Category: Orchestral

THE FOUR SEASONS

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday March 13, 2023

Joseph Tawadros

I’ve heard this program before. Well, perhaps not the exact thing but something close to it. When the penny dropped during Spring, the preliminary program booklet statement from ACO Managing Director Richard Evans suddenly struck a nerve: ‘We are thrilled to bring back this spectacular concert . . . ‘ If the energy had been there, I might have tracked down when the ACO and the Tawadros brothers launched their first shared national tour, but I know they committed their Four Seasons collaboration in Melbourne (and everywhere else) during 2015 when the Vivaldi concerti were also surrounded by, amongst other things, compositions from oud expert Joseph Tawadros.

The organization knew that it was on to a good thing with this partnership; hence a re-presentation to packed houses across the country. Brisbane proved no exception: as far as I could see, apart from a few empty seats in the organ gallery, the Concert Hall was packed. With enthusiasm as well, for everything from the individual Vivaldi compositions to Tawadros‘ flashy works that seemed to be divided into two sections: rhapsodic slow, pacey fast. These latter seem to follow a pattern that turns up in musical settings from India’s alap/taan to the lassan/friska of Hungary – uncomplicated, an easy juxtaposition/ capable of revisitings and recapitulations to taste. Tawadros proposes that some of his work has its roots in personal experiences. Good for him, although it has to be said that such inspirational roots are hardly uncommon. You might almost say that the fertile Venetian seasonal depictions come from living through plenty of Veneto campagna weather variants: it’s true, but just what you’d expect.

As well as the four concerti, we were also promised other Baroque music. Well, we got a scrap: the 22-bar long Grave from Vivaldi’s D Major Violin Concerto RV 208, nicknamed Grosso Mogul and therefore relevant to this program. Maybe: did the composer know about this distinctive title? Most organists know the work in a Bach transcription, BWV 594 where whatever Oriental flavour is dissipated. In any case, ACO artistic director Richard Tognetti took the solo line and turned it into an improvisational exercise, packed with bazaar-style flourishes and whines, alongside abrupt curvets in and out of focus, dynamic hurtling and soft rustlings in turn; all very creative, but it couldn’t disguise an inbuilt taut structure of (almost) predictable sequences.

Apart from the six Tawadros numbers – Kindred Spirits, Permission to Evaporate, Eye of the Beholder, Give or Take, Point of Departure, Constantinople – the only other extraneous pieces were a prelude or taksim, named Nihavend, by Mehmed VI Vahideddin, the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire; and Makam-i-Rehavi Cember-i-Koca, an Ottoman march by Tanburi Angeli which was played – like the four other Angeli(s) pieces I know – as a single line taken on by all instruments. Both pieces were among the briefest on the program: 3 minutes and 2 minutes respectively.

A continuing performance peculiarity was Joseph Tawadros’ penchant for following Tognetti’s line (or somebody else’s) in the Vivaldi concertos, as well as brother James‘ support, particularly in thumping bucolic movements, on his riq or bendir. To me, the percussion reinforcement sounded superfluous for most of the time: the originals are bouncy enough, like the first movement of Mozart’s 40th; a percussive underpinning, no matter how subtle in dynamic, seems like gilding an already glittering lily. Still, you got a perverse pleasure from hearing the lute attempting to match Tognetti’s flickering, fast output.

Not that all of the artistic director’s work was audible. In the later Seasons especially, his production moved into inaudible territory and I was sitting in a fairly close stalls position. Virtuosic scale passages often disappeared in their downward trajectories, casualties from the effort to make this firmly-based concerto sequence take on the character of an improvisation. Maybe it might have worked with a set of scores not so well known but this demonstration wound up by irritating; notes you know should have been audible failed to come across, although a famous passage like the three-violin bird exchange at the start of Spring was crystal-clear. Then – the oddest moment of all – between Movements One and Two of Winter, the orchestra inserted what I suspect was another Tawadros composition. Rather than cementing a pathway between East and West, the disjunction proved incomprehensible.

Which brings us to the most difficult aspect of this entertainment: the projected musical connection between Venice and the Orient. As light entertainment, the program contained an essay by Robert Dessaix which, before it reached its didactic core, described a Good Friday concert in the Scuola Grande of the Four Seasons; it sounds glorious until you reckon with the standard of Vivaldi performances in pretty much all reaches of the lagoon. Dessaix writes further of the mercantile achievement of the city and its artistic magnificence – the paintings, the buildings (some of them), the occasional solid fantasias – but there is precious little about the music.

I probably carped about this when covering the previous Four Seasons appearances of the ACO and Tawadros brothers, but you scratch hard and painfully to find a relationship between Vivaldi and a non-European music. The modes and scales are different; the harmonic languages don’t touch; when Tawadros goes in for metrical complexity or simple syncopations, you’re a world away from continuo homophony. Even the fusing of textures serves as aural confrontation; you could say it was Vivaldi’s fault for not experimenting with the oud’s texture, contenting himself with an archlute (Simon Martyn-Ellis theorboing and Baroque guitaring behind Joseph Tawadros all night), and not using any member of the Arabian percussion panoply. But he didn’t.

At the end of the printed program, after the rousing flurries of fabric and driving rhythmic freneticism, a standing ovation from a house packed with patrons who have learned their reaction techniques from State of the Union broadcasts or (more credibly) Australia’s Got Talent. So you can argue that, even if the cross-over is not persuasive, it makes for popular success. For me, as with the first time I came on a Tawadros/Grigoryan mixture, the original experience was indubitably interesting for its level of accomplishment and the willing endeavour from all concerned; this time around, the output was expert if unsurprising. Next time? I don’t know. Where do you go after the Four Seasons? Going back to the Gabrieli family is impossible; and there’s not much that is well-known after the so-called Venetian Golden Age. Furthermore, what about Tawadros’ contribution? By the time he began his last number on this night, I felt as though we were spinning on the spot, that nothing new was happening.

A palpable hit, this whole affair, punctuated by some splendid music-making. And there’ll always be fans who appreciate and love these artists working together: God knows that the world of popular music demonstrates daily how long you can get along by repeating yourself. Further, you will always have couples like the pair in front of me who got carried away into ecstatic applause with the Near-Eastern excerpts and relaxed with knowing smiles every time Tognetti launched into a tune familiar from TV ads. Makes a fellow proud to be Australian.

ILYA GRINGOLTS PLAYS BRUCH

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday February 13, 2023 at 7 pm

Ilya Gringolts

A tad bitty, this opening Brisbane gambit from the Australian Chamber Orchestra for 2023. Missing from the line-up were artistic director Richard Tognetti and associate Satu Vanska, but the band enjoyed some amplification – an extra viola (Carl Lee), a pair of new cellists (Charlotte Miles and Eliza Sdraulig), a mate (Axel Ruge) for bass Maxime Bibeau, and some violinists I’ve not come across before (I think!): Anna Da Silva Chen and Tim Yu. Also, by an arranger’s quirk, timpanist Brian Nixon came to prominence during the night’s big feature: Bruch’s G minor Violin Concerto.

Control of these forces fell to Ilya Gringolts, last heard with the ACO five years ago when he performed Paganini as we should have been hearing it. On this night, he took the soloist’s spot for the Bruch warhorse as well as for a splendidly cogent reading of Frank Martin’s Polyptyque, In more workmanlike mode, he took over Tognetti’s usual place as concertmaster-director for the last of Mendelssohn’s early string symphonies, the one-movement No. 13 in C minor; a fresh commission in Australian writer Harry Sdraulig‘s Slanted; then finished off proceedings through Grazyna Bacewicz’s Concerto for String Orchestra of 1948.

Naturally enough, popular acclaim went to the great-hearted German concerto, arranged for smaller forces by the ACO’s artistic administration manager Bernard Rofe. All the wind parts vanished – 2 each of the woodwind, four horns and two trumpets – their lines relocated to any stray strings; as you might have expected, this meant a loss of timbral variety and an absence of ambient gravity which can actually weigh down considerably this score’s progress. Further, the absence of a sizeable group changed the concerto’s flavour; if you knew the work (and that would have described quite a few patrons), you would have missed some tutti passages memorable for their abrupt bite and stridency, let alone the Vorspiel‘s haunting initial wind chords.

