outbursts; the bell-like right-hand quavers and left-hand triplets that set the pattern for Variation 4, leading to a powerful final 8 bars of ff to fff trills and tremolando; and the final apotheosis suggesting the end of the Quartet for the End of Time in its slow processional pace and the terrifyingly risky 6 bars of quadruple-forte at the segment’s core.

Compared with other readings, the Wildschut-Brauss interpretation proved individual because of its urgency, neither musician showing any signs of hesitation, no matter how complex the mixture; the work balanced by a clear definition of outline in both outer sections and a shared confidence. But then, this work is less open to idiosyncrasies than the preceding Schumann.

Or the Debussy sonata where Wildschut again impressed for her low register timbre, even if she came close to scraping in some places; a tendency that was not realized in the second movement Intermede. You could not fault Brauss’s control of dynamic and simple touch here – no crass blurts or attention-grabbing staccato insistencies. Certainly, these pages lived up to their Fantasque direction, but the corresponding leger came over fitfully, and the final dying-away of the last six bars was unusually positive for a good part of its length.

However, the finale proved to be a disappointment, beginning with the violin solo at the time-signature quasi-change to 9/16: a rhapsodic throwaway exuberance at its finest but here lacking punch and/or a rationale. Further, the violin’s output became too forceful for the music itself at certain points, so that you were fretful about upcoming forte passages, like the Molto rit. ten bars before Number 3 in the old Durand edition of 1917. And, while the movement is a creature of fits and starts (which you can actually say about the whole sonata), I found that through these pages the interpreters seemed to be grabbing at one technical problem after another. In short, the realization lacked coherence as a steady building unit.

There’s not much to report about Lyon’s new work. It began with a violin cadenza that supposedly suggested water and ice; it closed with a ferment that represented volcanic fire – or at least that’s what I gleaned from Wildschut’s introductory comments. Fine; that’s what I heard, going along with the composer. Of course, every auditor will have a personal response but Lyon lived up to her projections. All the same, you can’t find much that’s novel here – no ‘new’ sounds or singular developmental touches – and the executants seemed to be in command of a score that painted its illustrative colours with a mild-mannered hand.

It was hard to fault the first Allegretto of the Franck work, especially as it gave us a fair sample of Brauss’s output in the movement’s 2/3 piano solo passages, carried out with eloquence and exactitude. Further, Wildschut’s delivery showed fine restraint – right up to the con tutta forza aphorisms before the second piano solo which were over-emphatic, despite the direction. Even that active opening to the second movement Allegro enjoyed expert rapid-fire handling from Brauss, and Wildschut’s G-string entry cut through effectively. The next extended violin entry sounded over-strident but the delivery of the second theme resonated with well-shaped character.

The violin’s soft line 9 bars after the Quasi lento interruption was intended, I think, to be spectral; both instruments are under a pianissimo direction (in my Schirmer 1915 score) but you still have to phrase the lines, not just let them sit there uninflected. On the other hand, when both instruments at last state the main theme in unison, the violin’s carrying power was exactly proportionate to her escort.

Both players took a spacious approach to the Recitativo-Fantasia, Wildschut unhurried in her two cadenzas. As the pair entered the F sharp minor section, you felt that the sonata was unfurling with purpose, right through those sequences of thematic reminiscences and re-statements up to the climactic violin high F, delivered with loads of bite and gusto 13 bars before the hushed ending.

The first appearance of the main theme in the A Major concluding Allegretto was a delight, mainly because of the musicians’ unfussed attack – just following a tune in canon without giving it amplitude or weight. This ease was too good to last, of course, and the later E Major version that turns into a barnstorming that prefigures the final page was something of a slash feast. And you have to have a control of weight and phrase to get through the passage work either side of the key-signature change to B flat minor, and maintain the listener’s interest in following your journey.

Perhaps Wildschut gave out too much intensity too early – not that Brauss was keeping her powder dry – but the build-up to Franck’s explosion into C Major proved overdrawn: a series of efforts that crushed against each other, the resolution not serving as a mighty release but simply another climax in a series of exercises in crescendo. Mind you, that made the final appearance of the first theme very welcome, even if Wildschut’s intonation faltered as she negotiated the highest notes in her part.

My score for the final page reads poco animato but these musicians upped the ante considerably, racing through the work’s last 21 bars at a very quick pace. They’re not alone in this acceleration, for sure, but you have to consider the music’s poise and, by the time Brauss hit the ascending dominant and tonic dyads, sense flew out the window in a meaningless frenzy. This passage is meant to be a triumph, a powerful variant, but here it was reduced to a vulgarism; an unappetizing end to a recital of good quality, if not consistently so.

MUSIC FROM THE NEW WORLD

Out West Piano Fest

Blackdown Farm, Bathurst

Friday October 27 at 4 pm

Andrey Gugnin

Yet another regional festival, this one dating as far back as 2022 and a treat, I’m sure, for the cultural habitues of Bathurst; just as the Organs of the Ballarat Goldfields week is for that city’s illuminati, and the Mornington Peninsula Summer events delight the effete palates of Melbourne’s beachside (ho ho) Prues and Trudes. For this second-time around at the same farm venue, the organizers have acquired the artistic direction of Andrey Gugnin, winner of the Sydney International Piano Competition (now becoming Piano+; move over, Elon Musk) in 2016. I’m not sure how the remaining events will go but this initial exhibition gave us observers on the Australian Digital Concert Hall site quite a bit of thick meat to digest.

Gugnin has put himself into the performing personnel, as you’d expect. He’s assembled a line-up of Sydney artists in Clemens Leske, Tamara-Anna Cislowska and Yanghee Kim (replacing the scheduled Sonya Lifschitz) and half of the program involved two-piano works, the afternoon ending with a barnstorming Rhapsody in Blue from Cislowska and Kim. Leske and Kim opened our new world ears once more to John Adams’ Hallelujah Junction; Gugnin and Cislowska worked through a pre-interval work billed as ‘from Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5’, but it was neither the Aria nor the Danca although the Latin-American inflexions came through clearly.

For solo work, Cislowska gave us a rich reading of Ginastera’s Suite de danzas criollas (five of them, with an incomprehensibly separated Coda), and Carl Vine represented us splendidly with half of his Piano Sonata No. 1 from Leske (the Leggiero e legato second movement), while Gugnin swept all before him with the complete Sonata No. 2 – a gripping interpretation that almost eliminated from one’s consciousness the work’s indulgent working-out in the later pages of the second movement that begins Legato, senza pedale but takes us well away from that on a virtuosic odyssey.

