Category: Orchestral

COCTEAU’S CIRCLE

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Sunday November 16, 2025

Le Gateau Chocolat

A good deal of what follows might be incorrect. As with many concert-giving organizations these days, the Australian Chamber Orchestra has taken to plunging audiences into darkness from the start, so that a conscientious note-taker might be obliged to come along equipped with a pencil light and act as a constant distraction to anybody in his/her/their neighbourhood. Or you could rely on your memory, as I have done; a difficult task with a program of this nature. I remember Paull Fiddian, one-time manager of the Victorian/Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, telling me that his instructions were to lower the lighting at the start of concerts to 70% of capacity; he would probably have seconded my usual reaction at these current enforced plunges into momentary blindness which echo Florestan’s first words at the start of Act Two.

Anyway, the ACO and some wind guests and a percussionist meandered onstage, led by pianist Stefan Cassomenos who began doodling and set others off to play what I think was Elena Kats-Chenin‘s first background offering for this program; in all, she composed six pieces commissioned for the players – this initial Intermission Music and five Interludes: Les annees folles, L’opera, Le sacre, Les fantomes, and Etonnez-moi. Mood-setting constructs, these were forgettable immediately after they played out and, even if the Sydney composer was no part of the circle that enswathed Cocteau, these samples of musique d’ameublement would have found favour with the poet’s friend, Satie.

In any case, the program proper began with artistic director Richard Tognetti leading his forces in an Ouverture (abridged) by Auric and we were in the world of Les Six, that variously talented group of composers fostered by Cocteau and who frequented Le Boeuf sur le toit cabaret along with most other Paris-dwelling artistic innovators of the 1920s. I’m not sure which overture it was; possibly that one written for his own ballet of 1921, Les Maries de la tour Eiffel (a work I’ve never heard any parts of before last Sunday). Listening to the complete work some days after this performance, I’m not at all sure if this concert-opener was this piece at all The proffered shortened version of whatever extract it was proved amiable and sparky but evanescent.

We enjoyed the first part of a running commentary from Le Gateau Chocolat (George Ikediashi), the concert’s Maitre d’: a big-framed drag performer whose costumes appealed to me more than his words or singing. Still, he set up a scene of Paris in the post-World War One years where creativity with frissons was the expected diet at this cabaret. For some reason, I got the impression that he was presenting himself as Jean Cocteau, occasioning one of the more tensile suspensions of disbelief I’ve enjoyed for many a year. And I believe that he suggested we were to imagine being in the fabled cabaret itself.

In fact, we heard works by five of Les Six whose musical-social lives centred (for a time) on this cabaret. In order, they were: the afore-mentioned Auric overture; a funeral march which was Honegger’s contribution to the amalgam that was Les Maries de la tour Eiffel (Auric asked his fellow group members to write movements as he himself was pressed for time) and re-scored for the available instruments in this ensemble; the first movement of Germaine Tailleferre’s String Quartet finished in 1919 (Modere – thank you, Debussy); Poulenc’s 1940 cabaret waltz-song Les chemins de l’amour, performed with loads of period elan by soprano Chloe Lankshear; Milhaud’s ballet of 1919-20 which gave us all an eventual programmatic context.

None of Les Six got a second showing. Instead, the program was extended to include people who would not or could not have been part of Cocteau’s milieu. For instance, we were offered two Gershwin songs by Le Gateau Chocolat: the jazz standard Oh, Lady Be Good! from 1924, taken at a pace I can only call funereal but which gave the singer plenty of scope to roll out his sonorous bass register; and I Loves You, Porgy from the 1935 opera which is, in its original form, a duet and in a lesser shape should be sung by a woman. By the time this piece hit Paris, Le Boeuf sur la toit was moving to its fourth address and the fun times were well and truly over. We know the American met Ravel, who was a Boeuf habitue, but did he meet Cocteau?

Speaking of Ravel, the ACO performed the final Vif et agite from his String Quartet which dates from 1903 and here given in what I believe was Tognetti’s own arrangement of 2012. The composer definitely knew Cocteau although I don’t believe that they worked together. And what would the purveyor of up-to-date modernity find to relish in this post-Debussyan chamber work? I’d suggest: not much. A flashy showpiece from Act III of Henri Christine’s Phi-Phi operetta of 1918 brought Lankshear into play through Bien chapeautee, in which Greek sculptor Phidias’ wife extolls female fashion as a means of exerting her sex’s superiority. It’s an attractive piece of boulevadierism and the soprano produced a brisk negotiation of a complex text. The piece took a place alongside Poulenc’s chanson as a remembrance of things past, not a bond vers l’avenir in the manner of Cocteau.

Another more contradictory element emerged in the second movement of Debussy’s String Quartet, written way back in 1893 and representing all that Cocteau and his band of self-conscious revolutionaries loathed. Place for this in the cabaret? Non, jamais, even though its was a fine reference point for the concert’s program section called Les fantomes as the composer loomed over so much that followed his death in 1918 when the young moderns started biting and sniping at everything from the near past.

Why was Lili Boulanger’s Pie Jesu included here? She wasn’t connected to Cocteau and this piece, the last she completed before her death in 1918, sits at odds with most of the politely feral products of Les Six. For all that, Lankshear sang its remote vocal line without gilding any emotional lily and coping with an accompaniment that lacked the original’s harp and organ. Perhaps a touch more relevance came with the second movement, Assez vif et bien rhythme, to Francaix’s 1932 Concertino for piano and orchestra, this composer having some connection to the later Ravel as well as being a Poulenc admirer. The piano part gave Cassomenos scope to exercise his clarity of articulation in a a score fragment that exemplified the digital precocity of French inter-Wars chamber music at its most clear-cut.

As for an out-and-out ring-in, what was Janis Ian‘s Stars doing here, apart from giving Le Gateau Chocolat an excuse to sing it? The song was a 1974 hit for the American singer-songwriter but I’m sure Cocteau would have disliked its sentimentality in both text and music; if it was intended to make some connection with the brittle, almost neurasthenic aesthetic that underpins Cocteau’s world, it’s an impossible sell when juxtaposed with the real thing.

One composer who did enjoy a double exposure was Stravinsky, who knew Cocteau too well, having collaborated with him on Oedipus Rex – that unsettling opera-cantata from 1927. On this program, we heard the perky Ragtime from L’histoire du soldat, another 1918 product, here illuminated by Tognetti’s negotiation of the sprightly, difficult violin part and treated with something close to the original’s orchestration. Later came two movements, Danse and Cantique, the outer ones from Trois pieces pour quatuor a cordes of 1918. Once again, you could question whether these would have made much impression on the cabaret patrons; perhaps the first with its insistent melody and rugged second violin counterweight would have been happily received, but definitely the slow-moving Orthodox-hymn suggestions of the second one would have turned off the not-too-heavy thinkers.

To end, the singers collaborated, although Lankshear took the honours, in a version of Piaf’s 1949 Hymne a l’amour: the song that Celine Dion sang from the Eiffel Tower at the opening to the Paris Olympics in 2024. So we ended with a definite congruence: Piaf and Cocteau were friends, dying within a day of each other in October 1963. This made for an unexpectedly moving finale, largely due to Lankshear’s excellent realization of Piaf’s timbre, complete with that inimitable vibrato.