Nevertheless, Gringolts gave us a memorable account of the solo line, accommodating to his reduced background so that full ensemble passages came across with less heft than usual; for instance, the first explosion at bar 11 after Gringolt’s second cadenza was a watery intimation of the real thing. But you learned to compensate as the Vorspiel surged forward with its amalgam of rhapsody and respectability. The absence of timbral punch mattered less in the central Adagio but by this stage Gringolts had absorbed most of our attention with an impeccable demonstration of how to perform the score’s technical hurdles with absolute confidence, while simultaneously expounding the concerto’s rich romantic paragraphs.

Unlike other brilliant interpreters, Gringolts refrained from generating a seamlessly pure line with its contours neatly enfolded; when the action heated up, you could hear some preparatory scrapes as double- and quadruple-stops were hit hard – but not so much in the energetic Allegro last movement where the temptation to add extra gutsiness to the main theme’s thirds and sixths is too great for many an executant to resist. Both soloist and orchestra made as much as necessary with dynamic contrasts, while the whole reading kept you involved by its rhythmic intensity in the outer movements and through the waves of tensile string fabric in the second movement.

Messiaen stole several marches on his contemporaries with regard to putting his Christian/Catholic faith into musical practice, but Martin’s late creation for violin and two string orchestras scales some religio-emotional peaks with just as much sincerity and brilliance of utterance as the French master. His Polyptyque was inspired by a series of miniatures in Siena that depicted various stages of the Passion. In his six movements , Martin lets the solo line represent Christ and a Narrator, in the best Bach fashion; hence also, the two orchestral forces. It only seems like yesterday that adventurous choirs would present the Swiss writer’s Mass for Double Chorus (now almost a century old!) as the last word in modernity and improbably hard choral writing. You would hardly say the same about Polyptyque which is couched in that stringent, athletic language with which some of us have become familiar through the chamber works. Any appearance of a work by Martin is still remarkable, if not as noteworthy as it would have been 30 or 40 years ago.

As at the best of concerts, this performance was a revelation because of a happy combination of expertise and inspiration. After seven live audience performances, this penultimate one in Brisbane came to us well-honed and holding no surprises for all concerned. But the fulcrum of this success emerged through Gringolts’ sympathetic outline of the central role: in turn jubilant, mournful, aggressive, transfigured. Of course, the composer’s realization of specific images veered closer to the physically illustrative than anything in Messiaen’s work. For instance, the opening movement depicting Palm Sunday set out the turba in action – not wholly elated, but busy with suggestive undercurrents – while the violin wove a clearly defined path into the city.

Martin did justice to Judas with an active cadenza for the soloist, packed with self-circling energy like a man newly-arrived in a prison cell and finding no relief, even when the orchestras enter sombrely to underline the traitor-victim’s isolation. To end, the composer contrived a matched pair: the judgement before Pilate and Via crucis, prefacing a continually aspiring image of Christ’s glorification which is achieved by simple means, certainly more mobile than the Louange a l’immortalite de Jesus and less constipated than Majeste du Christ demandant sa gloire a son Pere. In these pages, Gringolts led us on an all-too-brief journey, remarkable in its concentration of output as it moved beyond a kind of remote tension to a radiant, soft triumph. Obviously, an experience to treasure.

The evening started with the Mendelssohn Sinfoniesatz, the last of the teenage composer’s essays in the form. While being happy to observe the near-adult grappling successfully with formal exercises, I’ve never gone overboard about any of these early efforts, least of all this effort with its thickly applied imitative passages of fugato. But then, I feel the same discomfort when Schumann starts fugueing in the Piano Quintet’s final Allegro, or even when the piano kicks off a mini-fugue in the last movement of Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3 (bar 228). But, if nothing else, this piece set the physical scene: Gringolts leading an all-male first violin group, Helena Rathbone opposite him at the head of an all-female second violin bevy; pairs of violas either side of centre-stage (this is one of the string symphonies with two viola lines); pairs of cellos in the rear centre, Timo-Veikko Valve and Julian Thompson at the front, of course, with the two females seated in the second row; and the two basses bringing up the real rea, one behind each group.. In any case, the Mendelssohn served its purposes of clearing the sinuses, loosening bowing arms and establishing a communal sound.

Better followed with Sdraulig’s new work. I can’t quite grasp the rationale behind Slanted, even if the composer explains it in two ways: the first, in terms of the actual music’s shape, its architecture as the 18 variations elide into one another; then, as a social commentary on the biases with which we’re all infected these days. Not ignoring these descriptor/explanations, you tended to become less concerned with the underpinning dialectic and more enthralled by the composer’s felicitous writing: expertly shaded, clearly defined in its allocation of responsibilities, gripping in its athletic first part and subtly atmospheric when the tension eased rhythmically for the later stages. It reminded me of several all-strings scores (well, of course, given the timbral potentialities) but carved out an individual stature by means of its remarkable definition, like a solidly sculptured torso. In some ways, it recalled the Frank Bridge Variations but with less glitter: Britten with balls.

Bacewicz’s famous Concerto rounded out this night effectively; to my mind, more so as a demonstration of the ACO’s finesse and ardour in attack than for the ground-breaking qualities of the score itself. As a standard-bearer for Polish modern music in the grim late 1940s, Bacewicz struck out on a progressive track although, in a wider European context, this work is not ground-breaking. Nevertheless, the composer’s vocabulary presents as strong and flinty with its neo-classical sprightliness and linear lucidity at a time when the great ruck of writers were still stuck in a post-Romantic morass. Gringolts headed an interpretation that found grace, even elegance amid the spiky polyphony; I heard only one suspect early entry , probably from the second violins, in this composition’s expertly-contrived delineation. More memorable was the rank and file’s vivid reaction to their guest leader’s never-failing enthusiasm.

BEETHOVEN SYMPHONY NO. 9 – SYMPHONIA CHORALIS (VIC)

Bendigo Symphony Orchestra and The Gisborne Singers

Ulumbarra Theatre, Bendigo

Sunday December 11, 2022

Merlyn Quaife

We’ve imbibed all the old saws throughout our lives; warnings about Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself, or injunctions along the lines of Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp . . . and very encouraging/discouraging they can be. But surely you have to take these up on a personal basis, judging how they apply to you. It’s a different matter when you involve others in your aspirations: then, the ambition is a shared one, the grasp becomes common property. Also, if you exert yourself to carry off an individual accomplishment, it’s OK if success or failure belongs to you and you alone.

Concerning this concert broadcast under the Australian Digital Concert Hall auspices, Browning’s line came to mind many times during the performance. This mighty score tested the grasp of the assembled musicians – Bendigo Symphony and Gisborne Singers – and the results were unhappy, for the most part. Uncertainty ran through the instrumental forces from the opening bars in Beethoven’s Allegro ma non troppo where the sotto voce 5ths and 4ths for the first violins sounded unhappy and uncertain. As with much of what followed, certainty arrived only when everybody was involved, as at the bars 16-to-17 explosion of the movement’s first theme. Biting away at this sudden assurance, the two trumpets dominated this stretch, the theme itself disappearing under the brass’s octave Ds and As. I thought this imbalance might have been due to the ADCH microphone placements, but the problem really lay with the small number of unassertive high strings in the ensemble.

Why the Choral Symphony, of all works? It’s been with us for nearly 200 years and its finale has turned into a celebratory cliche but the complexities involved in getting through the thing still tax even expert musicians who don’t rely on sailing along on the grounds of professional competence and/or regular familiarity. Conductor of the Bendigo and Gisborne forces, Luke Severn was hard pressed to keep his orchestra in time, let alone in tune or taking proper care with articulation and tuning. In the end, this performance struggled up to the last movement and that’s a long stretch of purely orchestral fabric to generate successfully – and to sit through when the output fails to deliver.

As for an actual cause for this concert, it came about through a choral festival held in Bendigo last weekend. On Saturday evening, participating choirs showed their wares to each other (and the public, one assumes), while the combined forces came together on Sunday for the Beethoven Ode – even though the only listed choir in the program was Severn’s Gisborne Singers. In fact, 55 singers were listed as his Gisborners – which is a respectable number but insufficient to carry off this score, particularly as these vocalists were rarely able to produce a sufficiently robust sound.