Like the afore-mentioned Victorian festivals, the clientele for this exercise looked elderly – as far as you could tell from the ADCH cameras. In fact, the youngest person in the place seemed to be Gugnin himself. I don’t see that this sort of enterprise is in any way calculated to bring in young people, particularly as the concert manager and Gugnin himself (during a post-recital address in limited English) kept on referring to pre-event drinks and post-event dining which, from my vast experience, don’t hold much interest for the new puritans.

The Adams work divides into three sections on paper but it sounds like an amalgam of several more elements than that. The composer’s inter-phase/out-of-phase technique is apparent at the opening but dissipates as the work progresses. Its initial percussiveness rouses interest but there’s not much subtlety to be heard; each player simply has to keep his/her end up in a tightly argued onslaught. Mind you, when the dynamic weight increases, you can feel your involvement fading, particularly in those frequent pointillistic chord stabs. Kim had the right idea, using a note-pad, while Leske encountered several moments of discomfort handling his printed score, opting not to involve a page-turner at this point.

True to its school, this score puts you into a mesmerised state as you move in and out of half-connections, the players seeming to enter a compact of rhythm and dynamic only to either drift through or hammer out of it. But, the longer the work goes, the more you wonder where those initial interface passages went – until, suddenly, they re-surface and your logic is engaged once more. For all that, I can’t find any link between the score’s title and the truck-stop of that name on the border of California and Nevada; the composer points to ‘junctions’ in the piano writing and rhythms based on the word ‘hallelujah’ but, while there’s no doubting the first rationale, the second is much harder to follow.

In any case, both performers weltered their paths to a congruence. Cislowska’s solo followed, showing a deft hand with the second Allegro rustico dance, especially the Ivesian 8-note right-hand clusters – all 33 of them. While the slower pieces wafted past pleasantly enough, especially the Bartok-reminiscent No. 4, Calmo e poetico, the aggressive, Panambi-suggestive faster ones proved more entertaining. I would have been happier with the No. 5 Scherzando if it hadn’t been missing about 20 bars of its second page (in my Boosey & Hawkes edition). But Cislowska continued the pattern established by her predecessors of showing the contemporary bent for sonic onslaught (albeit the Adams comes from 1996, the dances between 1946 and their revision in 1956).

Vine’s Sonata No. 1 movement presents as a toccata for both hands in tandem at the start: same notes, different registers over an 4-bar loop, the left hand persisting with the semiquaver-pattern while the treble becomes concerned with melody/cell work. Compared to the only other interpretation of this work I’ve heard (Michael Kieran Harvey, its dedicatee and initial performer), this version tended to become blurred later after the initial dry semi-staccato attack. Also, the onward rush was momentarily interrupted at bar 227. Still, Vine changes tack in the movement’s centre for La cathedrale engloutie atmospherics, albeit with plenty of added notes to complicate any harmonic predictability.

In this more leisurely phase, Leske produced a full-bodied and resonant wash of sound, giving us a fabric that displays Vine’s post-Romantic sympathies – before a return to the opening toccata busyness and the run of repeated figures that eventually dies out for a placid conclusion. A respectable interpretation, then, if not as nervously exciting as Harvey’s efforts. This was followed after interval by Gugnin’s realization of the composer’s second essay in the form (from 1997, seven years after the Sonata No. 1). During his upcoming recitals in Melbourne’s Recital Centre and Sydney’s Angel Place Recital Hall, Gugnin will repeat the work, and patrons will get a rare opportunity to hear this substantial product from a now-venerable Australian composer/pianist.

At the opening, Gugnin approached the stentorian double-octave chords calmly, giving them resonance room; then, keeping an easy hand or two on the rhapsodic rush of arpeggios that obtain from bar 9 on . Towards the movement’s middle, the pianist showed a relish for the lush writing that once again suggested submerged cathedrals, even girls with flaxen hair – the former in a solid meditation at the latter end of the movement. For all that, Vine extends his score for a fair while, happy to repeat his colours (rich as these are) and patterns, if not accomplishing much by way of formal complexity.

We switch to an irregular jazz-inflected atmosphere in the following legato, senza pedale where a loud bass ostinato supports treble clef block-chord spits. You can see why Harvey (again, its dedicatee and first interpreter) would have delighted in this sort of pianism – for its rapidity, bounding across the instrument’s compass, and its clarity of texture. Gugnin brings a similar authoritativeness to these pages, responsive to the Ondine washes that precede the climactic hymn preceding a final gallop to the work’s quadruple forte final smash-and-grab.

This is a remarkable testament to Gugnin’s dedication to some Australian music, never forgetting that among the works he performed in the Sydney 2016 Competition was one of Harvey’s 48 Fugues for Frank. Yes, he used the score of Vine’s sonata – but then, so did Leske. It would be well worth hearing his reading live in either Sydney or Melbourne particularly when considering the odd Grieg/Tchaikovsky/Silvestrov/Stravinsky amalgam that surrounds it; you’ll be treated to an unusual exhibition of mastery from a young artist who deserves all the plaudits he’s amassed so far.

As I’ve reported, the program ended with Gershwin’s sprawling rhapsody in an arrangement I don’t know; it’s not Gershwin’s own, as far as I can tell. To a certain extent Cislowska and Kim shared solo duties, although the former enjoyed what I saw as the lion’s share. You’d be too kind to call this performance a perfectly congruent one: it wasn’t, even if nothing disastrous took place although the final cakewalk revealed some slips. Yet every so often the players complemented each other very well; for example, their role-sharing at Number 22 (in the two-piano score put out by T. B. Harms in 1924) where the main theme is restated in C Major at a Piu mosso section; and the huge mash-up at the D flat Major splurge five bars after Number 26 in the middle of the work’s central cadenza.

Cislowska was left alone with the next big cadenza at Number 32, Kim only entering with those lolloping left-hand chords eight bars before Number 33 (the Leggiero call-to-arms). But the rabble-rousing double glissando interpolated before Number 37’s fussy build-up to the work’s climax struck me as vulgar and unnecessary. Not that such a flourish was too out-of-place in this knock-’em-down, drag-’em-out version of this jazz/classic warhorse which was big and blowsy, without any Bernstein-style sophistication. If nothing else, the recital’s start and end gave us sterling examples of compositions from America that reveal the national psyche more faithfully than anything out of Nashville or Graceland. And we were lucky enough to hear some Australian work that, in its ambition and elevated spirit, negated the reduction to cretinism exemplified by Dutton’s gaggle of nay-sayers, just as the United States shows at its wild and wooly best in Gershwin’s amalgam rather than at a Trump-led MAGA rally of the red-necked and scrofulous.