Yes, I know: it doesn’t do to be over-puristic about presentations like these where the event’s title is an indication – an all-round inclusion – not a prescription. In fact, the whole exercise proceeded in the best cabaret fashion by juxtaposing number after number, here punctuated by a master of ceremonies who upped the entertainment aspect with his lavish dresses and camp delivery, although an early attempt at badinage by an audience member fell flat. At its best, the concert brought about some fine singing from Lankshear and excellent ensemble work, not least in the focal Le Boeuf sur le toit ballet by Milhaud which we heard near the performance’s end and during which everybody involved seemed to enjoy some solo or group exposure between the rondo-like recurrences of the infectious central tune that embodies those Slightly Roaring Gallic Twenties more than pretty much anything else we heard.

A MUSICAL AWAKENING

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Sunday October 7, 2025

Timo-Veikko Valve

Perhaps the organization was more than a bit optimistic to hope for any awakening in this afternoon’s music, especially in the physical sense. After the first ten minutes or so, I was verging on the somnolent, mainly because the opening work, Illuminations, was played in near darkness with a backdrop of soothing electronically-generated bush noises, and the basic music, one of Hildegard of Bingen’s Marian acclamations (Ave generosa from about 1158), might tempt towards ecstasy in the right surrounds but not in the well-amplified environment of a tenebrous Hamer Hall.

Something of the same could be said about the Australian Chamber Orchestra‘s conclusion to their program: an arrangement for string orchestra of the 1825 middle Molto adagio to Beethoven’s Op. 132, his Heiliger Dankgesang for relief from illness where the composer stretches his material to weave a focused movement that has aspirations to take us away from the diurnal grind. I believe this finale came as something of a relief to ACO patrons, not least for the ardour with which a truncated ACO pronounced it. Mind you, its provenance as an arrangement remains obscure; Beethoven made no indications of moving it into the extended forces format.

But it was an uneasy concert experience for this listener, chiefly due to a sudden change in the programming order. At some stage leading up to this performance, Peteris Vask’s Musica serena disappeared, to be replaced by Jaakko Kuusisto’s Wiima – a sort of nature piece from 2011 (in this string orchestra shape) describing a winter wind. Somehow, the replacement meant that the core of our diet had to be moved around, with several problems arising for many of us faced with a set of contemporary pieces and trying to piece together what came where. Not to mention the hurried issuing of this information from a noticeably inexpressive voice murmuring over the hall’s speaker system.

Certainly, the opening Hildegard piece came first, the sound world centred on Genevieve Lacey‘s recorder outlining the chant while the supporting strings made great play with drones and open 5ths in Erkki Veltheim‘s re-imagining of the piece for modern ears. We couldn’t actually see Lacey, who stood in front of the string forces (3-3-2-2-1) and, while they were partially lit-up by desk-lights, she wasn’t. Anyway, the piece progressed serenely enough, Lacey left the stage and some lights came up (a practical illumination) to show us Simon Martyn-Ellis holding his theorbo and taking centre-stage for a solo which I assume was carrying on from Lacey’s meditations on the Virgin. It ought to be sufficient to say that the general tenor of the music remained roughly the same.

But it’s possible that Martyn-Ellis was doing an elaboration on something else. Somewhere along the line we heard Max Richter‘s On the Nature of Daylight from 2004 which struck me – as so much of this writer’s work does – as being based on predictable chords and melodic waverings that occupy a kind of Stasisland. Nothing happens. You can follow the progressions without thinking about it and that’s probably what happened because I’ve got absolutely no recall of the ACO musicians wafting through this miasma of old-fashioned harmonic progressions.

All of a sudden, we were woken from our meditations by the clean sounds of Kuusisto’s soundscape which, at last, showed a mind searching for unusual textures and sound-production techniques. Here was a score for our times, speaking a language at once contemporary and harking back to past tone-painters yet not descending to the level of mimicry. The ACO musicians gave us a vivid account of this bracing music, welcome for its bustling activity and allowance for individuality.

Lacey returned to give the world premiere of American composer David Lang‘s flute and echo, a clever concerto in which the recorder sets up series of solo melodic lines which are imitated by a solo violin (Helena Rathbone, leading the ACO), the content spreading to the orchestral body. This inter-leaving device gradually loses its rigidity and the opposition of woodwind and strings gains in contrast as Lang’s work moves to its conclusion. My only problem with this attractively lucid work was the amplification level which was high, and not just of Lacey.

Australian writer Melody Eotvos contributed Meraki to the musicians’ offerings; like the Lang work and Veltheim’s arrangements, commissioned by the ACO. Eotvos’s piece, taking its name from a Greek word, was written five years ago and presented these players with no obvious problems as it too harks back to a simpler time where the aim of communicating involvement or creativity results in a pleasing aural environment where any harmonic shocks (there are no rhythmic ones) register in the work’s centre with some pages of chugging discordant chords before everything is righted at the end and we come to a placid quietus.

Lacey and Martyn-Ellis (now sporting a baroque guitar alongside his theorbo)returned for Veltheim’s second construction: Imaginary Cities: A Baroque Fantasy which, like Illuminations, featured a soundtrack of noises, in this instance somewhat watery ones as the cities in question seemed to be transmuted into one: Venice. After some preliminary faffing around, we were suddenly hit by Monteverdi’s Domine ad adjuvandum from the 1610 Vespers (later the opening toccata to the composer’s 1637 opera L’Orfeo and here carried off without the Vespers‘ choir, of course, and lacking the brass), played straight. This is startlingly direct music, revelling in its monochromatic harmonic outbursts and a sudden delight to experience.

Lacey gave us two Vivaldi extracts: the first Allegro of the Recorder Concerto RV444 and, completing Veltheim’s entertainment, the finale to the popular RV 443, both of them coming from 1728-9. To my well-roused ears, these were played as written and the focus naturally fell on Lacey who invested both with her customary precision and clever differentiation of attack across repeated passages – and God knows you can find a lot of those in Vivaldi concertos.

In between, the supporting tape gave us a ney flute solo, a Sephardic song that melded with Strozzi’s Che si puo fare aria of 1664, and some faint tarantella dances, along with the rippling water and many other atmospheric noises that have not stuck in this memory. So the exercise catered for both courtier and commoner, just as Venice does today depending on the amount of cash you’re prepared to spend in that slowly-sinking marvel.

And then, the Beethoven quartet movement which had the benefit of bringing this musical journey to a sonorously satisfying ending with an impressive strength in the full-bodied chords that punctuate the score, e.g. 21 bars from the end. Nevertheless, the emergence of these noble sounds as a kind of aesthetic summation of the awakening process struck me as taking an easy way out. Some of us might be suspicious that the composer is too overt in his transcendental signals and this adagio needs its original surrounds to give it a suitable framework, a world that treats with the everyday alongside this singular ascent out of it.

Timo-Veikko Valve, the ACO principal cello, curated this event but made an unobtrusive figure onstage. At the end, his selection impressed for its catholicity, even if the opening veered into a highly restrained area of musical experience. I was tempted by my shortcomings in following the chain of offerings to hear the program again on the next night but was constrained by domestic troubles. However. one of the more successful features of this Sunday afternoon experience was the absence of serious coughers; apart from some rumbles during the Beethoven, the occasion was pleasantly free of laryngeal interference. Long may it continue.

