Category: Orchestral

GRIEG AND BEYOND

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall

Sunday September 10 and Monday September 11, 2017

                                                                                Henning Kraggerud

I’m not a fan of that musician who feels the need for talk and so gives his real work an oral preamble.   All too often, such a speech wastes time and that particular commodity is becoming more precious to some of us as the years bound on.   Further, all too often what you hear is instantly forgettable or essentially trite or  –  worse   –  a repeat of information found in the program notes.   For a few, this preliminary oral exordium is an ego-bolstering exhibition conducted with the silent encouragement of defenceless listeners, a meandering monologue that can even turn into an attempt to do a Seinfeld and show a try-hard humorous facet to the artistic persona.   While having its points as soul-destroying meta-theatre, the introductory talk can amount to little more than ambient buzzing, the kind of useless fodder you get from announcers presenting a concert or recital from their incubating sound-booths.

Even worse is the interview, where the conductor interrogates a soloist or composer about what’s coming up.   The stilted instance of Paul Dyer talking to horn player Bart Aerbeydt about his natural instrument during last Sunday’s Australian Brandenburg Orchestra event was a case in point where dialogue disappears and oral give-and-take goes missing; mind you, in that particular interview, matters were somewhat redeemed by the instrumentalist pulling out a few party tricks and flip lines to spice up yet another demonstration of the horn’s natural harmonic series and note production methods.

For most of the time, I’m left inwardly groaning at these pseudo-Parkinson preliminary obstacles that wind up with all the non-sequitur awkwardness of a ‘One on One’ clip.   At rare intervals, a light will shine, the most notable when a conductor like Brett Kelly asks a young composer about his latest score –  as at the Cybec New Music concerts each January from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, where the chance for a moment of worthwhile information is strongest.    And you can strike the aware musician who knows just how long is enough; Markus Stenz was an excellent exponent of the rapid communication of just sufficient information to keep you  .  .  .  well, if not engrossed, then mollified.

Guest director and soloist in the latest ACO subscription series, Norwegian violinist/composer/arranger Kraggerud prefaced every one of the five works on his Grieg-Plus program with an explication, not getting off to the best of starts with the In Folk Style, one of Grieg’s Two Nordic Melodies.   This was a pseudo-folksong sent to the composer by a diplomat which Grieg subjected to some variations and restatements; nothing very original and, in places (like Letters C and E) failing to impress as little more than composition by the numbers.   The conductor-leader’s introduction  –  soft-spoken, courteous and prepared  –  proved mildly interesting for the speaker’s fluency and naive charm, even if he made more of this specific triviality than it deserved.

Ross Edwards‘ Entwinings is enjoying its world premiere on this tour.   In two movements, the work proposes both a juxtaposition and a link between the natural world and our civilization although the most attractive section of the score, the opening Animato, holds more interest for its Maninyas-type suggestions and the bird-like sounds that eventually dominate the texture and round out the aural imagery, the whole fore-fathered in atmosphere by Sculthorpe’s Irkanda exercises.   In the following Lento magico, Edwards employs a chorale-type statement to open and conclude a chain of sequences, the emotional language more worked-out than in the initial movement: less suggestive of the bush and wild-life, the accent less on pantheistic rhapsody and more on the civic world, the narrative sustaining your interest for its inner variety of approach as well as being a gift in multiple textures and techniques for the well-rehearsed ACO.

Kraggerud has turned all three of Grieg’s violin sonatas into concertos, to flesh out the number of Scandinavian exercises in the form  –  although, if you look hard enough, there are several available apart from the towering Sibelius in D minor.   This concert’s offering, No. 3 in C minor, isn’t a full orchestration  –  no brass, no percussion, only single woodwind to punctuate the string texture  –  but the results are forceful enough.   There’s not much any musician can do to spice up Grieg’s orthodox melodic divisions; still the same two-bar phrases that obtain through most of the composer’s works, very evident in the opening Allegro, but on Sunday this predictable four-squaredness was mitigated to a large extent by the orchestra’s enthusiastic address.