So Severn was labouring under all kinds of disadvantages, the main one being his players’ pussy-footing round a masterpiece that demands absolute confidence, particularly in its first two movements. All manner of details were muffed, like the violins and violas downward demi-semiquaver scales at bars 34 and 35 and the fatigued upper string sound at bar 71. Every so often the bland texture was disturbed by a misreading, as among the unison strings during bar 116, or by an absence like the missing woodwind at bar 138, or by a simple mistake like the first violin’s falling 5th at bar 177, or by the lack of woodwind coherence in the simple chords of bar 197. Then you’d suddenly come across a patch of competent work as in the flute/bassoon dialogue starting at bar 253 which shone for its unexpected clarity. But matters had become laboured, bogged down in hard slog by bar 333. Horns 1 and 2 had their exposure almost precise at bars 469 to 477 but the trumpet pair revisited their original hard-man brashness from bar 531 on, drowning everything else that was being generated at fortissimo level.

I’m afraid the scherzo fared little better. Right at the start, the trumpets made a mess of their D octave leap in bar 5 and, from then on, we were on tenterhooks as this naturally biting movement progressed. Wisely, Severn did not undertake most of the repeats in either the main body of this vivace or its Trio but you encountered some unexpected pleasures, like the bassoon work kicking off the Ritmo di tre battute pages, counterbalanced by the first oboe unable to make sense of a simple exposed melody line at bar 468. What you really missed in this movement was an efficient contrast between its initial ferocity and its complementary fleet-footed warmth.

It might be a slow movement but Beethoven’s Adagio offers many challenges, most obviously through the exposure of all its executants; the first violins and all four horns enjoy some torridly testing stretches of play. Again, it seemed to be a case of simply getting through these pages without much attempt to shape individual phrases; suppleness was at a premium, exemplified in bar 42 and the rushed lead-up to the violins’ E flat pause (which didn’t happen), as well as the fourth horn’s unhappy arpeggio encounter finishing bar 55. The Andante moderato change in pace went unmarked, but horn 4 gave an almost precise account of the stand-alone bar 96. This near-success was almost immediately followed by the first violins’ rhythmic malfunction at the bar 99 change of key back to B flat and the time signature splaying out to 12/8. One of the simple brass chords across bar 122 proved defective but then this section reached another apogee of strained performance at about bar 141 before a messy account from the first violins of bar 151’s semiquaver triplets.

Cellos and double-basses gave a persuasive account of the finale’s six recitatives but they were set a fast pace through Beethoven’s famous D Major melody starting at bar 92, their tuning occasionally off-centre. When the first violins got their crack at the tune in bar 149, you would have expected that the ensemble would have acquired some fluency in its treatment but their enunciation sounded stilted, although the least impressive part of this celebratory all-in came with a trumpet fluff across the theme’s last phrase at bar 184.

Bass soloist Teddy Tahu Rhodes delineated his O Freunde recitative with a vibrato as wide as the Calder Freeway but his delivery mode proved welcome for its assurance. Which only served to emphasize the lack of projection from the Gisborne altos, tenors and basses at their bar 21 entry of the Allegro assai. Soprano soloist Merlyn Quaife attempted to bring the whole operation back to a more measured, less runaway pace from her Wer ein holdes Weib entry at bar 37. Severn’s forces began the Alla marcia quite well, giving a congenial setting for tenor soloist Michael Petruccelli‘s bravely buoyant Froh investing these pages with much-needed vivacity, although I would have liked his concluding high B flats at bars 101-2 to have been hurled out with more ardour.

The consequent orchestral double fugue proved to be a testing set of pages that simply lacked consistency of output with valuable lines lost in a general melange, climaxing in a pair of disappearing horns at bar 210, their repeated octave F sharp inaudible. While the male choristers gave a good account (if not quite loud enough) of the Seid umschlungen maestoso, their Bruder in bar 17 came over as faint, given the context; but later, the full choral Welt? exclamation in bar 44 made for an unanticipated aural bolt.

The Gisborne sopranos handled the top As that pepper the Allegro energico with laudable vim; speaking of which, it was gratifying to hear the small band of tenors handling the same note with force at bar 65. And it was reassuring to come across mezzo soprano Kristen Leich‘s line emerging clearly during the soloists’ Alle menschen melismatic stroll starting at bar 70. But the performance’s underlying tentativeness endured to the end with an unsatisfying prod at the last stringendo‘s kick-off in bar 81, the concluding bars an unsatisfying series of soft punches.

Obviously, I didn’t enjoy this concert, finding it full of specific flaws and a lack of coherent interpretation. A school of thought that prevails these days believes that any effort is to be praised; you can see this mind-set at work in every classroom across our country where accomplishment comes second to the Morrisonian trope of ‘having a go’. Well, it didn’t work for the self-aggrandizing Australian football team in blood-drenched Qatar; it doesn’t work for the petulant brats who represent us in the world’s tennis stadia; much more importantly, it doesn’t do anything for the thousands of underpaid workers in our hospitals and nursing homes.

You have to be capable of more than good intentions when putting your grappling skills into operation for any Beethoven symphony; this D minor masterwork, one of Western music’s cornerstones, is not a construct for which it’s sufficient to ‘do your best.’\

BOHEMIA AND BEYOND

Geelong Symphony Orchestra

Costa Hall, Deakin University, Geelong

Saturday October 22, 2022

Stefan Cassomenos

This regional orchestra was established in 2016 and, under favourable conditions, it has managed to present three concerts a year since then, apart from the recent Plague Years that are now being re-evaluated as not as perilous as first thought; a marvel to be living through historical re-writing, unabashed to the point of brazen. Even in its early years, it didn’t come to my attention in the same way that the Stonnington Symphony did during my decades in Melbourne. Of course, I heard enough of the Malvern people to know that their efforts were more am than pro, their work sometimes painfully laboured; which made expectations of the Geelong musicians rather carefully non-commital. They remain so.

Saturday night’s concert as presented online by the Australian Digital Concert Hall saw conductor Richard Davis take his players through Smetana’s The Moldau and the E minor Symphony No. 9 by Dvorak. In the centre of this old-fashioned program, Stefan Cassomenos was soloist in Schumann’s Op. 54 Piano Concerto. From their archives, you can see that Davis is a regular with this body and Cassomenos has appeared in a GSO event almost four years ago to the day when he performed the Mozart K. 450 in B flat. As well, you can see that the organization’s ambitions are high as it presents familiar if taxing repertoire.

Like this night. The two Czech works feature among serious music’s most familiar scores, turning up in all over the Western world’s concert halls on a regular basis. And that’s fine, particularly if you get reasonably accurate interpretations; they don’t have to be plain sailing, pure velvet all the way, but you’d like to follow the progress without wincing. For the greater part of this night, the Geelong musicians got all the notes out and in tune. But they were hard-pressed in their work and it showed in some leaden pages during both the symphony and the concerto.

Things began ominously. We came online to see the orchestra on stage and a hush over Costa Hall – which went on for some time. Then the wind players started some little flourishes, general talk broke out, all of which again descended into an ecclesiastical murmur. Some wag called out an encouragement to general amusement (muted). Then the concertmaster arrived, followed pretty swiftly by Davis. But for a moment I was taken back to an MSO concert where the concertmaster failed to arrive for a very long time; we found out later that he was playing hardball in his contract negotiations with the orchestra or the ABC, I can’t remember which.

In any case, the unnamed leader arrived, then the conductor and soon we were into the flute duet that opens The Moldau. This exquisite dovetailing lasts for 15 bars and you’re meant to get the impression, before the clarinets arrive, that one flute is playing. Sadly, the joins here showed a bit too clearly. But the quadruple winds passage to bar 36 worked to better effect as the Moldau’s feeder streams led to the main body with some fine murmuring from the group’s violas. The texture sounded unduly ragged when the first violins cut out at bar 69 and the seconds were left exposed but the melodic flow was impressive up to the mood-changing Es at bar 118 where the horns wavered on an easy cliff-edge. Another case of lapsed concentration emerged at bar 133 in the middle of the rustic wedding where the communal attack wasn’t; surprising, as the Geelong basses made an emphatic underpinning for this entire stretch.

The strings (upper) took to the Moonlight change of scene with an unwillingness to let go, their minims and semibreves not very congruent with the woodwind’s burbling semiquavers. Later, the woodwind should have been similarly indulged around bar 233 but weren’t allowed sufficient lebensraum. So on to St. John’s Rapids and a prominent cymbal just before the river broadened (following a very muddy violins+violas upward rush at bar 332), and we reached Vysehrad which was despatched very rapidly. I don’t understand the need for a ritardando at about bar 404, the last heroic blazoning; perhaps an unconscious salute to marine pollution brought in by the Elbe. But those triumphant concluding pages before the moving last string arpeggios gave an impression of untidiness; the tone poem sounding at its best when handling the rustic central segment.