VISION STRING QUARTET

Musica Viva Australia

Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University, South Bank

Tuesday September 26, 2023

(L to R) Daniel Stoll, Florian Willeitner, Sander Stuart, Leonard Disselhorst

These latest guests for Musica Viva were here on the fourth leg of their national tour after performing in Newcastle, Melbourne and Hobart, from which last they were lucky to escape after sharing the national problem of flight delays/cancellations. Anyway, they got here with a couple of hours to spare and the experience didn’t seem to do them any harm, if you judge the situation by their extraordinary exhibition on Tuesday evening.

The big feature about the Visions is that they play from memory; not all the time, apparently, but all the way on this, their first Australian appearance. It seems that the German ensemble is presenting one program only as they move through all the state and territory capitals except Darwin. They begin with a brief Bloch Prelude, subtitled Receuillement in the best Baudelairean tradition: a five-minute effusion of mild passion. They end with Dvorak No 13 in G Major which celebrates – at length – being back home in Bohemia’s woods and fields after the composer’s mixed American experiences.

But what astounds is their reading from memory of Bartok No. 4, allegedly in C minor. This is a tour de force, not only of the obvious – learning the complex by heart – but also in the energetic certainty of the group’s interpretation. Here, what you are invited into is a radically new way of listening where the performers don’t focus on the printed notes but have internalized them so that their linear relationships aren’t just cerebral but totally physical. No screening from music stands or occasional eye-flicks: these four musicians focus on their collegiality where each knows exactly where and what his contribution is.

The result is that this searing music gains immeasurably, being presented as an unmediated entity and appearing (even though this cannot possibly be true) like a colossal exercise in shared improvisation. Of course, it isn’t: Bartok’s score is a solid object and the Visions work through it like so many quartets have done since March 1929. The difference is that these players have internalized every scrap and prepared it so thoroughly that you feel unshakeable confidence in their work. In the opening Allegro, the shared demi-semiquaver shakes that start at bar 58 have never sounded as uniform; each canonic pattern took on a cutting edge, e.g. the non-fugato from bar 104. Then there was that breath-taking escalation of tension that breaks out at the bar 126 Piu mosso where the action is too swift to imbibe.

Speaking of which, the Lyric Suite-indebted Prestissimo showed the benefits of knowing your place in an organism because it’s in your brain, rather than using the score as an aide-memoire. Here again, the interdependence proved absolute and justified, the ensemble grouping closely around the fulcrum of cellist Leonard Disselhorst as the motivic wisps swelled and faded before that startling burst of glissandi at bar 136, almost the dead-centre of this movement.

Disselhorst set the running for the work’s centre with a highly expressive account of the exposed solo from bar 6 to bar 34, first violin Florian Willeitner then taking over for the tinnitus-like portion of this night-music lento. What struck me here was the apparent freedom available to both players, pitching and weaving their lines with the assurance that their partners knew what they were up to and how they were working through their responsibilities before the meat of these pages emerged in bar 50’s poco allargando. As for the following all-pizzicato Allegro, we were treated to that rarity: exemplary dynamic gradations and contrasts, as in the abrupt forte arpeggiations of bar 63 preceding the triple-piano susurrus of bar 65 and the consequent catch-and-release processes in play up to bar 88’s Un poco piu mosso.

But there were so many other facets to this interpretation that deserve praise. The various pairings came over as razor-sharp in their clarity, rather than slightly sharp-discrepant, as witnessed by the outline of the final Allegretto‘s main theme (beginning at bar 15) by Willeitner and fellow violinist Daniel Stoll. Later, your spirits were elevated by the determination of Bartok’s frequent fierce canons, like that between the violins against Disselhorst and viola Sander Stuart beginning at bars 249/50, then 284/5. And I can’t recall being as struck at percussive simultaneity as in the col legno-punctuated stretch beginning at bar 329: a gripping uniformity of attack lasting till bar 340.

After interval, the Visions worked through the Dvorak work with just the same sweeping stamina, perfectly comfortable with the composer’s sonorous landscape of benevolent contentment. I watched this from the back of the Conservatorium hall which gave an opportunity to relish the group’s timbral warmth, particularly welcome during the Adagio second movement’s progress from that throbbing sul G/sul D initial strophe from Willeitner to the weltering grandioso C Major statement just before the key signature reversion back to E flat Major. In these hands, even that self-indulgently lengthy Allegro con fuoco finale maintained its grip as the group seemed to knot even tighter together while the episodes swept past, including that odd prefiguration of Harry Belafonte at the piu mosso 19 bars after Number 5 in the Eulenberg edition of (about) 1910.

You can argue that this group has numerous advantages not available to others. Three of them have been in the Vision configuration since 2012 – long enough to know each other’s musicianship and still tolerant enough to endure those personality quirks that have driven asunder other ensembles. Willeitner replaced Jakob Encke in 2021 but his slightly-less-than-two-years Vision experience clearly doesn’t tell against him. These musicians still have the heightened perceptions of youth on their side, all being in their very early 30s and I’d suggest at their prime level of physical reactiveness: they move remarkably quickly and with admirable discipline.

Best of all, as their Bartok reading shows, they have no fears of the difficult but show willing to master music that is still taxing after nearly a century since its publication. This readiness to enter fully into their work gives you hope for their future, although it’s probably expecting too much to expect that they will eventually be able to give a complete Bartok cycle from memory, for example. Despite that, I’m afraid that the Visions have spoiled us; from now on, I’ll be remembering their confidence and ensemble virtuosity when faced with any normal string quartet complete with music stands, no matter how essential these may be. Irrational, I know, but this group has set a remarkable precedent, regardless of what follows from them or anybody else.

COLOUR AND VITALITY

Mackay Chamber Music Festival

Conservatorium Theatre, Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music

Sunday July 23, 2023

Glenn Christensen

To those of us from out-of-state, only one chamber music festival has operated in regional Queensland: Townsville. And each time a message comes through from the Australian Digital Concert Hall people, I’ve been reading ‘Townsville’ for ‘Mackay’. This latter celebration is only five years old, the brain child of Glenn Christensen whom I know mainly as a one-time violinist with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. He has moved on since those days to be deputy concertmaster with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, and one of his other post-Tognetti moves has been to set up this small-scale festival in his home town.

It’s small because it lasts barely three days with much of its activity pushed onto the last day, which was Sunday where guest artists Arcadia Winds and two-thirds of the resident artists Lyrebird Trio combined for two significant ensemble scores that you rarely hear worked through successfully because of the odd personnel required: Martinu’s Nonet No. 2 which fits the Arcadias but asks for one each of the standard string section – and it’s a rare string quartet that substitutes a double bass for the usual second violin; and Beethoven’s Septet Op. 20, which asks for the same string combination as the Martinu but cuts out the top two woodwind lines.