ELEVATOR MUSIC

Omega Ensemble

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday August 15, 2025

Michael Collins

A Sydney-based group, the Omega Ensemble presents as a moveable feast of artists. For this segment of its national tour, the group comprised string players, alongside some crypto-strings/percussion in piano (Vatche Jambazian) and harp (Paul Nicolaou), with artistic director David Rowden contributing his clarinet to one work. As the Omegas’ guest, Michael Collins brought his clarinet to the stage for the brief evening’s two major works, demonstrating his expertise and interpretative flair with deceptive ease and making something substantial out of an odd scrappy program.

To begin, the Omega strings gave themselves a throat-clearer with the first movement to Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik of 1787. Well, it also gave us a chance to get used to the body’s weighting of 4-4-3-2-2 which, from my seat, gave the bass line of this quartet an unexpected prominence. Not that you could complain about such a teaser which made for a congenial tuning-in exercise. As usual, the group overdid the dynamic contrasts well beyond anything the composer would have entertained, but they’re not alone in that. They repeated the exposition, which never fails to be a pleasing 55 bars to re-experience.

American writer Anna Clyne‘s Stride for string orchestra followed. Its three movements employ the melodic and sometimes the harmonic path of Beethoven’s Pathetique Piano Sonata No. 8, albeit with plenty of filler. Apparently, the composer found a similarity between the bass octaves at the first movement’s switch to Allegro di moto e con brio and the stride technique utilised by ragtime pianists; can’t really see it myself, but the shoe obviously fits for Clyne. Mind you, that all becomes irrelevant when she moves on to the second and third movements, the last being most direct of the three in utilizing Beethoven.

This is not the sort of music to stop you in your tracks through its level of inventiveness or novelty of timbres; it’s just akin to hearing the sonata referenced in a mushy web, a kind of filtered Beethoven at an unsettling remove from the original because of the transcription to strings. But it misfired for me because even Clyne’s changes of harmony accompanying the original melodies were ordinary. I suspect that the work’s success in performance relies on the style of attack adopted, which might have been more interesting in the hands of its original commissioners – the Australian Chamber Orchestra, which premiered it in 2020. Added to this, the bass component across the final rondo again overwhelmed whatever was happening upstairs.

We then came to the new double concerto by Australian composer Graeme Koehne called Dances on the Edge of Time, which title emanates from a Tagore poem and which to me promised something along the lines of Messiaenesque mysticism or perhaps a touch of Bengali complexity. But no: Koehne has produced a simple set of three dances – rigaudon, chaconne, gigue – which contain no terrors for players or audience, written in a happy diatonic style that is instantly accessible and free from any pretensions to depth or gravity.

Adding to this piece’s popular backdrop, Koehne heads each movement with a quote from the collected wisdom of either Randall G. Leighton (the American business analyst?), Mark Twain or Satchell Paige (a renowned baseball player). For the opening rigaudon, the instruction or life-message was ‘Work like you don’t need the money’, exemplified by a retrograde-sounding piece in four-square rhythm that called to mind Grainger and Holst in what sounded to be G Major, the two front-of-band clarinets indulging in some jaunty interplay and mimesis.

‘Love like you’ve never been hurt’ was the preliminary advice for Koehne’s chaconne in which I became aware of the harp’s timbre for the first time. For these pages, I thought that the prevailing tonality was D Major; or may be not as I’m finding it increasingly hard to claim having absolute pitch any more and trying to pick out tonality from finger positions is a mug’s game at best. Whatever the case, we enjoyed a few eliding slides into other keys while the cantus firmus moved from treble to bass across the movement’s stretch with a clean fluidity, even if the players didn’t seem to find much excitement needed to be summoned up while conveying these placid A-River-Runs-Through-It pages. Again, I sensed no strain in the output of Collins or Rowden while presenting this lush and predictable slow movement.

With the gigue, we were in unsteady territory at first with a clarinet duet that eventually settled into the expected 6/8 pulse. Here again the music occupied an ‘open’ key – C Major? – that moved into harmonically unchallenging episodes before the catchy main tune slowed down for a more drawn-out statement of its elements: a gentle and soulful interlude with the strings given the main burden while the clarinets sublimated themselves in attention-grabbing burbles. Back to the fast jig tempo and we reached a happily contentment-inducing cadence, all illustrating that timeless adage, ‘Dance like nobody’s watching.’

The composer is not concerned in this work with confronting anything that’s driven the art forward or into detours and culs de sac over the last century. His vocabulary throughout the new double concerto rarely moves beyond that employed by the English pastoralists. Further, he keeps his soloists well in hand with very little room for virtuosic flourishes, content to give them aural prominence among their support colleagues. To my mind, the work is congenial enough but not in the least bit ground-breaking. The program notes for this concert speak of Koehne pursuing a ‘neoclassical kind of aesthetic’ – but there’s no need for the neo qualifier.

As far as I could tell, the rather sparse audience (250? 300?) reacted favourably to this exercise, and I suppose that its reception can be viewed as a success, even if a few of us were nonplussed by the work’s innate conservatism, given the Omegas’ motto: Embrace the unexpected. Celebrate the extraordinary. Not with this work, commissioned by the ensemble itself.

To end, Collins took the lead for Copland’s Clarinet Concerto of 1947-9. As far as I can see, he has produced only one recording of this famous work – a Swedish Chamber Orchestra collaboration released in 2013 – as opposed to the three versions he has produced of Finzi’s less well-travelled concerto. You could find much to relish in the opening slow movement, in particular Collins’ ability to give us a crescendo–decrescendo set of sequences that remained sensible, not straining the barriers of taste and sense. This atmospheric consequent of Appalachian Spring‘s placid stretches maintains its eloquence, even if it does suggest a Meditation on the Prairie ambience.

At last, we came to some hectic playing in Copland’s cadenza where the composer anticipates the coming action. In spite of the sudden heating-up, Collins gave us a sensible and ordered account of this 70-plus bar extravaganza that tests any interpreter’s agility and self-control. Not a squawk or a misdirect to be heard here as the soloist joined up with his Omega colleagues for the jazz- and Latin-inflected finale. Here you felt the lack of violins once again, even from further back in the Murdoch Hall, because of a lack of aggression as the syncopations piled up and some rhythmic anxiety appeared in the rear echelons.

As the freneticism continued, it struck me that Jambazian might have been well advised to have his piano-lid down or off; this instrument’s colour proved very prominent in the movement’s centre. Still, Collins dominated the terrain, not least when Copland exercised his heavy jazz tongue, as at bar 297 with the bass semi-pizzicato slaps while the clarinet saunters across the room. I wasn’t happy about the penultimate bar’s glissando up to the final unison C for everybody but you’d expect that the players will have coordinated that to better effect for tonight’s Sydney and Thursday’s Newcastle performances of this program.

Looking over the Omega appearances past and future for this year, it’s very clear that the body is a solid supporter of new music; its list of previous commissions is the most impressive and all-inclusive I’ve seen in this country from any serious chamber music enterprise. Most of us interested in new developments might have our expectations better fulfilled in the body’s final Melbourne appearance this year which features Bartok’s 1938 Contrasts (like the Copland concerto, another commission by Benny Goodman and still more challenging than anything we heard on this Elevator Music program), Nigel Westlake’s Rare Sugar clarinet concertino of 2007, and a new work from Sydney-based writer Ell;a Macens.

GERSHWIN & SHOPSTAKOVICH

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Sunday August 10, 2025

Alexander Gavrylyuk

In some ways, this afternoon’s event impressed for the breadth of its span in emotional content. Richard Tognetti and his Australian Chamber Orchestra performed three works that exposed their talent for breathing fresh life into a near-classic and giving two newer scores every opportunity to stake their claims for inclusion here. It might have had a lot to do with the age and predispositions of this particular audience but it struck me that the opening gambit in this concert made less of a case for itself than its companion while the program’s final work exercised its usual impact of uplifting despair.