We enjoyed another solid break while the piano’s microphones were adjusted with a care that seemed finicky to me but was eminently justifiable according to the demands of the electrician’s operating handbook; the settling of microphones can take almost as much time as percussionists organizing themselves at a contemporary chamber music affair. I didn’t see anyone use the piano’s A for a tuning pivot: everyone just took the oboe’s pitch as the operating datum. Cassomenos used a score which I’ve never been able to criticise having seen the great Moura Lympany once lose her place during the first movement of the Emperor.

A worrying problem was the lack of synchronicity between soloist and orchestra as early as the tutti chords at bars 3-4. A momentary freeze in transmission, and we took up again at the soloist’s restatement of the main theme in C Major. It was hard to work out why the clarinet wasn’t sustaining notes for their full length in the following Animato section; minims tied to crotchets simply disappeared halfway through; as was the case further on at the Andante espressivo section. At Letter C in my old Breitkopf and Hartel edition where the work’s opening flourish is revisited, the orchestra came to life during some expert statement-and-response work with Cassomenos, whose attack moved into choppy territory at the Piu animato duet with the GSO first flute. Still, by the time he reached the next solo, just before the recapitulation, he was working at an excellent Schumann vein of controlled delicacy which continued up to his duet with the first oboe preceding Letter F. At the start of the cadenza, the pianist manipulated the piano’s upper line with impressive expertise, even if I found the trills at the Un poco andante to be over-aggressive. To end, the orchestra was late across the movement’s last four chords.

By contrast, the Intermezzo satisfied on nearly all grounds, the flute/clarinet/bassoon/horn ensemble punctuations both efficient and well-inserted into the narrative. Cassomenos momentarily hit a patch of uneven delivery 17 bars before the third movement eruption and the string rush that leads into that Allegro vivace was undisciplined. The pianist’s instrument sounded very weighty at the opening and, after a while, you took extra pleasure in segments where the soloist did not feel the need to punch out his contribution. That abrupt change to a march rhythm across the prevailing 3/4 bar lengths found the strings uneasy with where to put the emphases. A later unhappy point came just before the key signature change to F Major where individual groups were exposed, most of them rather thin in output by this stage. An uncharacteristic fumble from the pianist marred the endless right-hand quaver patterns 23 bars before Letter H and the return of the march.

At about this stage you were struck by how little ebullience had been transmitted during this movement. The flashes that should burst out in the tutti passages failed to appear and the pages packed with piano figuration were characterless – exercises without individuality. The end came as a release from tedium, I’m afraid, this last movement a slog for both performers and audience.

After interval, the concertmaster again made another individual entrance and the players again stood for the conductor; something of an excess in protocols of acknowledgement unless the parties involved felt the need for such mindless bobbing and unnecessary bouts of applause (for what? showing up?). What until this stage had been a suspicion became obvious when the Dvorak symphony got under way: this orchestra doesn’t have enough high and middle strings. For all that lack of weight, the bodies concerned put their backs into their work, such enthusiasm paying off well in tutti patches. Once more, we experienced an early unsettling inaccuracy from horns 3 and 4 in bar 16, the prefiguring of the Allegro molto‘s first subject. However, the performance settled into place quickly and the only disturbance during the exposition (which was repeated) came with a dynamic imbalance at about bar 129 where the woodwind sextet choir proved too strong for the melody-carrying violins (let alone the momentarily high-lit basses).

Davis isn’t alone in pulling back the pace in the string handling of Dvorak’s Swing low theme at bar 157 but it always strikes me as over-sentimentalizing this touching moment. A small glitch marring this movement’s development came in the horns (1 and 2 this time) at bar 220 but the fortissimo explosions impressed the further these players got into the score’s homely bravado; all that was lacking was a touch of high string hysteria. Finally, I couldn’t pin it down (viz. ascribe definite blame) but the rush towards the final cadence, at about bar 441, was faulty in what is a straightforward passage of play.

A famous danger spot, the opening wind chord to Dvorak’s Largo failed to reassure you of the ensemble’s security. That famous cor anglais solo didn’t enjoy the happiest bar 8 where a small clip disturbed the flow, and the second bassoon minim in bar 20 made a delayed entry. Once more, Davis is not alone in rushing through the string filler at bars 32 to 34, but is anything gained by this acceleration? At their first statement of the middle C sharp minor interlude (bars 64 to 67), the first violins demonstrated their potential as a highly responsive corps; and the string decet near the movement’s end was graced by an excellent, vibrant duet between the concertmaster and principal cello. I turned the volume up but still didn’t register the low D flat in the Largo‘s last bass divisi chord.

Happily, the following scherzo passed with loads of vehemence and crisp dynamics, my only quibble the clarinets’ restatement of the trio’s theme at bar 78 where the players weren’t quite on the note for a substantial octave stretch of 8 bars. Some more obvious problems peppered the concluding Allegro vivace. One of the brass missed the top note in bar 24; that lack of upper string power proved a detraction from the energy needed between bars 100 to 105. However, the stretch where Dvorak reviews his preceding movements was negotiated very well indeed and the strings made a graceful case for the decelerando at bar 220. In fact most of these last pages in the symphony came off successfully for this section, while a horn made a sad encounter with the top note of bar 268, and some players were jostling out of line at the approach to the Meno mosso e maestoso peroration, while the final chord could have been attacked more cleanly.

You can find a fair degree of competence in the Geelong orchestra and you have to wonder if the ensemble might have fared better with a program that wasn’t so well-known. When you’ve been familiar for years with these particular scores and the polish brought to them by great musicians – Ancerl, Szell, Brendel – it’s difficult to ignore any flaws, even when the interpretations on offer are based on laudable intentions. Obviously, I found this Smetana/Schumann/Dvorak trilogy only occasionally successful but, judged by the standards of other regional and suburban orchestras that I’ve heard, the GSO has a solid base on which to work. I’d like to hear the group at a later date, especially when performing music that doesn’t have a wealth of shatteringly fine interpretations readily available for comparison.

THE CROWD & I

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday August 15, 2022

I would have thought that putting this exercise into operation was pretty simple. For all that, the process seems to have taken a number of years before it grew into its current form. The construct’s realization came from three prime sources: the ACO’s artistic director Richard Tognetti, film and staging director Nigel Jamieson, cinematographer and editor Jon Frank. Of course, a cast of several assisted this creative trinity, but the actual composite whole boiled down to a sequence of film sequences for the eyes and a collation of musics for the ears.

I’ve seen one of these collaborations before, when Tognetti went into partnership with photographer Bill Henson for Luminous in 2005. I think the surf/water one came my way at some time but nothing remains in the memory about that; Mountain, from about five years ago, remains a personal terra incognita, if not quite nullius. You can find little to take exception to in The Crowd & I; visually, it’s occasionally gripping and at other times tedious; with its musical stratum, the success rate is just about the same. So, much of the presentation fell outside my competence level, and the ACO’s contribution was hard to assess as the body seemed to be amplified for part of the night and the corps had mixed success with some works; not so much with the notes’ production but in how they sounded.

Along with the organization’s 16 strings (one down on the usual number, I think), we heard a flute/piccolo, a clarinet/bass clarinet, a bassoon/contrabassoon, a trumpet, a trombone/bass trombone, two percussionists and pianist Konstantin Shamray. Supplying vocal sounds came six members of Sydney’s Song Company. I think that summary includes all on-stage performers but can’t be sure: for much of the night, the musicians were working in darkness, a black-as-pitch pit situation with some strange groupings being carried out. Further to this, certain moments had you wondering whether you should just give up and watch the films rather than trying to make logical sense out of what you were hearing. For instance, during Ives’ The Unanswered Question, I could have sworn I saw an extra (anonymous) flute taking part in the woodwind ejaculations. The night began with the first movement to Schubert’s B minor Symphony in a Tognetti arrangement where the 15 original winds were cut to five, the result being that both oboe and horn textures were sadly missed by those of us who are asinine enough to revere this splendid fragment.