The guest violinist was heard here in fully exposed voice for the first time.   His sound-colour is admirably pointed and clear with an individual lyric timbre in higher-string passages of play, most obvious in the middle movement at the sideways move from E to E flat Major at bar 209.   The long restatement of Grieg’s opening theme high on the soloist’s E string made for a moving display of emotional wealth of feeling and impeccably shaped performance skill.   In the final Hall-of-the-Mountain-King allegro, where Grieg oscillates between dance-like thumping and smooth simple melody, Kraggerud splashed around his technical agility with carefully moderated abandon, the most memorable passage coming at the shift to A flat for the central trio where a low-lying melody line for the soloist was supported by cellos and bass: an outstanding realization of another heart-on-sleeve moment from this most approachable and complication-free of writers.

The Topelius Variations (from Topelius’ Time) commemorated the 19th century Finnish writer in a sequence of connected episodes that also paid a kind of homage to Grieg’s Holberg Suite.   As its composer, Kraggerud had a fair bit to communicate to us before he started on this score, which is receiving its Australian premiere on this tour, but, by the time he’d finished, I was expecting something a good deal more taxing than the reality turned out to be.   While he varies his basic material, not sticking to one theme to treat, Kraggerud veers towards the folk-tune-style of lyric with which to play around.   His variants may occasionally veer into complex territory but as a rule they make for easy absorption; even the rhythmic difficulties  –  a time-signature of 19/16, we were promised   –   didn’t seem to make extreme demands on the ACO  –  or on us.

To end, the ACO took us back to Grieg: the arrangement by Richard Tognetti of the String Quartet Op. 27.   It’s been a while since I heard the ensemble play this piece but it has been bred into the players’ bones  –  quite a few of them, at any rate  –  because they recorded it in 2012.   Kraggerud exerted minimal control for this piece.   At first, I suspected because the musicians had an intimate familiarity with its performance problems.   But really, the guest engaged in very little overt direction; nothing like Tognetti’s habit of conducting with his bow for significant cues.   Mind you, little on this program required any semaphoring, with the possible exception of the new Edwards work, but I can’t recall Kraggerud taking time out to make many directional gestures for that piece, either.   As well, the musicians had already given six accounts of this program in Sydney, Wollongong and Canberra before hitting Hamer Hall, so they were more than adequately played in.

The quartet ran its course with maximal flourish, in particular the symphonic first movement with a wealth of declamation and spirited rhetoric.   In fact, much of the work is well-suited to string orchestral guise, including the smart, syncopated Intermezzo and the saltarello finale, even if the actual material wears out its welcome many minutes before the G Major coda.

As promised, we had plenty of Grieg at this afternoon’s event, the Topelius piece probably suiting the ‘Beyond’ promise, although how much further Kraggerud takes his heritage is questionable; an amiable work, yes, but not as far advanced as you might expect, considering the musical earthquakes that have taken place since the Norwegian master’s death in 1907.   A lot has happened over the last 110 years, but this new piece looks back in more ways than one.   However, Entwinings took us some steps into the 20th century and it was heartening to hear another Edwards work, just two days after the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra had aired his Tyalgum Mantras with striking elan at the Deakin Edge.

TOWARDS ETERNITY

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Deakin Edge, Federation Square

Friday September 8, 2017

                                                                                 Merewyn Bramble

A deftly organized program is a treasure beyond price these days.   Whether or not this latest offering from the MCO was all the work of soloist Genevieve Lacey‘s doesn’t matter; whoever put it together had a nice sense of proportion, Friday night’s entertainment constructed in two almost equal halves that reflected each other without too much close mirror-imaging.

Both halves of the evening began in medieval mode – first, with the Leonin/Perotin motet. Viderunt omnes arranged by Lacey for three cellos and double bass; later, a continuation of the species, Notum fecit in an adaptation for four violins. The latter made for a sobering experience, coming close to the night’s title than the opening gambit which once again gave cause for wonder at how conjunct were popular and religious musics in the 12th century and what a feeble echo comes from the auditoria of Hillsong and its ilk in these latter days.   The experience also rolled back many years of memory to student days when Dr. Percy Jones endeavoured to interest us laggards in the intricacies of organum and conductus – and how little actual knowledge remains.