For starters, we heard Zipingu by Canadian writer Claude Vivier, written for thirteen strings; I counted fifteen in the ACO ranks but you can’t have modernity (awkwardly, the piece is 45 years old) without flexibility. Sadly, I’ve not seen the score of Zipingu – a word used in Marco Polo’s time to refer to Japan – but its chief characteristics indicate that colour is the main objective. Vivier intended a kind of pan-Asian atmosphere, in which he achieved no little success with, as far as I could see, nobody attempting a vibrato throughout although tremolando proved king as a sound source.

For all its supporting polemic, Zipangu worked on this listener as a sort of musical diuretic as it lacked most of the connectors that your average Western concert-goer expects, or clings to. The composer’s canvas is full of incident but nothing stays with you and the absence of investment in the individual note – simply sounding it without much intellectual impulse, as if applying white to a white canvas – made this fifteen minutes or so quite challenging. I’m assuming that Vivier was seeing his Japan flat-on, without embellishment and the invitation was for us to absorb an abstract sequence of disparate shades.

As for the following Moments of Memory (VI) by Valentin Silvestrov, a Ukrainian composer who fled from Kiev to Germany when the Russians began the latest phase of their invasion, the ACO performed this world premiere (the organization had a hand in commissioning it) with assured ease. Still, little remains in this particular memory about a set of seven movements that melded into each other. It presented as a type of cafe music, a series of waltzes that might have been reminiscences of life in Ukrainian cities before disaster and drones made the composer’s homeland unliveable. Not that Silvestrov struck a tragic level and confronted us with suffering; his memory proved melancholy but warm, especially as vibrato had rarely made such a welcome comeback.

At the program’s end, Tognetti led his forces through Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony in C minor, the 1964 arrangement by Rudolf Barshai of the composer’s String Quartet No. 8 which was written four years earlier. This was splendid work, the performance notable for its final two slow movements that gradually sink to that individual gloom that the composer made his own: the Largo that ends the composition one of the bleakest resolutions in Western music. Of course, this work would have been at the performers’ fingertips as they released a new CD of it in February this year, although the recording sessions date from 2021.

Yet again, the ACO demonstrated its depth of expertise and accomplishment by a vitally emphatic account of the Allegro molto second movement, clear-speaking in its crisp chord slashes and the power underpinning group statements of its single-line melodies. Likewise, the players managed to bring out the chameleonic nature of the middle Allegretto which seems innocent, almost simple-minded, but teeters on the brink of despair as its overt insouciance alternates with bitter vehemence, concord and discord masterfully balanced until the aggressive attacca opening of the finale.

From there it’s all downhill through the second Largo which, in this orchestral version, bears witness to Shostakovich’s inner torture. You can say what you like about the composer’s naivete in Russia’s political sphere and, if you like, share in the derision heaped on him by other Western composers who lived under no restrictions. But, when it comes to baring the soul’s dark places, nobody equals this composer who shows you a world of dour resignation which is, in the end, an affirmation of stern nobility.

Which made it all the more understandable that Tognetti interpolated a brief pause in these final pages when audience coughing proved intrusive. This was nothing you could blame on the unthinking young because the blight of expectorations and catarrh clearances were clearly produced by some of the elderly patrons in Hamer Hall who have forgotten (if they ever knew) the lessons of COVID and the benefits of masking your breathing difficulties. The ACO leader was too kind in waiting for these self-absorbed geriatrics, especially while in the process of constricting a profoundly moving experience; I’m just surprised (and grateful) that he didn’t walk off, taking his earnest colleagues with him.

Mind you, this work worked in several ways alongside displaying the ensemble’s gift for outlining an emotionally concentrated score like this one. It offered a sharp contrast with Silvestrov’s regretful farewell to things past; along with the personal trauma experienced by the Russian master, you cannot forget that part of the quartet’s impetus came from the composer’s visit to Dresden and the sight of that city still recovering from the fire-bombing of mid-February, 1945. The work commemorates a cataclysm while the Ukrainian writer seems to be memorializing a never-to-be-regained vision of his native land..

As well, the Chamber Symphony moved us into a different sphere, following as it did a dazzling performance by Alexander Gavrylyuk of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue of 1924, a brilliant compilation of jazz-inflected piano solos linked, after that unforgettable opening clarinet solo, by big-band tutti passages. My standard for this work is the Bernstein recorded performance of 1959 with the Columbia Symphony which still raises the spirit for its breadth of vision and force of character. Gavrylyuk came close to this level with a muddle-free approach to the orchestra-supported solos, the piano ever clear throughout, and with an awareness of the exhibitionism, the bravura that an interpreter has to contribute to succeed across the score’s span.

Given the ACO’s personnel constraints, an arrangement was made for strings, trumpet (David Elton) and piano by Bernard Rofe, the organization’s artistic planning manager. That opening sort-of-glissando run was given to the trumpet which played a sterling role in making up for the missing woodwind and brass ranks from Grofe’s orchestration, and the ACO strings welcomed the chance to soar through the big E Major tune at No 28 in the old two-piano edition. But, despite everyone’s best intentions, the band/orchestral backing fell short in terms of timbre and bite, especially in that jubilant final cakewalk.

Before interval, Gavrylyuk and Elton fronted the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1, all forces producing a reading of immaculate clarity, even in the final frantic galop. The pianist and trumpeter made a fine fist of their first real collaboration at No 8 in the Muzyka edition; controlled but headlong in its forward thrust and almost mellifluous when the tonality hits E flat Major. Gavryluk showed no hesitation (if the occasional touch of rubato) when handling the brilliant passagework of this first movement, particularly brilliant in the top-of-the-keyboard register, picking out the melodic line with pointillistic precision.

Elton gave a lucid account of the second movement’s trumpet solo beginning at Number 34. It’s a startling moment in this Lento, the instrument muted (who isn’t?) and spinning out its commentary in well-etched exposure above the strings’ murmuring 3/4 – more a pavane than a waltz – accompaniment. I suppose the Moderato that follows acts as a circuit-breaker after the subdued nature of the slow movement’s E minor fade-to-black. Its two-part invention opening devolves into another plaint for the strings, which serves as another red herring before the piano launches into the concluding Allegro con brio where exhilaration reaches its apex in this work.

Yes, there are moments when you think that the composer’s thumb-to-the-nose humour seems like overkill, as at that famous splat-chord in the middle of an Italianate trumpet solo nine bars after Number 63, or the rich supply of ‘wrong’ notes in the rage-over-a-lost-penny cadenza for piano that precedes the final Presto at Number 72,not to mention that extraordinary deviation to a mittel-European folk-stomping piano solo at Number 76. But the persistence with a military-inspired cadence right up to the final bar still presents as a sparkling piece of musical cheek, here briskly carried off by soloists and their quicksilver support.

I got the impression that the ACO members admired Gavrylyuk and his impressive commitment to the task, whether striking sparks in the 1933 piano-and-trumpet opus or weltering through America’s exemplary fusion of jazz and serious music. For some time, he has impressed me as a musician with very broad shoulders, capable of taking on many challenges and forging a triumph out of each one. You’d have to hope that his next appearance with this ever-ambitious ensemble will not be too far off.