Beginning the program (after artistic director Christensen’s multiple thank-you messages to his festival helpers) was a duo for violin and double bass by Pekka Kuusisto’s older brother and fellow violinist/composer, Jaako, who died in 2022 from brain cancer. This short piece, Minio (meaning ‘minion’?), exercised violinist Doretta Balkizas (a Bremen colleague of Christensen: same city, different orchestra) and bass Jaan Pallandi from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. It begins with an insistent pulse/scrape from the bass instrument followed by repeated semiquaver groups from the violin. The delivery is vehement and rough, even when the roles reverse and the bass opts for pizzicato while the violin exercises its own capacity for full-bodied scrapings which eventually accelerate. This far, you won’t hear much melodic content – not even of an angular type; it’s all rhythmic jumps and alterations, punctuated by some high, top-of-the-fingerboard notes from the bass.

But then comes a kind of relieving trio with open A and E string alternations from the top voice with harmonics produced by the bass, before both instruments opt for this harmonics by-play. Some inter-relationship follows where one note for Pallandi underpins three for Balkizas before we return to the opening aggression, more growling before a reminiscence of happier times with a violin tremolando above the bass’s high, aspiring series of 2nd intervals; the whole, finishing with a mutual assault on four semiquavers and a farewell belt. Despite its theatricality, I enjoyed this work but I suspect mainly for the energy and breezy enthusiasm of its executants.

For Martinu’s nonet, the full Arcadia group emerged: flute Eliza Shephard, oboe Rachel Bullen, clarinet Philip Arkinstall, horn Rachel Shaw, bassoon Matthew Kneale. Mind you, that’s a pretty different formation to the one I’m used to with Kiran Phatak on flute, oboist David Reichelt, and clarinet Lloyd Van’t Hoff. Balkizas returned as top string, with Meagan Turner viola, Simon Cobcroft (from the Lyrebirds) on cello, and Pallandi representing the most hard-worked unit of the afternoon. For all that, not much took me by surprise across this sample of neo-classical bounce. All players handled the opening Poco allegro well enough, somehow emphasizing the composer’s stolid use of timbral blocks as exemplified in the wind hymn 3 bars after Number 3 in the Statni Nakladatelstvi/Barenreiter edition of 1959. But the only dubious moment came in the violin line about Number 12 where the tedious soprano-level ostinato wavered momentarily.

It’s always hard to gauge operating conditions from a broadcast but both cello (and later, bass) came across as over-confident in the opening pages of the middle Andante. Yes, I know the cello has the melody from this movement’s opening and for some time after but Cobcroft’s idea of mf put the surrounding string piano well into the background. As the movement progressed, the ensemble displayed a sense of carefully applied rubato and an awareness of dynamic contrasts, even if this latter proved close to overbearing at climaxes as at Number 3, two bars before Number 5, and the explosion a bar before Number 8 where Pallandi’s tremolando F somehow dominated proceedings. Not the most fluent performance but the pieces fell into place properly.

It was a pleasure to encounter the concluding Allegretto with its clever-clever changes in pulse which gave the four strings no problems in the scene-setting opening pages. While the shade of Stravinsky is present in both outer movements, you also come across suggestions of Copland in this finale; for instance, at the Poco meno 6 bars before Number 10. You also encountered some passages of splendidly rich scoring, certain tutti stretches of powerful warmth, pointing to Martinu’s open-minded acceptance of his own emotional stance and compositional vocabulary in his last, very fruitful year.

For the Beethoven Op. 20 Septet, Christensen (also a Lyrebird) replaced Balkizas in the taxing violin part, and both Shephard and Bullen were not required. This work began impressively enough with an excellent communal attack on the Adagio‘s communal chords, loud and soft. With the jump to Allegro con brio, Turner’s viola Alberti accompaniment proved too loud for Christensen’s finely contoured opening subject, if more restrained in the exposition’s repeat. But then, the violinist kept to an appropriate dynamic level throughout these pages, regardless of the curt self-promotions of some colleagues, both wind and strings. However, the movement showed all ensemble members cleanly articulating and eager to engage with the score.

I came across only two problems with the Adagio cantabile: one of the repeated bassoon Fs across bars 22 and 23 went missing in action; and Cobcroft with Pallandi pushed themselves too far forward in Arkinstall’s solo about 36 bars from the movement’s ending. These apart, the players did fine service to this one slow movement of the six in this score. The group’s Tempo di Menuetto enjoyed brisk treatment – more a bucolic stamp than usual – with some welcome rubato at the woodwind’s octave rise and fall at the second half’s centre. Icing on the cake, Shaw’s arpeggios during the Trio proved faultless.

All strings showed to better effect in terms of dynamic responsibility during the first variation of the next movement; but then, the winds are silent here – no competition. Christensen made short work of Variation 2’s demi-semiquaver-packed line, while Arkinstall and Kneale exercised some individuality in the concluding bars to Variation 3’s first half. It’s not that difficult, but what a relief to have Shaw’s accurate horn in play for Variation 4’s opening and closing four bars; it added to the high quality of delivery from all in this segment. And the troupe almost carried off an ideal final variation-plus-coda except for some glitch between violin and viola in the third/second-last bar.

Similarly, something odd happened to the cello line in the latter-stages duet with Christensen in the final stages of the Scherzo‘s Trio. But full marks to the violinist for his E flat arpeggios starting at bar 47 of the movement’s main part; a cleverly understated buzz that enriched his colleagues’ outline of the melody. And the Presto of the finale was the violin concerto that Christensen indicated in his pre-performance talk. All attention here focused on the top string and its interwoven solo exposures, the performer showing a firm, steady style at critical moments like the three-bar solo that leads into the second subject’s reappearance, not to mention the taxing, if ludicrous cadenza that brings this helter-skelter progress to a standstill before the final stanzas, complete with chains of increasingly hectic triplets for the violin.

This Beethoven made a benign conclusion to the Mackay festival which slightly overlapped with the Townsville event that began on this Sunday and lasts till Sunday August 6. I went as a guest to one of the earliest of these latter celebrations in the more northern city but I’m tempted to visit next year’s Mackay gathering because it’s easier to imbibe, less time-consuming, and the quality of performances – on this showing – could proved very satisfying. At the same time, I’m finding it hard to get over the fact that Queensland hosts two such exercises in close succession annually – and not in the state’s capital; a great boon to both regional cities’ residents.