After the Viderunt omnes, a string quartet of violins William Hennessy and Rachael Beesley, viola Merewyn Bramble and cello Michael Dahlenburg moved without a break into the penultimate movement, O Albion, of Thomas Ades‘ Arcadiana which carried through an ultra-restrained pastoralism that might have caused little surprise in 1198 Notre Dame, so subtle was the slide from the motet’s meditative last pages to Ades’ placid sound scape.   This in turn gave place to a madrigal, Cipriano da Rore‘s Ancor che col partire, with two divisions by Giovanni Bassano – which brought Lacey to the stage playing the top line: a stream of expressiveness in the middle of a non-vibrato (well, very little) string halo, followed by variants with the strings pizzicato, then with mutes.

This made for a sensible trans-generational journey before the night moved on a century to Vivaldi’s Recorder Concerto in C minor, one of the multitude in the composer’s catalogue that I’ve never come across.  By contrast, in the program’s second half,  Lacey presented Sammartini‘s F Major Concerto, the writer’s best (only?)-known work.

Balancing the night’s opening, after interval, following the sober Notum fecit, the second stanza of Viderunt omnes merged into Ross Edwards’ Tyalgum Mantras in an arrangement I’ve not come across: solo violins at every corner of the Deakin Edge space, two central cellos, Lacey’s recorder, three violas, a group of four violins – all contributing their individual voices to the Australian composer’s own pastorale that showed a clear debt to Sculthorpe with its sustained pedal notes and shared melismata duties.   This in turn mutated into John Dunstable‘s Quam pulchra es arranged for three violas – Bramble, Katie Yap, Matthew Laing – which capped off this second group gambit with remarkable success, thanks to the performers’ sensitively-melded negotiation of the British composer’s clear-speaking polyphony.

The two Baroque recorder concertos gave Lacey another opportunity to remind us of her instrumental and interpretative brilliance.   They don’t look adventurous on paper, but the Vivaldi concerto’s first movement solos challenge any interpreter to smooth out some demanding leaps, keep faith with the underpinning metre through syncopations, and enunciate several demi-semiquaver exposed near-cadenzas.   With Lacey, you sense no performance tension but rather an awareness of the composition’s coherence, thanks in part to the recorder being written in to the outer movements’ tutti passages for both works.    But the efficiency of this soloist emerged best in the three rapid-fire solos of the concluding Sammartini gigue-like Allegro assai, notably the precision of the sequence of trills that punctuate vaulting pairs of semiquavers.   This work presents as more gracious than that of the Venetian master but then it doesn’t travel very far; its simplicity from a galant-style opening is sustained because Sammartini doesn’t travel far from his home-key.   Even the chromatic descents of the middle siciliano fail to lead far from a central A minor/C Major harmonic spindle.   But the solo line is light and buoyant in its movement, Lacey carrying it off with elegant spiritedness.

Hennessy led his forces into interval with Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge.   Unlike the customary take-no-prisoners mode of attack, this reading pleased for its lucid delivery, even in those passages of maximal inner strife.   The two elements that surprised from this experience were the power of the two violas  –  Bramble and Yap in bracingly concerted voice  –  and the surprising dearth of interest delivered in the central Meno mosso e moderato where everyone seemed happy enough to observe the pianissimo marking throughout but otherwise did little shading work with this material.   Elsewhere, the musicians coped best with the movement’s broader dynamic passages  –  the sterner the fugue itself, the more involving this account   –   but some relieving moments misfired, like the soft trills that intervene at Bar 710.