ACO UNLEASHED

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Sunday June 22, 2025

Satu Vanska

Something of a grab-bag, this program. That’s understandable since the original guest director, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, bowed out due to an injury of some kind and the Australian Chamber Orchestra had to come up with something else that appealed to its clientele. Pushing forward the ensemble’s personnel in another celebration of the organization’s 50th birthday, artistic director Richard Tognetti absented himself from this particular felicity and gave three violinists and the principal cello a generous exposure in two concertos, as well as granting Satu Vanska the opportunity to outline her interpretation of Ravel’s Tzigane of 1924 with a reduced orchestra of strings, celesta and timpani/percussion.

As well as flaunting some front-line talent, the ACO demonstrated its collective skills in two arrangements: one by Tognetti of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F minor of 1810, the other the C minor Quartettsatz by Schubert from ten years later which was string-orchestrated by an anonymous musician. Both are short but the players attacked them with that carefully honed brusqueness which is a characteristic of this body when confronted with composers of this stature in curt mode. And Tognetti obviously takes pleasure in transcribing masterworks of this level for his forces who usually make them seamless accomplishments.

But you come across a different creature when you move from the single line to the many, no matter how determined and aggressive the groups of five violins, for example, in Beethoven’s opening Allegro. The first violin octaves leaps that start in bar 3 lose bite, as does the all-in-together menace of bars 18 to 20 when four whip-cracks become a sound-wall. The listener can sense the communal determination of output in the string orchestra format but you sacrifice an individuality of character that generates the main interest in string quartet recitals.

Well, I’ve made this comment before and it probably borders on the pointless, particularly because it could be worse. We could be hearing arrangements of music that relies on large-scale and diffuse orchestral timbres, like Rimsky’s Scheherazade, the Pines of Rome, or Berg’s Op. 6. Actually, no: we couldn’t: that’s several bridges too far. But there’s nothing to stop a spread into the Schubert Quintet which I’ve heard in full orchestra format; or the Brahms sextets which have also been converted for the larger string-rich palette.

And on you could go. But this predilection for regular and familiar quartets by Beethoven, Janacek, or Bartok is all more than a little disappointing as the repertoire for string orchestra is large. And, if you’re going to faff around with the pre-existing, I’d welcome a bit more adventure – like reducing Penderecki’s Threnody for your available forces, or doing the same for Boulez’s Livre pour cordes, or expanding the Schoenberg quartets, especially No. 2.

In any event, much of this afternoon’s activity comprised arrangements. We started with Bach’s Concerto for three violins, a reconstruction of a work using three keyboard soloists. Vanska, Helena Rathbone and Anna da Silva Chen (the ACO’s latest full-time member) performed the individual lines with an agreeable self-appreciation of their function in the complex, yet not slavishly imitating each other in the frequent staggered entries with which Bach peppers his work. Vanska gave us a firm exhibition across the opening movement, including two striking exposed solos (bars 63 to 72, bars 115 to 119), while Rathbone and Chen made exemplary complements, to the gratifying point where you could experience three differing styles of attack and release.

Still, the intriguing movement of this concerto is its finale with the potent solo for Violin 1 from bar 141 to bar 174, although not before some eloquent exposed passages for her partners. By the time we arrived here in this second public rendition of the program, the ensemble showed at its best through a forceful oscillation between ritornello and solo, all three of them vaulting into action with gusto, especially Chen who exercised an attractive personality here, both earthy and buoyant.

Vanska bowled into Tzigane without waiting for the greeting applause to die away, making fierce work of that vigo4rous opening of 27 bars on the G string only. You were left in no doubt that this player had the mastery of the thing as she handled its challenges with a precise ferocity and demonstrated for one of the few times in my experience how cimbalom-like that moment of left-hand pizzicato could be. Yet, behind the bravura and theatricality, I couldn’t help wondering if the player was showing us how satirical this piece of Gypsy music is with its fits and starts, not to mention its employment of all those Liszt-to-Sarasate Romany tropes that Ravel was utilizing to construct such a clever exercise in brittle musical frivolity.

Bernard Rofe, the ACO’s Artistic Planning Manager, carried out the arrangement of this exuberant gem and gave a large part of its colour spectrum to the celesta, here handled by regular ACO violinist Ike See. I suppose nobody in the ACO doubles as a harpist; that instrument sees far more action in the original than the 16 bars of light colour contributed by the celesta between Nos. 14 and 15 in the Durand score of 1924. Not that this imbalance in the back-drop matters that much when the spotlight shines almost uninterruptedly on the soloist and Vanska showed plenty of flair and apparent enjoyment in her work right up to the rather brutal three pizzicato quadruple-stop chords that finish the piece.

If you accept the character change of the string quartet arrangements, then you would have been impressed yet again by the ACO’s outlining of the Beethoven and Schubert program components. As you might have expected, the most persuasive section of the Serioso came in the Allegretto where the key is to keep the piece in fluid motion. I think the texture cut down at one point to a series of solo entries – the fugato at bar 34? – but the quiet, filled-out nature of the movement’s harmonic movement with its sideways slips gave us a welcome tranquillity between two driving sets of pages.

I enjoyed the Schubert movement because of its innate qualities that seem to lend it more easily to the orchestral framework, like the oscillation between bustle, as at the start, and the sudden soaring aspiration of the second subject in bar 27. Later, the rapid outward and inner surges between bars 77 and 80 proved striking in their unanimity of production and dynamic management, as were the transparent first violins’ step-by-step gradual descents across bars 105 to 124. It’s a striking fragment in its mode of address, making a virtue of simplicity . . . which is probably why it seemed more suitable for an expansion of forces.

To end, Timo-Veikko Valve fronted the Australian premiere of his compatriot/relative Jaakko Kuusisto’s Cello Concerto of 2019 which is scored for an orchestra of strings, timpani (here played by Brian Nixon) and percussion (the evergreen Daryl Pratt). This proved to be a gracious, expansive construct in an orthodox three movements, its progress outlined with exemplary earnestness by the soloist. The most lasting impression from this new (to us) composition is of a lyrical fluency coupled with harmonic sophistication, but Kuusisto’s vocabulary impresses as conservative: there are no disruptive signs in this work which takes its place in a long chain of such concertos which offer expressive gifts for their soloists while the orchestral support holds some challenges. Will we hear it again? Possibly, I suppose, but in my gut I think that this concerto might remain a local rarity.

Nevertheless, it was refreshing to hear an unmediated composer speaking his original tongue without reconstruction from any other source. Further, it brought this celebration to a satisfying conclusion, giving the ACO the opportunity to engage with a contemporary voice, sadly stilled before reaching its full complement of years, yet fortunate in these exponents who take up their work with exemplary devotion and relish.

THEREMIN & BEYOND

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Sunday May 18, 2025

Carolina Eyck

This was an afternoon full of listening material, some of it worthwhile, most of it entertaining. But it did come down to a case of special pleading for guest Carolina Eyck‘s specialization: the theremin. The Australian Chamber Orchestra‘s artistic director, Richard Tognetti, has taken on board some unexpected colleagues, like oud master Joseph Tawadros and accordion guru James Crabb. But Eyck’s is a pretty obscure sound-maker, even if it pops up in unexpected places – or sounds as if it does, as in the original Star Trek title music where the actual sound you hear on top is a soprano.