AMONG THE BIRDS AND THE TREES

Adam Walker, Timothy Ridout, Anneleen Lenaerts

Conservatorium of Music, Griffith University

Wednesday May 3, 2023

Anneleen Lenaerts

Latest in the Musica Viva national tour recitals, we heard the instrumental combination set-up for one of Debussy’s final sonatas: that for flute (Adam Walker), viola (Timothy Ridout) and harp (Anneleen Lenaerts). This program had a sort of innate sense, its major elements the Debussy work and two later works employing the same ensemble: Gubaidulina’s The Garden of Joy and Sorrow, and Takemitsu’s And then I knew ’twas Wind. Along the way, each musician contributed a party piece or two. In the first half, Walker made an eloquent case for Georg Benjamin’s Flight; Lenaerts indulged in a transcription of Jardins sous la pluie from Debussy’s Estampes trilogy; Ridout too played a transcription with the Fantasia No. 7 in E flat by Telemann, a piece originally for violin. After interval, Walker and Lenaert collaborated in Messiaen’s Le Merle noir (originally for flute and piano), before Lenaerts yet again indulged in another Debussy piano transcription with Clair de lune from the Suite bergamasque.

Best of all, as far as this audience was concerned, was this last which served as some reassurance in a foreign landscape. The night’s finale, Debussy’s trio sonata, is not well known because of rarity in performances – although why that should matter in these happy times of perfect recordings, I don’t know. But the composer’s best-known piano solo enjoyed sensitive treatment, the long-arched drooping melody picked out with finesse while much of the accompanying figuration came over the space to this hall’s rear. It made a pleasing preface to the sonata which gained much from a compelling collaboration between these artists who demonstrated a reassuring awareness of their relative positions, specifically in the rambling first two movements.

It’s a composition that, for two-thirds of its length, radiates a loose warmth in a setting where everything is thematically controlled but the content seems to spill from one segment into the next. More than the transformations and subtle timbral changes, the moments that have always attracted me are those where the instruments mesh in something close to equality: the first movement Gracieux five bars after Number 2 in the Durand score; later in the same movement the brilliant wash four bars after Letter 4; and the soft fall to the movement’s conclusion beginning at Number 6. These were delivered with excellent balance and idiomatic responsiveness, highpoints in a reading welcome for its cool warmth.

The pleasures continued in the following Interlude, notably the energetic outburst that begins with a harp glissando six bars after Number 10, which peters out five bars after Number 12; here was an invigorating, light-filled centre to this movement that is languid at either end. Not to mention Lenaerts’ supple support through the duets and imitations that follow Number 14; on the verge of lushness, but eloquent. As for the Final, this was handled with an unexpected percussiveness, the harp making forceful work of the left-hand F quavers that mark the opening of each bar up to Number 16. I liked the heavy-footed discursiveness that sets in four bars after Number 18, and the joyous bolt towards home that begins straight after that nostalgic look-back to the opening Pastorale. A work that has so little of the doctrinaire about it and which proves a welcome experience after each live performance.

About Gubaidulina’s composition, I’m not sure what to report. These players had the score’s measure and the various incidents passed with apparently easy ensemble, but the language evades me, being on the cusp of dissonance but inserting, especially towards the end, common chord arpeggios. The work begins arrestingly enough with what appear to be single-string harp glissandi, producing an approximation of a sine wave. But the Eastern inflexions promised as part of the composer’s inspiration passed me by, as did the relevance of Francois Tanzer’s poem from which Gubaidulina took inspiration, although Ridout read it for us beforehand in English and German. But then, this set of verses moves beyond the other poetic source – Iv Oganov and a wealth of garden/flower imagery – into general prospects of the world at large . . . and there, I’m lost.

As usual with Takemitsu’s work, And then I knew ’twas Wind takes a melody or a motif and toys with it; the fascination lies in hearing or trying to trace the multiple torsions. This composition – like Gubaidulina’s, based on a poem (in this case, by Emily Dickinson) – sets up an expansive landscape where flute and viola slowly emerge after the harp has set up the focal flourish, and you’re carried forward on the poet’s fitful gustiness. The product presents as more ‘constructed’ than either of the two other trios programmed, while the Japanese master makes an early reference to Debussy’s Sonata. But the palette is varied and crammed with pointillist touches informed by the opening 3rd and 7th intervals and a moving, oddly concordant conclusion.

The Japanese master’s music proved more accessible than Gubaidulina’s essayed fusion – possible for its placidity of utterance and contentment in a fixed number of colours, although the viola is taxed heavily with production shifts. Added to this, Takemitsu infuses his music with individual colour but without trying to make statements, or drawing attention to the technical skill of those involved. More than most of his contemporaries, this writer creates without self-regard or the desire to generate some sort of eclat; it’s a marvellous accomplishment, especially from a student of Messiaen, a master of look-at-me, watch-my-modes composition.

As for the party pieces, there’s little to say. Benjamin’s solo flute bagatelle of 1979 opens with some low glissandi, punctuated by abrupt blips, before we encounter some typical atonal birdsong outbursts. Then the composition moves into further episodes, alternating lengthy lyrics with busy chattering. It’s obviously a favourite for Walker who moved through its pages with high eloquence, even if the English composer is following a path well-established by his European peers. You could find the same enthusiasm in Lenaerts’ Debussy. The gardens suffered very little from this rain as the original’s bite was missing in the more formidable passages, such as the D flat Major arpeggio explosion at bar 47, the meteorological panorama starting with the long-awaited final change of key signature to E Major two pages from the end, and the percussive strikes of the last three bars – all present here but missing their characteristic cutting vitality.

Ridout’s Telemann transcription worked persuasively enough across its four divisions, the performer drawing out the unremarkable seven splits of the opening Dolce with a firm right hand, and being victim to less errors in the two faster movements than you might have expected, given the Allegro‘s high activity level. But I think the most outstanding of these fillers came with the Messiaen duo: a favourite for certain flautists, if (like so many of the composer’s bird-infested works) blessed with the most melodically adventurous blackbird in avian history. Here again, Lenaerts took on the piano part – with considerable success, although much of the piece’s interest lies in the cadenzas for flute before and after the first duet segment, with the final presto rush between both players as fine an instance as you will experience of metre-less rhythmic energy (perhaps).

Walker and Ridout have collaborated in recent years; Lenaerts has appeared at the same venues/festivals as her male colleagues but I’m unsure whether she has partnered either (or both) of them before. Yet, in this session one-third of the way through a 9-night program across the country, all three musicians displayed excellent ensemble across the focal trio compositions, bringing a high level of chamber music performance to audiences of an organization that has sponsored so successfully this corner of a shrinking serious music environment.

ANAM ENCOUNTERS: IMPRESSIONS

Australian Digital Concert Hall

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday April 31, 2023

Matthew Garvie

In his opening talk, pianist Reuben Johnson proposed that this Australian National Academy of Music program was the brainchild of pianist Matthew Garvie and himself; the institution putting its members to work in the fullest sense – think of it, organize it, play it. Like many other keyboard musicians – well, specifically pianists – the two decided to observe the 150th anniversary of the birth of Rachmaninov. The Russian master’s natal sesquicentenary, as it were, and we enjoyed some examples of this composer’s work, framed by a couple of dubious superimpositions.