But some readings succeeded well enough, like the Slow Waltz section of Morton Feldman’s Three Voices that accompanied images of refugee camps and their dispiriting mixture of desolation and overcrowding. A Shostakovich polka supported shots of football crowds in all their natural repulsive mindlessness. The sickening images of the Cronulla riots in 2005 made a fine melding with Tognetti’s own rabid Mosh Maggot, which title is an apt descriptor for each one of those who initiated (from a gutless distance) or took part in this national celebration. Also, the final sequence of a Japanese fast train speeding through a seemingly endless, self-perpetuating cityscape while Chopin’s Op. 27 C sharp minor Nocturne forged along its troubled, unhappy path made for a conclusion to the evening that transcended much of the program’s main body, colourful though this was in many parts.

In the end, you’re left with an old-fashioned entertainment which, in fact, has no pretensions to grandeur or wide range of thought; more, it’s a look at the multitude and the individual in different contexts: the crowd or I. As expected, the visual component(s) stole most of the thunder and it often required a wrench to give proper focus to what Tognetti and his cohorts were about. I never thought that I’d be distracted from the Molto adagio of Beethoven’s Op. 132 but Michael Wolf’s images of individual faces among a crushed host of Japanese commuters were among the most arresting sequences in this night’s work; as were the succeeding prospects of Hong Kong housing that resembled computer strips straight out of the Matrix films.

It’s clear (to me, at least) that Tognetti, Jamieson and Frank are content to face you with their combined vision and leave open whatever you choose to make of it. (Well, there’s nothing original in that observation: most of today’s arts avoid audience direction.) Certainly, there are crowds galore, some of them obviously Australian (not just the Cronulla sub-normals), some of them close to being in extremis like the refugees coming to land on Samos or Lesbos, others a mass of individual colours that somehow cancel out individuality as in the millions that gather on the banks of the Ganges. Juxtaposed or interspersed with these come single units, like an elder walking into the landscape of the Tanami while the camera pans back until his figure is just a fleck in the spinifex; or like the football fan captured by Dragan Aleksic whose creased face reflects his team’s fortunes from minute to minute but might just as well be witnessing yet another mind-numbing spectacle in today’s Ukraine.

Look, for me, Augustus’ pet put it best: Odi profanum volgus et arceo. It’s clearly a sign of social decrepitude but these days I can’t imagine anything worse than sitting in a packed football stadium – and this from somebody who stood from 8:30 am to the final whistle at the 1970 Collingwood-Carlton grand final and who, at the same ground, watched with muted involvement as South Melbourne won their 2005 premiership cup. Despite the much-vaunted bonhomie of sports crowds, any generosity of spirit, tolerance and fellowship can disappear in a split second with an unintentional jostle, just as it can in a bar. What this night made me consider was the essential – for better or worse – isolation that pervades our society.

In the filmed imagery, you saw little sign of benevolence. No, it wasn’t all horror stories but the final message was a contradiction of the dean’s dictum: every man is an island, entire of itself. You may live in one of those Hong Kong pigeon coops, as a tour leader in that city described her home to me, but, just because you are thrust daily into a variety of social complexes, what follows isn’t membership of a philanthropic multitude. For assured social connection, you might have your family; all too often, that’s it. As a counterweight to this gloom, our aboriginal peoples are determined to speak individually of belonging to a ‘mob’; but I suppose that concept is vital if you are part of an all-too-easily dismissed minority.

But the majority of us have no such right of relationship. Friends? Sure, but, as you age, they become ships that disappear into the night. A multiplicity of associations give you a semblance of being part of the main, but all such clannish continents are built on sand; ask any politician. For my part, The Crowd & I impressed as a 15-part kaleidoscope of sombre sadness, bordering on depression; the world’s peoples are varied but rarely are you attracted to join in, even when faced with bland celebrations of the spectacularly little, like Ekka or Moomba. But I admired the probity of the ACO’s construct which persevered in its unflattering vision of humanity as, in line with the Schubert overture piece, unfinished.

You’d like to be optimistic about our future, as proposed in the night’s opening shot of the earth as a vital, beautiful object in space, before the camera zooms in on the globe’s details. As it was presented, our world is – from a distance – a breathtaking objet trouve. But then comes the rot: while you may hope for the dearest freshness deep down things, you rarely find it. Strangely enough, on this night, while recognizing several truncations and arrangements, a sort of buoyancy of spirit emerged, even out of the program’s more tenebrous music, bearing witness to Tognetti’s (assisted?) catholicity of vision.

MOZART & BRITTEN

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday May 23, 2022

Here in Brisbane for the last in a 12-performance national run, the ACO played a program of music by two of music’s greatest brats with admirable panache, taking an individual approach to two Mozart scores – the K.136 Divertimento in D and the brilliant Sinfonia Concertante of 1779 – and exerting an apparently effortless expertise on Britten’s newly-resuscitated (well, in the last decade) Elegy for Strings and his still-striking Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge.

Three of these works require strings only. Mozart’s Sinfonia here appeared in an arrangement that left out the original’s pairs of horns and oboes, in line with a ‘tradition’ that obtained in the 19th century of rescoring this writer’s works at will. Sorry, but I missed the winds’ timbres significantly, even if anyone with half a brain can see the financial logic in using readily available resources, not carrying around nation-wide a quartet of wind players who contribute only half-an-hour’s input to each performance. The texture changes and, if you love the double concerto as Mozart wrote it, your expectations are bound to be dashed at too many points when the ambience is all-strings.

So, nothing left to do but sublimate your disappointment and enjoy what you’re offered by the country’s premier chamber orchestra. Britten’s Elegy, written in the composer’s 14th year, shows a talent of striking assurance, especially when it leaves off its portentous opening for more active fields. Like a fair amount of what was to come in later years, the piece impresses for its executive skill and emotional liveliness, while very little bricks and mortar remain in the memory. You can, if you like, ferret out reflections of Mendelssohn – another high achiever when young – even in the recourse to fugato.

For all that, the ACO’s 17 members produced a powerful and committed reading, the sonorous carapace admirably firm apart from a couple of production flaws from the second violins, apparently missing their principal, Helena Rathbone. Artistic director/concertmaster/leader Richard Tognetti contributed his impeccable individuality in an exposed passage (or two?) but this brief work’s appearance impressed as a curiosity, fleshing out an unknown corner of Britten’s juvenilia for aficionados. Thanks for the experience but I won’t be buying the CD.

Speaking of recordings, the ACO recorded part of Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante in 1986 (the pre-Tognetti Age), with Carl Pini and Irina Morozowa the soloists. Some 24 years further on, Tognetti and the ACO’s then principal viola, Christopher Moore, recorded the whole work; a memorable pairing which I witnessed in Hamer Hall about that time. It seems to be a selective rite of passage for the position because here was the newly-appointed ACO principal violist, Stefanie Farrands, collaborating with Tognetti and reflecting the violinist’s chameleonic path through this score with excellent reliability.

In fact, this performance was a delight for the experience of the two solo lines which sounded faultless to my ears across the work’s length, notably in the two cadenzas where the linear mirror-work showed that the possibility for musical dialogue isn’t just a Goethean aphorism. Apart from the excellence of ensemble work, the interpretation distinguished itself for its elegance; some distance from versions in which the output strives to be unbuttoned to the point of sprawling – a temptation in the opening maestoso‘s 71-bar scene-setting tutti.

Not that we weren’t faced with some unexpected moments, like the slow approaches to fermata in bars 176 and 189. But the delectable chase between the two soloists that precedes the movement’s recapitulation was exactly that, as opposed to a machismo-laden competition. The wind absence didn’t strike me as a defect in the central Andante until the coda where the oboes were sorely missed at bar 124 and beyond. Still, the concluding Presto was handled sensibly with a remarkable neatness of phrasing and an infectious, sparkling delivery.

Another improbable youthful score, Mozart’s D Major Divertimento comes from the composer’s 16th year but in recent decades its popularity/regularity of performance is approaching that of the Eine kleine Nachtmusik serenade. Tognetti and his forces gave it a smart-as-paint run-through, doing their best to offer as much variation as possible with unexpected phrasing, striking textural differentiations and the usual ducks-and-drakes games with dynamics. While the first two movements demonstrated (if it was really needed) the ACO’s cleverly etched style, the finale was brilliant in sound and execution with the ensemble introducing all sorts of production tricks – saltando, pizzicato, spiccato, staccato – to brighten up Mozart’s plain Presto.