I’ve had to learn to distinguish it from the ondes Martenot that Messiaen uses to devastating effect in his Turangalila-symphonie; still, to my increasingly useless ears, both instruments sound remarkably similar. Does the thremin have a masterpiece like that to boast of in its catalogue of works? It seems not, but Eyck made something of a case for its use as a solo by performing a welter of scraps from the serious to the popular, with a few touches of humour along the way; never a bad thing in this context.

Throughout the program, the ACO presented some chamber works without Eyck, beginning with an extract from Brett Dean‘s Short Stories of 2005. This was the fourth of the set, Komarov’s Last Words, referring to the Soviet cosmonaut who died re-entering Earth’s atmosphere in 1867 – the first casualty of the space race. It’s a fast if not furious piece which somehow manages to suggest nervousness, fear and strong resignation all at once. Somehow, this linked in with Glinka’s The Lark, part of the composer’s A Farewell to St. Petersburg song-cycle of 1840 in which Eyck came to the fore playing the melody line, with pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska providing some punctuation from the florid Balakirev transcription.

So far, so fair. Eyck produced a gentle version of the sung line, which served to underline the instrument’s inbuilt limitation of producing one note at a time. Then, Tognetti started his strings on the Air from Bach’s D Major Orchestral Suite (c. 1730), the one on the G string. After the opening strophe, Eyck joined in on the repeat and stayed a constant, playing the top violin line with no little grace and a few traces of the theremin’s glissando trademark effect..

For the last part of Offenbach’s Overture to his highly successful opera of 1858, Orpheus in the Underworld – the Can-can – Tognetti and his strings (with the aid of percussionist Brian Nixon) gave a fair simulation of the dance’s energy, even if we missed the brass timbre when the piece’s broadest theme breaks out at the key change to G Major. As well, at about this stage, you came to appreciate just how few of the ACO force were on board: five violins, pairs of violas and cellos, and one bass.. Yes, you can’t doubt the ability of any ACO member but both here and later on you felt the lack of weight in the ensemble’s output.

Anyway, this Galop infernal led into its parody by Saint-Saens in his 1886 Carnival of the Animals; the Tortoises, to be precise, where both Cislowska and Eyck figured. We also heard The Elephant, Aquarium and The Swan, all of which found the theremin taking pride of place or sharing the honours with the original front-runner (e.g. Maxime Bibeau’s bass dealing with the pachyderm). Still, my attention was taken more by Cislowska’s handling of the piano part across these extracts which proved as atmospheric and broad-beamed as the original’s two piano contribution.

It’s also worth noting that all four of these pieces from the suite are slow-moving and well-suited to the theremin’s ability to outline a top solo part with elegance. Much the same came just before interval with Miklos Rosza’s Spellbound Concerto, sourced from the 1945 Hitchcock film’s score which did use a theremin. So we came to a non-arranged work at last, even if the composer’s lush Hollywood score was presented here as a pallid reflection of its original full-bodied amplitude, and at half the original concerto’s length with an over-emphasis on Eyck’s instrument at the expense of Cislowska, the work’s real soloist.

Preceding this reminiscence-laden offering, the ACO played Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet of 1924. These dances come from the pen of a young man intrigued by the wrong-note high-jinks of Les Six; the sore is dedicated to Milhaud. And the whole is clever and spiky as Schulhoff moves from waltz to tarantella with a deft mixture of vigour and not-too-serious eroticism. When the Signum Saxophone Quartet played the final three of these pieces here last week, I noted that you missed the bite of the original’s strings; now, I’m not so sure as the ACO players moved through this score with a fluency that flattened out its acerbities.

Straight after the break, we moved into our times with a vengeance. beginning in 1993 with Jorg Widmann‘s 180 beats per minute for string sextet where the young composer played a few amiable games with rhythmic displacement in an unpretentious jeu d’esprit. Much the same could be said of Holly Harrison‘s Hovercraft, commissioned for this tour and giving Eyck space to show off those special effects, like rapid glissando loops and burps, that make up part of her instrument’s reputation for special effects on film-tracks. This proved to be a clever example of scene-setting, the title mechanism’s swoops and starts (not to mention its periods of stasis) mirrored in this new score.

Moving back in time a shade, the ACO gave a hearing to Yasushi Akutagawa’s Triptyque for string orchestra, written in 1953 before the composer struck up his friendships with several Soviet writers, including Shostakovich and Kabalevsky. At this stage of his career, his compositions were competent, slightly British in sound as though he were a member of a colonial school like Australia or New Zealand. As far as I could tell, traces of his own country’s background were few and far between. But this comes from somebody who knows nothing of this composer’s later work which could have taken a huge turn after his time in Russia.

From here on, proceedings took an idiosyncratic turn in that we were confronted by Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee from The Tale of Tsar Saltan opera, premiered in 1900. Naturally, Eyck took part in this, though not taking on as much of the buzzing as expected. But it was a remarkable demonstration of her deftness, particularly her right hand which determines pitch in the distance between her hand (or her body) and the instrument’s circuitry.

Then it was one thing after another. We all enjoyed Alexander Courage’s theme music for Star Trek, its raciness enhanced by Dixon’s backing, and memories of the three-handed (Eastwood, Van Cleef, Wallach) stand-off at the climax to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly 1966 film of Sergio Leone reared up in response to Morricone’s tense underpinning for this The Ecstasy of Gold scene. Somewhere along the way came Eyck’s own composition Oakunar Lynntuja (Strange Birds), the first of her Fantasias for Theremin and String Quartet from 2016; this left not a rack behind in this memory – too little, too late.

We endured a pretty lengthy handling of the 1966 Brian Wilson/Mike Love collaboration, Good Vibrations, here enriched by a true theremin rather than the electro-cousin/bastard used in the original recording. Again, Eyck’s timbre dominated this version, somehow reinforcing its association with the counter-culture at work in the naïve United States of those distant years.

As you can see, this was an exhausting collation, yet the mainly elderly audience enjoyed it, if an air of relief permeated Hamer Hall when familiar melodies emerged from the mix. Added to which, Eyck has a quiet personal charm that made her explanations and illustrations useful and entertaining. The instrument is a curious one and this musician’s handling of it quite exceptional. Yet you can understand why it wasn’t taken up by the electronic music laboratories and workshops that sprang up – for a while – when Stockhausen & Co. emerged to brighten up our lives with their mid-20th century experiments.

BRAHMS & BEETHOVEN

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday February 17, 2024

Richard Tognetti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SCOTLAND UNBOUND

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday November 11, 2024

Sean Shibe

To shut up its Brisbane shop for 2024, the ACO went all Hibernian on us, showcasing the talents of Scot-Japanese guitarist Sean Shibe. The visitor began on your normal everyday guitar – Spanish or acoustic or classical – treating us to a Scottish lute solo extracted from an early 17th century collection and ended the night on electric guitar with selections from rock musician Martyn Bennett‘s Bothy Culture album of 1997. Between the two, the guest played a couple of vignettes, a guitar concerto from Canada and a sort of aural rort by American composer Julia Wolfe.

In all of this, the arranging hand of James Crabb loomed large. The Scottish accordionist/friend of the ACO was responsible for the three orchestra-alone efforts in the night’s first half, as well as arranging the Wolfe and Bennett works for guitar and strings. Indeed, arrangements were all the go on this occasion, Shibe himself transcribing the initial lute piece, an impossible-to-trace George Duthie responsible for a guitar-plus-strings arrangement of James MacMillan‘s From Galloway bagatelle, and Crabb again putting his talents to the service of another guitar/strings transcription, this time a version of Friedemann Stickle’s Da Trowie Burn.