Johnson began with some Bach; because that’s what you do, I suppose. Exactly what relevance you were meant to see between the presiding genius of Western music and the popular pianist/composer seemed difficult to detect. Yes, all European writers worth the name who entered the craft from the post-Baroque on owe a massive debt to Bach, whether they know it or not. Exactly why Rachmaninov should be singled out escapes me; he played Bach, yes, but not very much, if his discography is any guide; his only transcriptions were the Preludio, Gavotte and Gigue from the E Major Partita for violin – a fairly obvious source to raid. Did he learn his counterpoint from Bach? You’d have to think that Taneyev put his student through some of The Well-Tempered Clavier; whatever the case, his part-writing presents as full-blooded from the start (e.g., the C sharp minor Prelude).

At all events, Johnson worked through the English Suite No. 2 in A minor. Then Garvie led us into the second Op. 39 set of with Nos. 1, 8 and 9. Alongside violinist Harry Egerton and cellist Shuhei Lawson, Garvie presented the first Trio elegiaque in G minor, the (slightly) younger work in one movement. Then we enjoyed two bon-bons; first, with a four-hands transcription by American pianist Greg Anderson of the Rachmaninov Vocalise; then a nationalistic swoop in Miriam Hyde’s brief Toccata for Two of 1973 which might have owed some debt to the sesquicentennial boy but struck me as more Prokofiev-lite.

Speaking of the percussive, Johnson’s Prelude to the suite proved aggressive with a persuasive thrusting aspect, leavened with some eloquent dynamic intensity. In fact, the approach moved beyond a rattling martellato at certain points, like the sudden Romantic retrospective at bar 95 and beyond, with more hefty piano timbre emerging in the bass Es at bars 152-154. The Allemande‘s fluency occasionally faltered, as at the opening to the first half’s repeat; the bass crotchet B of bar 11, also in the first half, was fumbled at first attempt. I also started noticing the player’s unexpected arpeggiations on fulcrum chords, letting them speak in both upward or downward directions, No problems with the Courante, apart from a missing A crotchet in bar 21 of the 2nd repeat.

Johnson’s reading of the suite’s Sarabande followed the usual pattern of loading in the ornaments on the repeats, using Les agrements de la meme Sarabande the second time around; well, there’s no point arguing with City Hall. He employed a well-deployed piano dynamic and delicacy of touch, in much the same way as he inserted subtlety of attack into the repeats of Bourree 1; indeed, the complex of both bourrees made for a dramatic journey, the more arresting for Johnson’s abrupt switch back to the minor for the Bourree I repeat. Yes, Bach obviously planned the effect but it’s a pleasure to see the contrast achieved with such success, alongside a forward reference to Rachmaninov in the final 8 bars of Bourree II‘s second-half repeat. After which, the Gigue was something of a let-down, mainly for a momentary lack of rhythmic definition, the impetus being slightly disrupted at those points where both hands have mordents (e.g. bars 7, 9, 11), especially in the dance’s second half (bars 52, 54, 56), The spirit was certainly willing . . .

Enter Garvie with his Rachmaninov triptych. It’s hard to make much sense of the first etude-tableau in C minor: phenomenal athleticism but not much else to hang onto. The performer worked through it with technical heels flying, even if he showed a penchant for emphasizing bass notes – well, the bass clef in general – while the right-hand filigree was left as just that. Better (music and performance) came in No. 8 where Garvie demonstrated a laudable control of idiom and technique with an effective luminous atmosphere when the dynamic level was light, as at the G Major meno mosso in the movement’s centre.

No. 9, the last in the opus number, enjoyed a powerful interpretation, evenly spread apart from some disappearing right-hand semiquaver duplets in bars 18 and 20. And I appreciated the dynamic extremes achieved across this score’s canvas – the abrupt jumps without mediation between loud and soft, all leading to a driving final 6 bars – and the later treble-clef clarity, complementing its secondary status during the first of these Rachmaninov forays.

As usual, the piano part proved too loud for both strings in parts of the G minor Trio No. 1, right from the start when both violin and cello take their turns with the first theme (bars 20 and 24 respectively), and even later at the bar 79 outburst where Garvie announced his scale outbursts with over-wielded authority. Both Egerton and Lawson sounded at their most comfortable in the canonic duet from bar 135 to bar 142, the latter producing a rich, exposed thematic restatement at bar 168. But these performers displayed a reliable fidelity to dynamic direction throughout this score, enduring some blistering obliterations from Garvie. Possibly, the musicians might have benefited from more rehearsal to get their output levels into closer synchronization; they knew where they were headed, certainly, but the reading lacked coherence of effort, it seemed to me. They might all be attending ANAM but that doesn’t mean they group up regularly.. I’m not sure of previous experiences with Lawson but I’ve heard Egerton in recent times playing towards better results.

So we came to the two inserted encores. The Vocalise arrangement for Garvie and Johnson had the four hands interweaving; well, mainly Johnson reaching between and across his partner’s operations for some bass notes. I assume that arranger Anderson made this criss-cross organization for recitals with his long-time (over 20 years) partner Elizabeth Joy Roe because it involves – as was pointed out – quite a bit of choreographic organizational preparation. Both artists here worked happily together through this elaborate treatment which looked more complex than it sounded. And the Hyde toccata made an excellent counterweight with a brisk tempo and a communally bouncy application. Still not sure how Hyde fits in here but this small gem summoned up a smile or two after a solid whack of aggressive gloom and strong-armed melancholy.

KARIN SCHAUPP & FLINDERS QUARTET

Musica Viva Australia

Queensland Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University

Tuesday March 7, 2023

Karin Schaupp

Please excuse the disproportionately large snap above of Musica Viva’s guest guitarist; I’ve lost control over the size of inserted photographs on this WordPress system. Still, there’s little argument that the Brisbane artist was the pivotal figure in Tuesday night’s recital, the penultimate in a series of 8 outings in the usual MV national tour, albeit one that had suffered from the alarums and excursions that COVID and its variants have imposed on us all. At this point, we were hearing a program that – barring its final outing in Adelaide – was as finely honed as possible.