As for a major Britten work to balance the Mozart sinfonia, the Frank Bridge Variations filled the bill quite adequately. Written when the British composer was 24 (a tad older than Mozart when he produced his double concerto), the score brought international notice and fame at home. Britten’s many admirers regard this as a pivotal step in the path that led to the last string quartet and cello suite; while the less idolatrous among us find whole segments of admirable craft and emotional weight (Variations II and IX, and the powerful welter of the final bars), it’s hard to ignore other passages of superficial glitter and skittishness in the work’s central movements.

Another pre-Tognettitime recording comes from 1982/3 when the ACO recorded this work with Dene Olding leading the way. I doubt whether this early product from the ensemble’s first decade of operations would match Monday night’s performance in terms of precision and character. Each change in fabric substantiated the players’ reputation for informed virtuosity – from some searching non-vibrato chords near the start, through the ten violins playing in flawless unison during the Wiener Walzer, later into a breathtaking Moto perpetuo, and eventually exploring the realm of three ideally matched violas during the penultimate Chant.

This was a well-focused evening’s work where two adolescent compositions were paired with two semi-mature creations – all carried out with polish and insight. I left QPAC full of questions about the quality of genius, particularly as it obtains in the young, and heartened by the enthusiasm for music-making that came from the night’s music itself and from its interpreters. Of course, the questions remain unanswered but the gifts of Tognetti and the ACO remain as valuable and uplifting as ever.

SKETCHES OF SPAIN

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday April 11, 2022

Phil Slater

Winding up its current tour, the ACO gave its penultimate performance of this particular program to an enthusiastic QPAC audience; not packed to the ceiling, but respectably populated. This, the 10th time the players had presented this music, involved the usual 16-strong string body supplemented by percussionist Brian Nixon and a jazz quartet put to several uses: trumpet Phil Slater, pianist Matt McMahon, bass Brett Hirst and drums Jess Ciampa.

The intention of this enterprise was to fuse the visiting quartet with the ACO and, for much of the night, the success rate was high. I didn’t see any use of the guests during the opening fragment: Bernard Rofe’s arrangement of the opening to Par les rues et par les chemins from Debussy’s Iberia which was tooling along very nicely, strings and percussion in clear-speaking action, when suddenly artistic director/concertmaster Richard Tognetti made an abrupt leap into his own arrangement of the middle Blues movement to Ravel’s Violin Sonata, for which the soloist took up a contemporary and oddly-shaped instrument. This brought in the visiting quartet tangentially at first, gaining in contributory power as the movement passed in what can only be described as an arranger’s delight. I felt that there was a balance problem a bar after Number 7 in the old 1927 Durand edition when the violin starts its quadruple stops pizzicati and Tognetti was not as striking a contributor as you’d expect, given the assault typical in the two million performances I’ve heard prior to this one.

This was followed by a Sephardic song from Turkey, Yo era nina de casa alta, also in a Tognetti arrangement, that began with a percussive tambour rhythm, cellist Julian Thompson taking up a guitar, while Tognetti outlined the tune. No sooner begun than over; sadly, the guitar proved close to inaudible from my seat, although it made more of an impression during the following reading of Boccherini’s Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid. Mind you, in its original form, the string quintet imitates guitar, drums, bells; this interpretation came complete with its own extra-string sound sources. Nevertheless, Tognetti and Timo-Veikko Valve gave an excellent account of the Largo assai (Rosary) interludes with excellently judged dynamic balance, and this version did not attempt the crescendo/diminuendo during the concluding Ritirata which seems to have been an atmospheric flourish unknown to the composer.

To finish off the evening’s first half, we got our reminiscences of Spain through several filters in Shchedrin’s arrangement of Bizet bits in a selection from the Russian composer’s near-pastiche ballet Carmen. This piece enjoyed a vogue for some time, one that I’ve never quite understood except that the absence of wind ensures that performances are economically frugal. The arrangement is for strings and percussion (four players, originally, but Nixon and Ciampa seemed to cope; perhaps you only need two players for the selections we heard). I missed a few tubular bells notes in the Introduction and found some of the vibraphone work muffled, but the interpretation from Tognetti and his strings was very smart and arresting with patches of brilliant accomplishment from both sets of violins. We missed out on the ‘Fate’ motive that concludes the opera’s Prelude and features in the ballet, but we did score the Farandole from L’Arlesienne masquerading as a bolero and another import from The Fair Maid of Perth for a Carmen-and-Torero scene.

Some other memorable moments came in the bare-bones version of Escamillo’s Votre toast – here eloquent in its restraint – and the use of three ideally matched violas to carry the melody of the opera’s Act 3 Intermezzo. Despite the nay-sayers and the nonsense started by Furtseva about the blasphemy carried out on Bizet, this work – even in its truncated form – is a scouring agent of sorts, taking you so far into familiar pages and then cutting the ground out from under your comfort-seeking feet. Still, it’s a long way from Spain – just like Boccherini’s attractively hygienic and Debussy’s buoyantly optimistic streets, not to mention Ravel’s sophisticated foray into le jazz hot.

Matters took a sharper trans-Atlantic turn in the two main post-interval performances. The guest quartet took centre-stage for a version of the last movement, Solea, in Miles Davis/Gil Evans’ Sketches of Spain. This new arrangement was a collaboration between pianist McMahon and the ACO’s Artistic Administration Manager, Bernard Rofe, the latter’s craft previously encountered in the Debussy transcription. For my taste, the only interesting facet of the experience came through Slater who made a positive impression by following a Davis trail – meandering but always dominant; mind you, what I know of the great trumpeter comes from sixty-plus years ago and a high-school fascination with the Porgy and Bess and Kind of Blue albums, while Sketches of Spain passed me by.

As the work moved forward, the collaboration on display seemed to improve in persuasiveness, reaching a high point in a twinning of the three violas with the band minus McMahon in a stretch that came somewhere near suggesting Spain and exhilarated for itself. One of the question marks over this exercise actually came with Slater’s ‘bent’ notes which stood out, strangers in a familiar landscape and not quite gelling with the string writing which, as far as I could hear, played no games with microtones. Still, the final decrescendo proved to be, without question, the program’s most magical passage: excellently paced, restrained and confident: an ease-filled release into nothing.

For some reason, the ACO planning committee decided to interpose a Victoria motet between the Davis/Evans movement and another McMahon/Rofe arrangement of Chick Corea’s Spain. Well, it was one way of putting a real national composer in a menu that otherwise consisted entirely of outsiders looking in on the Iberian peninsula. From choppy memories, the 8-part Ave Maria sets two choirs against each other with bursts of echoes, imitations and dovetailing; here, the visitors seemed to become one quartet, the ACO strings playing the Choir 1 lines. For reasons I can’t explain, the arrangement worked well enough, although this might have come about because of its simplicity; but then, what could you possibly add to music at this level of textural clarity?

Corea’s widely-travelled work exists in several versions. What am I talking about: it can be heard in a myriad of forms, formats, combinations and permutations and I’ve heard a fair few, if some decades ago. On this occasion, McMahon set the scene with mildly coruscating solo work before he was joined by various collaborating bodies. Not that it was all piano, or all Slater, even if these players gave us the most intriguing music-making across this long piece – the program’s most substantial by far. Tognetti and Valve took the spotlight occasionally, but not for long as the focus shifted between jazz quartet (or trio) and the ACO. Despite its episodic shape, the work didn’t come over as diffuse, being anchored by a long melodic line/chorus that all played in unison or at an octave’s remove (or two of them).

In the end, Spain presented as so much of the evening’s work did: living up to the catch-all title of sketch. I couldn’t find much national flavour in the piece, let alone the vaunted references to Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez (which are more explicit in Corea’s earlier interpretations of this score). But you might say the same about the Victoria motet, or the Sephardic cantiga – or anything else at Monday night’s concert. For all that fretting about provenance, the exercise itself was full of expert, interesting performances and the merging of two separate bodies succeeded a good deal more than some previous experiences I’ve attended, like Don Banks’ Nexus of 1971, or Wynton Marsalis’ The Jungle with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2019. All the same, I hope that we can now move on to new pastures: the ACO’s first two presentations this year have celebrated Piazzolla/South America and the great (or infamous, if you like) Latin American colonizer.