Much of this program’s initial content proved easy enough to take in. From this showing, Shibe is not promoting the last word in Scottish musical modernity as a good deal of his native-made material was folk music or indebted to that branch of the art. The initial A Scots Tune proved amiable enough, a solo to concentrate focus, even if its later stages sounded harmonically suspect for the period, preparing us for the wry mini-dissonances of MacMillan’s brevity which was originally a piece for solo clarinet, complete with quickly arpeggiated chords. It’s a slow-moving lyric with a moody ambience that unfolded gently enough, without raising any stress levels in participants or audience.

The possibly/probably non-existent Stickle left behind a quietly atmospheric melody in Da Trowie Burn, the main interest in this Crabb setting lying in its occasional hemiolas. Shibe and the ACO made this arrangement into a mildly interesting conclusion to the guitarist’s opening round of activity but it re-activated the perennial problem of what to do with a folk tune once you’ve played it; unless a singer is involved. There’s precious little, except to repeat with elaborations. Still, this introductory gambit left you impressed with the guitarist’s restraint and ability to establish his homeland’s musical traits.

Speaking of perennials, ACO artistic director Richard Tognetti then led his ensemble through three Crabb arrangements, the first named Ossian by Victorian-Edwardian fiddler James Scott Skinner. Most of us would subscribe to the theory that Ossian was a fictional poet and a few of us might believe that Skinner was happy to trade on the legend. His original melody follows the melancholy path already set up in this program with its only distinction an un-flattened leading note; I can’t remember if Crabb followed this peculiarity.

The next piece, Niel Gow’s Lament for the Death of his Second Wife (by the eponymous lamenter) gave us a very well-known Scots melody but, by the time Crabb’s changes had finished ringing on it, I’d had enough. Certainly the tune is expressive in its rising, falling and fluency, but it came in a chain of folksy products and I, for one, grew impatient with the Robbie Burns’ quaintness that had prevailed for about a quarter of an hour so far. Which is not to say that the performances were under par; just that a lot of it sounded . . . well, unremarkable. Even the final part of this ACO-only trilogy, the traditional Shaun Robertson’s Rant, resurrected from Tognetti’s music for the 2003 Master and Commander film, raised the temperature only slightly, until the strathspey turned into a reel imported from Northumbria and a rush of blood raised expectations before the evening’s major element.

Cassandra Miller wrote her Chanter guitar concerto for Shibe. It’s based in part on the sound of his singing, and then somehow singing in his sleep – all the time following the lead (live or recorded, I don’t know) of smallpipes player Brighde Chaimbeul. Miller points to the chanter of her title as that part of the bagpipes that changes the instrument’s notes, the recorder-like attachment that sticks out of the bottom of the bag/wind-sack. I’m assuming that Shibe’s singing and sleep-singing bear on the chanter’s melodic potentialities in some way.

You might be able to trace the work’s five sections if you could rouse yourself from the trance that Miller wishes to establish. No problems with the first section, Rippling, but then the divisions became blurred, possibly distinguished by the upward or downward motifs that were articulated at great length by both soloist and strings. So we moved unknowing through Bellow-breathing, Sleep-chanting, and Slowing Air before coming to the change in character that heralded the coda, Honey-dreaming. Nothing disturbs the placidity of the score’s central parts where the repetitions are mind-numbing. For those of us not given to satisfaction with seemingly endless mantras, Chanter became irritating when you (I) started wishing for a change in timbre or pulse..

But I can’t improve on the observation of my neighbour at the end of it all. As we filed out of the Concert Hall doors in something like a communal daze, she muttered, ‘It does go on a bit.’ To which I felt like shouting, ‘A BIT?’ Perhaps, with another hearing, I might find subtleties of delivery in Shibe’s solo line, or shades of timbre in the string orchestral backdrop. There may be closely devised alterations in the movements’ rhythmic structures, or unremarked harmonic deviations across the general fabric. On the other hand, it’s more probable that what you hear is what you get.

After interval, Shibe returned for Wolfe’s Lad; like Miller’s concerto, it is enjoying Australian premiere performances across this tour. Originally composed for nine bagpipes, the work is an angry contemporary three-movement tombeau for the death of a friend. It begins with (Drones) which presents exactly those, verging in and out of a minor 2nd, expanding to an upward-moving scale with the use of rapid in-your-own-time glissandi to colour the melange. To 3end (I think), we move back to a unison, strung out to great length.

I missed the changeover to The Slow Melody which somehow emanated from (Drones); possibly this segment arrived with the scalar motion mentioned earlier. Still, we all were aware of The Fast Melody which was couched in what sounded like a 6/8 rhythm and shared in the biting rage that typified the work’s opening. You take the point that the composer is aiming at a bagpipes imitation in this final quick section, noticeably in the strings’ activity. Throughout, Shibe’s guitar dynamic tended to dominate, at times wailing over everything else to fine aggressive effect. In certain moments, this composition came close to verging on contemporary music-writing but, for the most part, its progress – for 2007 – didn’t move into new ground.

Serving as a hiatus between Shibe’s two electric guitar exhibitions came Hirta Rounds by Irish-born David Fennessy. This modern take on the tone poem concentrates on a now-deserted island off the Scottish Atlantic coast. This was excellent illustrative music, the bleak atmosphere set early by a harmonics-laden solo from principal ACO cello Timo-Veikko Valve. This set up the prevailing action of a short motive or pattern moving quickly into a diminuendo: a clever depiction of emptiness and desolation. As participants had a degree of freedom within their groupings, the results came over as freshly textured, even if the loud-to-soft pattern began to pall, especially at the half-way pause-point where the score appeared to take up almost where it began.

Nevertheless, as a representation of emptiness in a landscape, of humanity leaving not a wrack behind, this work showed a surprising individuality if, like Miller’s concerto, it moved nowhere but was content to revolve around a series of repeated gestures; well, what did you expect of a work that specifies rounds in its title? Further, being one of only two works on the program specifically written for strings, Fennessy’s score distinguished itself with its fluctuating timbral display, specifically the filigree work for upper strings. Also, to be much applauded, it didn’t quite wear out its welcome.

With the three selections from Bothy Culture – Ud the Doudouk, Aye?, Shputnik In Glenshiel – we encountered another facet of Scottish modern musical practice where the old forms meet up with the contemporary-of-a-sort in rock, or rock inflections. To be honest, this type of fusion (the third Australian premiere on the program) leaves me cold and I found little of interest, apart from double bass Maxim Bibeau moving to a bass guitar for most of its duration, and cellist Julian Thompson, who appeared to be providing an extra player from the scheduled three in Hirta Rounds (although positioned between second violins and violas) also taking up a bouzouki (could that be right?) in the rear ranks alongside Bibeau.

To be fair, I don’t know the original Bennett album, but this exposure to Crabb’s arrangement didn’t inspire me to research it overmuch. Like several pieces earlier in the program, the main practice seemed to be to take a tune and then give it variants. I also suspect that the order was changed for the last two pieces and we heard the Shputnik In Glenshiel reel before the program concluded with Aye? that was notable for Shibe’s spoken monosyllables as well as his playing. Or perhaps by this stage I was hallucinating and the night’s many elements were merging into one long Caledonian mental miasma.