Several points in the evening showed plenty of ensemble finesse; at other stages, the level of accomplishment drooped. Flinders Quartet followers would be well aware of the accomplished ensemble output of viola Helen Ireland and ccllist Zoe Knighton, both foundation members of this 23-year-old group. From the violin lines, however, I detected occasional uncertainty – not just in pitch but in uniformity of production and what I can only call ‘mirroring’: that agreement in all particulars that typifies an ideal duo. Many of us would have been hearing this configuration of performers for the first time. Second violin Wilma Smith has been a stalwart of Melbourne’s musical life for many years and has accumulated an impressive curriculum vitae; Thibaud Pavlovic-Hobba is a less familiar quantity, although I seem to recall his first appearances with the Australian Chamber Orchestra in about 2014/15. But I can’t recall hearing him at close quarters.

What I thought was going to be an introductory romp, Carulli’s A Major Guitar Concerto Op. 8, seemed to offer unaccountable problems. Maybe it was the reduced personnel in use – no oboes, horns or double-bass – or the absence of the second movement polonaise, but the fabric proved imperfect, violin octaves occasionally not exactly in tune and even Schaupp having trouble generating a consistently perceptible line in semiquaver scales and then handling with requisite fluidity that odd triplet passage of four bars that breaks up Carulli’s rhythmic strait-jacket.

Richard Charlton’s Southern Cross Dreaming, a solo for Schaupp, is an amiable miniature and comfortable for the instrument. So it should be: it was written for Schaupp, at Schaupp’s suggestion; she premiered it in 2012 and her performance is also available on CD. Comfort music, then. At its heart, the piece is a tremolo study and its connection to the constellation is a matter of your own emotional reaction. Charlton’s use of ‘dreaming’ suggests a mesmerised state, rather than any Aboriginal connotations, and I was happy to collaborate.

My paternal aunt had an old LP of Segovia playing in Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Guitar Quintet of 1950. But since that time. it hasn’t shown up on any guitar+string quartet recitals I’ve attended (admittedly, they’ve been few in number). Reacquaintance didn’t reinforce an inherited dislike for the score’s astringency; indeed, the initial Allegro showed this ensemble at its best with a fine clarity from everyone and a delicious piquancy at each return of the first subject of this formal but infectiously happy set of pages. The succeeding Andante featured Ireland’s line prominently, perhaps over-emphatic and ripe with vibrato but managed without the self-indulgence that the direction mesto often brings. But I feel that none of the other movements – including the sprightly Scherzo and final Allegro – maintains your interest as fully as the first.

Certainly, a good deal happens and the composer is lavish with his material, especially in the Spanish inflections of the third movement. Added to which, the melding of guitar and strings is remarkably balanced and fair, Schaupp a consistent strand in the concerted passages and making the most of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s deftly abrasive solo stretches. It’s an attractive work in competent hands and, if this performance wasn’t as vividly definite as you hear it on some recordings (Pepe Romero, I’m thinking of you), these players worked their way through it with assurance and something approaching enjoyment.

The Italian writer’s composition might have been the program’s most substantial element, but its central point arrived after interval with Carl Vine’s new composition Endless, a latter-day deploration on the death of architect/environmentalist Jennifer Bates, killed in a Newcastle hit-and-run disaster in December 2016. The score for this recital’s instrumental resources was commissioned by Kathryn Bennett, the victim’s mother. Possibly deploration suggests something morbid, definitely morose; there is little in Vine’s pages that suggests gloom. Melancholy, perhaps, but even in the meditative pages that surround the score’s central dance celebrating Bates’ passion for salsa, the work avoids requiem mode.

As you’d anticipate, the instrumental fabric is expertly managed, the guitar treated as a fulcrum voice from the outset while the full ensemble is put to active work in the dance section. The effect is not simply bipartite – the professional and the dancer – but a carefully welded musical portrait where one aspect folds into the other. In the final sections where Vine attempts to represent the ‘endless knot’ of Buddhist belief, a concept sympathetic to Bates’ credo, the instrumental layering and foregrounding of individual lines makes a telling emotional impact for reasons that are inexplicable; the moment isn’t exactly religious or suggestive of transcendence, but as a final salute, a hopeful farewell, it makes a powerful impression of that state where the fire and the rose are one.

The Flinders gave an airing to Imogen Holst’s one-movement Phantasy Quartet of 1928. This served the purpose of showing the players at ease in a generous score that took its various bases from the folk-infused examples of Vaughan Williams and other British bucolic composers. Fortunately, the composer had inherited her father’s ear for relieving astringency so that listeners aren’t swamped in sweetness. Did it add much to your depth of chamber music experience? Probably not, but this writer is overdue for exposure; even ABC Classic FM got onto the bandwagon the other day through an airing of the Fanfare for the Grenadier Guards – no, not a substantial contribution to Holst’s renaissance but an attempt, if measly, in this week of International Women’s Day.

To finish, the group performed the last two movements – Grave assai and Fandango – from Boccherini’s Guitar Quintet in D Major G. 448, which the Flinders and Schaupp recorded in 2010 with different violinists. The slow movement is really a 9-bar introduction to the dance which has the occasional infectious bite even if its repetitions start to oppress. Cellist Knighton is still taking up the castanets for part of the fandango, just as when I last saw this group perform the full quartet at Montsalvat in Eltham. Even in these non-too-difficult pages (for the strings), the upper lines didn’t come across to the back of the hall as dynamically balanced, although their pitching proved efficient enough.

As you can see, this was a multifaceted program, beginning and ending with guitar classics, two Australian compositions set alongside a 20th century repertoire staple for this combination and a curiosity from British music’s back blocks. For all the variety, it struck me that the participants were still not comfortable in all their offerings, despite the long association between three of them and the substantial preparation time enforced on the whole group by our country’s chain of medical disasters.

KUNG FU CELLIST – Y-SQUARED

Yelian He & Yasmin Rowe

Australian Digital Concert Hall

February 22, 2023 at 6 pm

Yelian He, Yasmin Rowe

This cello/piano duo has been going strong since 2008 under the appellation Y-Squared. In a surprise announcement at the Primrose Potter Salon between Beethoven and Schumann works, He announced that, after 15 years, he and Rowe are taking their collaboration to another level and are getting married. This was a rather understated occasion; nobody flew into manufactured ecstasy; nobody whooped or hollered in the traditional Love Island acknowledgement of such information; the partners smiled at the applause but kept their composures – and almost immediately got on with the program. I can’t tell you how much I admired this restraint which delighted after years and years of manufactured emotional exhibitions in the poorest Hollywood tradition, now exaggerated to ludicrousness on reality television.

Still, such control seemed to be a continuation or reinforcement of the couple’s artistic output. They opened their evening with Beethoven’s Twelve Variations on the theme ‘Ein Madchen oder Weibchen’, Papageno’s Act 2 aria in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. As with much in the rest of the program, this performance proved to be refined and elegant although, to be fair, He had little of gravity to do with most of the virtuosic running left to the piano; well, this is only to be expected, given Beethoven’s prowess which was in full swing at the probable time of composition – 1796. From the outset, this interpretation impressed for its sprightliness, evident in the theme’s announcement, and in the bounce with which Rowe infused her solo Variation 1’s demi-semiquavers.