NORTHERN SERENADES

Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra

Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University

Saturday, March 26 2022

Johannes Brahms

I’ve not been living in Queensland long enough to be sure of certain musical matters. One that preoccupies me currently is whether or not the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra has been a regular visitor to Brisbane. You can’t tell anything much from the last two years’ activity but I suspect that this body’s forays north of the Tweed might have been few and far between since it sprang into being in 2013. Or it might have performed in out-of-town venues and not had time to build up a public here; Saturday night found the Conservatorium Theatre about a third full.

Not that this is an indication of anything much. For years, the Australian Chamber Orchestra played to small audiences in Melbourne’s Hamer Hall; the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra worked for some surprisingly small attendance numbers in its early days at the Melbourne Recital Centre; the sterling Selby & Friends series laboured to attract supporters to its recitals at Methodist Ladies’ College in Kew. And the list could be extended to take in other brilliant performers, both locals and visitors, who didn’t get the following they deserved for reasons both specific and vague.

I’ve heard the ARCO players at least twice in the past two years, both occasions through the good graces of the Melbourne (Australian) Digital Concert Hall. But there’s no substitute for the real thing, as this particular program proved time and time again. A good deal of their output was more mellow, less astringent than I’d expected, and details of their performance practice – pre-figured in a program booklet article by Hilary Metzger, as well as a prefatory address from co-artistic director/concertmaster Rachael Beesley – ensured that the ensemble’s output reflected musical mores from the situations and times in which some of the night’s composers found themselves.

We heard five works on Saturday evening, beginning with Holst’s St. Paul’s Suite of 1913 which turned out to be the most recent score performed. Another more taxing English work came with Elgar’s 1892 Serenade for Strings, followed by Hugo Wolf’s Italian Serenade of 1887 which the composer arranged for small orchestra (double woodwind and horns, strings) in 1892 and this was in turn edited for string orchestra by American educator Lucas Drew – which latter version we heard as a pretty thick-textured substitute for the scintillating string quartet original. After interval came Beesley’s sister Shauna‘s arrangement of that much-transcribed gem, Schumann’s Op. 73 Fantasiestucke from 1849 – the night’s odd man out. To end, the ARCO forces performed – for the first time in my experience – another Serenade for Strings by Victor Herbert, written in 1888. In other words, four of these pieces were written within 26 years of each other; one way of generating a focus, even if Holst’s buoyant stomps didn’t quite fit into the prevailing late Romantic ambience.

But, the St. Paul’s Suite makes an ideal opener for any string orchestra program with its direct action and minimal use of tricky production techniques. Beesley had her players swing with a hefty bounce into Holst’s opening Jig and generated some fetching passages like the second violins’ variant at Number 3’s key signature change in the old Goodwin and Tabb score of 1922, and an unflustered Piu mosso at Number 9. Well before this, however, you became conscious of this orchestra’s smooth output, making a welcome change to the usual steel-string clangour and bringing to the front of mind how conditioned we have become to hearing this score spun out with robotic precision and an overkill of the composer’s dynamic directions – something like aristocrats slumming it in the country, which is not the name of Holst’s particular game here.

Full marks to the second violins again for their Ostinato work with some seamless dovetailing, and a pliant 8-bar solo from Beesley that set up this brief segment’s outer melodic matter. The concertmaster was put to more hefty work in the Intermezzo: this suite’s high-water mark for me with its striking oscillation between lean melodic arches and full-bodied chords for nearly everyone 18 bars from the end. Then, The Dargason conclusion mirrored the opening Jig with its absence of try-hard urbanization, the only problem coming from the cellos and their announcement of Greensleeves a bar after Number 3 which was too faint to have much impact against the busy violas. Naturally enough, this was compensated for at Number 9 when the upper strings had their way with the tune, and the final pages were robust enough.

One of the evening’s finest stretches came with the Elgar work which somehow slotted easily into the group’s performance style. Each movement passed without unnecessary flurries, capturing the score’s eloquently graduated phrasing without pushing the short crescendo requirements into overdrive, the violins true in intonation across Elgar’s aspiring E Major melody at Letter C of the opening Allegro piacevole. Not that the intonation in both violin groups was faultless; the odd slightly-off notes could be discerned in the seconds’ second desk and an inexplicable quirk in the firsts arose often enough to be noticeable in ascending small scalar passages on the E string. But you could not have wished for a more sympathetic dying fall in this movement’s last five bars.

In terms of numbers, the ensemble ran 5-4-4-4-2. To my ear, the first violins would have gained from an additional body, especially as six names appeared in the program. But then, Rob Nairn was named as principal double bass and he was absent, leaving Marian Heckenberg and Chloe Ann Williamson to carry that line – which they did with conspicuous devotion and produced a fulsome support in high-tension passages. You missed the extra violin weight mainly at the divisi bars at Letter L of the Larghetto, which Beesley took at a proper pace; in this case, a fine cross of ruminative with ardent. Later, the players captured the Allegretto‘s calmly surging essence but kept their best for the final pages following the change to E Major, in particular the delectably spacious last chords that brought this short piece to a euphonious conclusion.

It might be based on Wolf’s own arrangement for orchestra but the Italian Serenade loses its bite when re-contexted. The ARCO musicians kept the movement fluent but the innate vigour of the original went walkabout as the tempo moved into galumphing mode and chromatic changes both inner and outer (for the first time, at bar 46 and onwards) seemed ironed out, an effect that recurred to even more unfortunate effect at the interlude between bars 130 and 160 where linear clarity is vital to prefigure the joyful explosion back to G Major at bar 161. We had a taste of the string quartet original when Drew dried out his forces for the cello recitatives starting at bar 303.

So the whole thing had its flashes, particularly during concordant passages at full pelt, and you enjoyed a muffled impression of this chamber music scrap’s ebullience, but you missed the pointillist detail and the expectation-scouring wit. Something similar came across in the Fantasy Pieces arrangement where Shauna Beesley gave us a new work. Of course, you could relish swathes of string texture as long as you forgot Schumann’s original (although even he was catholic in his stipulations admitting viola and cello to take the solo line, as well as the original clarinet). However, what you do with the piano accompaniment is crucial and Beesley’s version verged on muddiness. How could it be otherwise, given the relentless arpeggios, thick bass support and competitive doubling and canonic work that persists throughout all three pieces?

In fact, at this point you needed a corps that specialized in rhythmic precision and slashing, pointed right-hand technical prowess to unplug the lower strings’ processes. Not so much in the final Rasch und mit Feuer, but certainly the opening Zart und mit Ausdruck became blancmange thick, the solo/dominant line having trouble being discerned, despite the arranger’s efforts to give it continuous prominence. For sure, the middle Lebhaft fared better, although it seemed to me that the pace had slackened once the musicians had passed the key change to F Major’s first repeat.

I’d moved further back in the Conservatorium theatre at interval; otherwise, I might not have noticed that one of the first violins moved across to the seconds for this Schumann arrangement. Presumably, the top-middle line needed reinforcing, and it’s true that this subsidiary strand probably gains from extra weight. Still, the main themes at some points in all three pieces tended to become attenuated, not exactly disappearing in the mesh but coming close to it. Perhaps the arrangement needed a bit more daring to make it more effective; as things turned out, the exercise proved sonorous but bland.

Each movement of the Victor Herbert Serenade proved how successful a choice the work was for this ensemble. If you know the composer’s background, you’d be aware that there’s nothing complicated in his music-making. But it’s not just a chain of melting melodies; each of its five movements shows a clear format and a fine awareness of writing for strings. The ARCO players seemed to enjoy themselves right from the opening Aufzug with its Babes in Toyland-reminiscent outer march sections around a lilting, central meno mosso. As for the following Polonaise, the first violins set pretty much all of the running and managed to stay together for most of its duration, although sorely tested by a five-bar stretch at the centre of Herbert’s G Major Trio.

Commentators (the very few I’ve come across) find the influence of Wagner in this serenade’s central Liebes-Scene. Even when listening to American (and one German) recording, I couldn’t find much trace of Tristan, Lohengrin, or even Act 3 of Siegfried; Herbert’s melodic span is orderly and falls into easily assimilable phrase and sentence lengths, while his harmonic vocabulary rarely ventures far afield. Nevertheless, it’s an effective movement and gave an excellent chance for the ARCO cellos to shine four bars after Letter C as they outlined the main theme under the violins’ soft sextuplet patterns.