Despite the acclaim that greeted Bennett’s compilation on its release, I’m not convinced that it does more than confirm a generic sound through the three ‘grooves’ that served to differentiate these final pieces. For all that, you could admire Shibe’s assured performance, particularly in the clear-speaking pieces early in the night. And you have to credit Tognetti and his players for their handling of this material and their imperturbability when faced with its unadventurous, atmospherically repetitive nature.

TOGNETTI. MENDELSSOHN. BACH

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday, September 16, 2024

Einojuhani Rautavaara

First piece on the program for this latest ACO mid-tour appearance was not scheduled in the original material. Rautavaara’s Pelimannit – Fiddlers is a five-part suite for strings, fantasias on tunes by folk-fiddler Samuel Rinda-Nickola. This Opus 1 was originally a piano solo that the composer arranged for strings and it employs a good many fiedel techniques or – better – habits like no vibrato, flat-bowing, passages with unvaried dynamic and (I suspect but can’t prove) some microtonal output to establish roughness of group articulation.

The work was expertly carried off by the players, with an outstanding passage or two when ACO artistic director Richard Tognetti‘s violin shadowed the cello melody line of Timo-Veikko Valve – possibly in the second Kopsin Jonas movement – where the folk-music suggestiveness reached an apex; more convincingly than the strident sweeps of the suite’s outer movements where the ethnic flavours were slathered on. Naturally, what come to mind on exercises like this are the works of Bartok: the employment of national musics from across Europe in settings of folk tunes, if not the Hungarian master’s transmutation of such material into his own music.

In this arena, Rautavaara sounds dependent on the players’ vitality and community in combination more than making much of the melodies as subjects for treatment. In fact, my impression was that the variants didn’t travel very far from home-ground and the harmonizations were more intriguing for their timbral qualities rather than for any polyphonic interlacing. But then, the work comes from 1952, seven years after Bartok’s death and the composer was pushing his up-to-datedness hard at the age of 26 in an unadventurous environment. Still, Pelimannit enjoyed a performance that elevated the score to an absorbing level.

Adelaide-based composer Jakub Jankowski wrote his Ritornello to the ACO’s commission and the score is enjoying its premiere performances in this series. The score begins with gestures: all players extending their bows like duellists, swishing them, then a communal shout reinforced by a hefty foot stomp and the work proper begins with long, slow bands of sound that move into a melodic strand (a Ukrainian folksong, the composer claims). Several features struck me as original, like the harmonics produced on Maxime Bibeau‘s double-bass and a kind of orthodox tutti that seemed to me to be the ritornello itself. But the most novel sound came with a kind of regular one-note bouncing effect, thanks to some wooden comb-bows utilized by the performers.

Still, I’m probably all at sea about the ritornello source and character as the score carefully wound up its strands into a composite; e.g., those extended bow gestures being given to individual players who used them as directive punctuation points during the work’s progress. It is paying Jankowski no small compliment to observe that his score kept his listeners intrigued; not so much for the theatrics but for the exercise of tension and release, for the generous spread of sound-sources around the eleven participants, and by his afore-mentioned sense of shape, of formal probity.

We then experienced a Bach violin concerto, the BWV 1041 in A minor with Tognetti as soloist. I’ve not experienced the Bach recording of this, the E Major Concerto, the Violin and Oboe Concerto and the D minor Double Concerto that this violinist and his orchestra produced to significant acclaim in 2006. But this night’s reading was unsettling because of Tognetti’s interpretation which eschewed the bold strokes of most players and favoured a remarkably light right hand under which notes tended to disappear. I don’t mean tutti passages but solo-dominated sections where the executant is meant to administer a clear line.

So no soaring aspirations in this version which was equivalent to seeing through a glass darkly where all too often the progress of Tognetti’s voice drifted into inaudibility. Certain aspects of the supporting decet’s work also puzzled, like the sudden pizzicato that was employed once during the opening Allegro, and the vibrato-less chains of detached and continuous quavers that populate the middle Andante‘s length. Of course, this latter methodology gave the soloist a plain setting above which to outline the composer’s splendid arabesques. Again, reticence came into play and the movement’s emotional eloquence was ignored for a polite, unassuming series of statements, distinguished by an occasional rhythmic liberty amounting to a sort of slurring of a gruppetto.

The gigue finale moves too rapidly for much beyond slotting the notes into place but here again, the soloist was determined to be self-effacing. At bars 31-32, the semiquaver interruptions to the regular quaver set-up didn’t come as a relief but a faint set of quivers. As the movement bounced past, you looked in vain for any assertion of primacy in the top line; rather, Tognetti followed an eccentric path that dipped in and out of prominence, blending in with the ritornelli bursts but leaving even these pages to succeed by an inbuilt minor-flavoured vivacity.

After the break, we came back to a smaller ensemble for Anna Thorvaldsdottir‘s Illumine; the pairs of violas and cellos remained, as did the bass, but the violin forces were halved to Helena Rathbone, Anna da Silva Chen and Ike See. The briefest work programmed, this short nature (I believe) poem was meant to indicate a physical transition to light – or was it one solid movement from quiescence to enlightenment? Shuddering, slow bands of discordant (later, concordant) sustained notes, suddenly fore-fronted sounds yielding to complaining short scales, Bartok pizzicato snaps, finally a series of soft glissandi: it’s all there in an amiable compendium of technical tropes common to your contemporary writers. Will I want to hear it again? Probably not because I didn’t catch anything individual about it.

To end, we had more of the disappearing violin approach across Mendelssohn’s E flat Major Octet, one of the ACO’s showpieces. Tognetti and Rathbone divided the softly-softly attack style between them, with Ilya Isakovich and Tim Yu rounding out the requisite violin quartet. Here also, we met with the absence of a hero top line; rather, we were faced with one that was content to meld in with the ensemble, yielding place to anyone with a moderately interesting subsidiary contribution – just playing along with the gang. The first Allegro came into high focus for this approach as the lengthy exposition was repeated. Even the opening climactic points at bars 4 and 8, the sforzandi in bars 10 and 11: all were under-emphasized.

And the story continued through a shadowy interpretation of the Andante where the soft outline prefigured what was to come in the very light Scherzo. In this latter, miraculously deft movement, the emphasis on collegiality reached a new high; even that splendid counter-strophe that begins at bar 37 failed to rollick even subterraneously. Still, the sudden break into visibility that came with Stefanie Farrands‘ solo at bar 188 served to leaven the piano-to-pianissimo, leggiero affettuoso atmosphere that dominated proceedings.

Dynamically, the Presto conclusion gave us a relief from the soft-stepping of the preceding two movements with cellists Melissa Barnard and Valve making a welcome forte start to the composer’s opening fugato. Tognetti and Rathbone occasionally moved into a dominant role but my interest (when it was roused) fell on the violas and cellos who seemed to be straining against the bit, unleashing an impressive power and drive when exposed.

This was certainly the most polite version of Mendelssohn’s youthful masterpiece that I’ve heard; fit to be played at the British court of the composer’s time in its polite titillation and well-couched reserve. For all that, the QPAC audience sounded delighted with it. But these patrons were also more receptive than I’d expected to the Pelimannit and Ritornello excursions of the evening’s first half and at least two fellow-passengers on the train home declared their enthusiasm for the Icelandic writer’s exercise. As with nearly everything that the ACO brings to town, you could admire the ensemble’s overall achievement and its polish, but I missed the usual urgency and dramatic sweep that you usually encounter in readings of the two older works.