He relished the opportunity to urge out an accurate, carefully wound Variation 2, while Rowe’s left hand gave us a faultless, highly active account of Variation 3. A clever division of labour on Beethoven’s part followed, then another piano-dominated 16 bars’ worth. Variation 7 again gave He little to do, the sole point of interest Rowe’s hiatus-point trills, carried off of a fine evenness. Ditto Variation 8, although the cello was rarely silent but confined to bass support while the keyboard generally worked on two treble staves. I enjoyed the slurred syncopation of Variation 9 from both musicians, chiefly because they made sense of the section’s rhythm while giving full weight to the bar-lines’ presence. As for the two minore blocks, Rowe handled the first one’s opening 8 bars with fine sensitivity and a lightly applied rubato, while He produced a mellifluous bass lyric in Variation 11, the pianist maintaining a present but non-insistent treble tinkling. With the change of time signature to 3/4 for Variation 12, a more even spread of responsibility proved welcome, with a deft and clean account of the work’s last 10 bars that concluded the work with placid softness.

After their engagement news, the duo launched into Schumann’s Op. 73 Fantasiestucke and again you were confronted with a seamless interpretation of welcome maturity. He produced a finely burnished timbre for the opening Zart, his line balanced and carefully woven, avoiding any suggestions of fitful temperament or tantrums; in firm balance, Rowe was an excellent partner for the controlled restlessness of her triplet patterns, almost continuous up to the last nine bars – both executants working in fine synchronicity of attack and emotional congruence. Similarly, in the following Lebhaft, the performance showed admirable fluency in treating the same metrical contrast across the first part, up to the central repeated segment although a rare articulation error from He disrupted the first note of this central section’s second part (in the repeat, I think).

Once again, Rowe demonstrated a sterling consciousness of appropriate dynamic levels in the final Rasch, the piano a reinforcement of the rapid cello upward arpeggios and a background to the movement’s second-phrase lyric. This trait is notable in a Schumann chamber music pianist where many players seem to think they have right of way because of the writing’s solidity; Rowe looks for elegance rather than loquacity; for example in the middle segment where the tonality changes to A minor (if anything) and the cello sings a relieving, quiet melody over more semi-urgent triplets.

My only query came with an introduced pause 11 bars into the Coda when an abridgement of the upward-leaping arpeggio pattern shifts into a flattened-out version of the beginning’s answering strophe. It just seemed an odd refinement to admit when the direction Schneller has just been introduced for a gripping rush towards the ebullient, can’t-come-quick-enough conclusion.

We then enjoyed some highly appropriate Salon music in Elgar’s Salut d’amour which I don’t think I’ve heard live since my mother gave up the violin. A fine melody seems to be its main attraction; certainly there’s not much for the pianist to do, except for maintaining the andantino pace. And He produced a caressing line, achieved without over-stretching his vibrato and keeping our attention fixed on his quietly insistent phrasing. It made for an amiable interlude, a blast from our Victorian/Edwardian past, probably best reserved for an encore – like the Frank Bridge Serenade that eventually fulfilled that function.

But the last offering in the duo’s printed program was Poulenc’s Cello Sonata which was constructed well before the composer’s four woodwind scores in the same genre. Again, I can’t recall a previous live performance that I’ve attended. Maybe I’ve been lucky because this four-movement construct falls into tedium in its outer Allegro and Presto movements. Yet again, the distinctive feature of this interpretation was its fluent facility; all the cello’s technical ducks and drakes, all the piano’s dissonances seemed ironed out with few harmonic frissons available to spice up a busy environment. Something odd happened at the A flat trills around Number 10 in the Heugel 1953 edition; I can’t be specific but I think it came from the cello line – going back to find the place proved fruitless but I believe some unexpected if slight irregularity sprang up.

Both parties gave us a fetchingly voluptuous passage beginning at Number 18 where the composer insists that his interpreters must not slow down to take relish in a sudden purple passage after all that Tempo di marcia insistence. At some point, I began thinking that Rowe was using her sustaining pedal a good deal; but the score pretty well instructed her to produce plenty of washes. Still, the movement is garrulous right up to this point; dedicatee Fournier might have called for a dash of brevity, apart from advising the composer on technical problems and potentialities. Happily, the following F sharp Major Cavatine displayed many passages of smooth sailing, beginning with the sans presser melody emerging in the cello at Number 1, even if a momentary blip came with He’s assault on the top G at Number 4, the production coming across as uncertain on what is probably the highest note in the cello part across these pages. Against that, place the impressively controlled sweep of colour with the reapplication of the mute at the Excessivement calme marking 13 bars from the movement’s chaste conclusion.

Rowe showed herself in light touch across the Ballabile, even with those full chords and octaves subsumed in the general aura of balletic bounding. Once again, you had to be impressed by the unshakeable congruence of these players in the outer sections where the instruments double each other with no room for hesitation. On top of that, He and Rowe convinced you of the good humour that runs through these pages where the percussive and intimate leggiero walk hand in hand. A full-bodied account of the finale’s 10-bar Largo introduction preceded an abrupt shift to rhythmic busyness at the arrival of the main body’s Presto subito; the players burbled along efficiently, although a C sharp minor chord at Number 11 struggled to make its desired effect. But there’s little defence against the movement’s central content between Numbers 13 and 18 where the action relaxes and the underpinning impetus disappears. It’s hard to describe how welcome were the returned triplets and how depressing the reversion to Gymnopedies country at Number 20 before the rounding-off stately five-bar Largo,

Poulenc’s product is a hard one to like, even when faced with a performance as expert as this one was. At the end, you know you’ve been through a substantial experience, one that gives its performers much room to demonstrate their skills. But, at the same time, you retain very little in terms of instrumental interplay, well-shaped melodies, rhythmic acuity, piquant harmonic layering. You can see and hear that the universally applied ternary format has been employed well enough, but the centre cannot hold your interest in a least two of the movements.

We all wish the newly-affianced our best wishes in their relationship which is clearly an artistic success already. They have shown themselves willing in their work, particularly in facing this evening’s French challenge; I’m anticipating calm seas and a prosperous voyage as they move on to more agreable Francophone peaks: Debussy, Ravel, Honegger, Saint-Saens, Faure – even the Franck Violin Sonata was approved for cello transcription by the (Belgian-born) composer. They’re definitely a duo worth following; in this instance, presenting an hour-long recital with remarkably few technical flaws and a wealth of interpretative insight.