You could make the same observations concerning structure, melody and harmony about Herbert’s Canzonetta with its infectious first violin portamento in bar 3 – and beyond. A gently-paced interlude, this movement also was reminiscent of passages from Herbert’s musicals (judging from the few that I know, thanks to my mother’s devotion to Nelson Eddy) and not outstaying its welcome. At this stage, the ARCO ensemble came pretty close to recreating the overall sound-colour of a pre-World War Two small orchestra through its melodic lilt and supple pulse. Even the repetitious jig-finale found these performers undaunted by its relentless optimism which became more than a bit wearing by the time we reached the Con spirito at Letter H, followed by a Con fuoco, and yet another Piu mosso.

Nobody would claim this Herbert suite as a burst of bright light in the string orchestra’s repertoire. It has, nevertheless, an openness of language and a charm of address that should make it welcome as a leavening of the predictable diet of Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Suk and even Elgar that makes up an all-too-staple diet for organizations without the facility to bring in woodwind and brass supernumeraries, as the well-funded Australian Chamber Orchestra and Australian Brandenburg Orchestra can.

As for the performance flourishes outlined by concertmaster Beesley and the Metzger essay, these sounded well-absorbed into the musicians’ technical vocabulary. Vibrato, portamento and rubato were all employed without fuss and, as far as I could tell, in appropriate situations. In this respect, the ARCO directors and members set an agreable example of how to suit yourself to the music you’re playing. Which makes life easier for all of us, worlds away from being constrained by a doctrinaire insistence on musical correctness: an inflammation of the aesthetic membrane that I class with Putin’s A History of Ukraine and our own prime minister’s podcast, Fighting Bushfires Out of Country.

BAROQUE IN BLOOM

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

Brandenburg One

Saturday November 20, 2021

It’s been years – well, over two – since I last heard the Australian Brandenburgers at work. Not that you could have expected more frequency, given the off-again, off-again nature of Australian concert-giving during our pandemic. Added to which, the organization would have put Brisbane excursions on the backburner when facing the shrinking possibility of getting on-stage in its home town. In our communal gap years, we’ve been offered some online scraps from specific orchestra members and two digital screenings, of which this program is the more recent.

Plenty of familiar faces emerged across the six constituents of this program which found the ABO mining one of its finest seams in Italian Baroque violin scores. Associate concertmaster Matthew Bruce has been a Brandenburg member almost since the beginning, as has guitarist/theorboist Tommie Andersson. Cellists Anthea Cottee and Rosemary Quinn are very familiar faces, as are violists Monique O’Dea and Marianne Yeomans. Some other participants have become familiar in different contexts, like Madeleine Easton from the Bach Akademie Australia, Matthew Greco from the Australian Haydn Ensemble and the Muffat Collective, Anton Baba from the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra.

Others were complete unknowns to me, like the violinists James Armstrong, Rafael Font, James Tarbotton and bass Bonita Williams, although this last I must have come across as she performed with both Orchestra Victoria and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra before settling into the Opera Australia pit in 2016. Whatever their provenance, the composite ensemble worked with fine rapport for most of this brief (35 minutes) program which comprised Marini’s Capriccio Per Sonare il Violino con tre corde a modo di Lira with Easton leading an elegantly contrived quartet; three of the ten concerti grossi in Giovanni Lorenzo Gregori’s Op. 2 set, a different concertmaster for each; Vivaldi’s C Major Sinfonia RV 116, Dyer directing with customary brio; and Corelli’s Ciacona Trio Sonata, the last of his Op. 2, with Tarbotton and Armstrong in excellent partnership.

Mind you, this broadcast was a fair while in arriving: it was recorded on September 24 in the Sydney Recital Hall. The program’s title was given substance by surrounding the performers with floral arrangements amounting to mini-jungles from some angles. Still, the entertainment had an appealing shape, moving from the solo spotlight on Easton for the Marini, through the exposed two Corelli violins, the exercise ending with exuberant full-blooded panache in the Vivaldi romp.

One of the delights of the Baroque is that room for improvisation or manipulation is wide; most of the performances we hear fulfil expectations because the scores are complete and set in stone, e.g. the St. Matthew Passion, The Four Seasons, Judas Maccabeus. Dyer and his band are quite prepared to take liberties, particularly with music that is all bare bones. For instance, the Marini Capriccio; the score I’ve come across is 53 bars long and heavy on unadorned chords at the opening, in the middle, and at the end. Easton opened with an unaccompanied solo, setting up her main interpretative model of arpeggiated three-part chords, before the continuo – Dyer on organ, Andersson on theorbo and Baba’s gamba – entered. From which point on, the interpretation followed Marini’s chord progressions faithfully in a reading that – quite -rightly – left all the running to Easton’s crystalline upper part.

For the one-movement Corelli sonata, the same three players provided the accompaniment, Dyer moving to a harpsichord, and each of them having a statement of the chaconne in turn before Tarbotton and Armstrong entered with flawlessly articulated and balanced interweaving lines. From both violinists, the style of address proved congruent, the dynamic changes calculated to a nicety and both sequences and canonic writing clean enough to sound as though one player was operating both instruments. All right: it’s not difficult music, not even when it switches in bar 17 to Allegro, but the piece requires finesse and empathy to carry off. Here was another example of music you don’t want to stop and, for a moment, I thought it wouldn’t when the soloists repeated their opening plangent Largo.

Then the ABO cohort presented the three Gregori works in a boxed set – Nos. 1, 2 and 5 with Greco, Bruce and Font serving as respective concertmasters. Of these, No. 1 in C Major and No. 5 in B minor were enjoying their Australian premieres; fine work, resurrecting some amiable material which could stand light comparison with the composer’s contemporaries Vivaldi and Corelli. All listed personnel except Baba took part in Gregori’s scores. In the outer two, the flower arrangements disappeared but the playing didn’t suffer; indeed, Greco’s control of the C Major work was exemplary for its restraint and sympathy. The rather ordinary melodic content enjoyed some relief with a sinuous solo from the leader in the central Adagio, the whole concerto enjoying several sparkling duets in its finale from Greco and Armstrong.

Bruce directed the No. 2 Concerto in D with just as much security as had Greco. After a bar or two of the opening Grave, Dyer took over with an extended harpsichord solo of high tedium – a series of arpeggios wandering around D Major for the most part and calling to mind the Brandenburg No. 5’s cadenza for no apparent reason. Maybe Gregori wrote it; possibly it was an add-on but to me this solo sounded out-of-character with everything else we heard. Its meandering path eventually led to a dominant pause and we entered the jolly, welcome Allegro. Bruce prepared us for the Adagio with a brief cadenza and closed up the movement with another one before the vivacious rush of Gregori’s Allegro finale which featured some more duets between Bruce and Greco, the latter leading the second violins who had changed position and faced Bruce and his firsts.

No. 5 in B minor was performed in a dark purple lighting to match its tonality, although Scriabin attached this shade to C sharp, investing B with blue. For this reading, some bass players had been moved but the two sets of violins still stood on opposing sides of the space; Dyer moved between organ and harpsichord, starting out at the former for the initial Largo, moving for the tuckets of the first Allegro, then back to the organ for the Adagio and staying there for the gigue-style finale. Leader Font kept his focus on the job in hand and showed an admirable mastery of piano dynamic in rapid-fire passages as well as rounding out the excellent duo playing – a prime feature in all three Gregori compositions – by his partnership with Greco in the concluding pages.

All too soon, we came to the Vivaldi sinfonia, which was all Dyer; well, there’s no show without Punch. For this, the harpsichord took centre stage, surrounded by flowers, with all other players (including Baba) standing/sitting in a circle around this floral fulcrum. A bracing allegro, in which everybody seemed to know exactly what they were about despite Dyer’s gesturing, came across with commendable crispness. Prior to the Andante, we were gifted another Dyer solo between the work’s bars 76 and 77, a further one at the movement’s halfway point at bar 90, and finally yet another leading into the last Allegro which was a triumph for the Brandenburgers’ precision and elan. Yes: it was C Major and moved only to the dominant and back, so it’s not as though people were grappling with demands on their left-hand technique. Still, it was a welcome chaser to an enjoyable half-hour and bracing to hear these strings performing close to their best.