Ending the night, Hennessy and his forces played the Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis by Vaughan Williams: another vision of the eternal to set alongside that of Beethoven’s vision of a divine architect.   This lacked the massive washes of fabric that a full orchestra can generate with its 50 or 60 participants but it came close to being one of the most successful readings I’ve heard of this superb score.   The second orchestra made vivid work of the manual-changing moments, starting four bars before Letter F, despite the presence of only one player at each desk.   Bramble and leader Hennessy gave splendid service in the quartet fantasy at the work’s heart, and later made a joy of the spine-tingling duet a bar after Letter U.   In fact, the only question mark arose at the start of Hennessy’s last solo F minor arpeggio but I wasn’t alert enough to put a name to the specific note.   Still, it hardly mattered in the context of this excellent demonstration of the MCO’s grace under pressure and responsiveness to the director’s insightful preparation.

SONGS OF THE NIGHT

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre

Sunday June 18, 2017

                                                                                    Rebecca Chan

An afternoon of nocturnally inspired music curated by guest director Rebecca Chan: that’s what was proposed at the latest MCO subscription series concerts.   With a willing band of young players, Chan took us through some excellent performances in a program that moved across the set theme, the primary intention of which must have been to keep us entertained.   This worked well enough for most of the time, including an excellent second half to the event; the multiple compositional voices proved too strained, however, in the concert’s middle passages.

Chan began by leading a transcription of the Prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde for strings alone; an imaginative way to open a concert with this underpinning theme  –  after all, Act 2 is conducted under cover of darkness.   Of course, you missed the antiphonal interplay between strings and woodwind, as well as the powerful moments of release that come in the original’s full-orchestra chords, but the 13-strong MCO worked up the passion effectively.   This arrangement by Sebastian Gurtler, one-time concertmaster with the Vienna Volksoper Orchestra, didn’t fade as expected into silence for the curtain-rise to Act 1 but worked its way into a postlude: the latter stages of the Liebestod that ends the opera.   A bit of a cheat, even if it leaves the audience’s inner tensions resolved.

Tenor Andrew Goodwin opened his contribution to the field of nightscapes with Strauss’s Die Nacht, from the 8 Gedichte aus ‘Letzte Blatter’, the composer’s Op. 10 and first published lieder.   The arrangement for strings was unattributed but suitably supple, Goodwin exercising his telling clarity of articulation, at its most moving in the final stanza’s Rucke naher, Seel an Seele.    Speaking of early songs, Schoenberg’s Waldesnacht, arranged for strings by Chan, followed; this, along with the concert’s final work, Verklarte Nacht, gave the unwary a one-sided picture of the composer as a thorough-going Romantic – which, at this stage of his career, he was.   This song comes from Schoenberg’s early 20s and, despite its chromatic side-slips, gave Goodwin no problems, although every so often the string action distracted attention from the vocal line.

Finishing this group was Schubert’s Der Erlkonig in a version by Gregor Huber which exercised the violins, just as the original gives a workout to the pianist’s right hand.   In this format, much of the song’s gruffness is dissipated but Goodwin managed the three voices inside the lied with aplomb, especially the persuasive, then threatening lines from the Erlking himself  – treated without bombast so that the hurtling drama of the narrative came across as a sustained crescendo, rather than a series of jolts.   You missed the piano’s compelling clatter but the ever-startling vehemence of the 18-year-old composer’s vision came across unimpeded.

Chan arranged the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream incidental music, spreading the work-load around to make up for the absent woodwind piquancies.   It made for a mildly entertaining experience, pretty well negotiated by the MCO band, but eventually unsatisfying; very much a second-best, if you know the original.   For a complete change from Mendelssohn’s suggestions of Puck and Co. cavorting in the Athenian wood, Chan moved us to Bartok’s Fourth String Quartet, specifically the middle ‘night music’ Non troppo lento movement which worked more credibly, principally because the forces involved were relevant and credible.   Even so, it might have been wiser to play the piece as written without a Tognetti-style amplification, although it spiced matters up quite a bit to see both cellists sharing the honours in outlining their part’s elastic solos.   But the central Agitato segment with all the insect noises loses a good amount of its spark when being negotiated by a corps rather than an individual.

Written for the MCO, Lachlan Skipworth‘s Rilke setting, The Expanse, found a persuasive exponent in Goodwin.  The lyric, Am Rande der Nacht, enjoys a calmly restrained handling, the composer constructing a darkly-coloured string backdrop for a mendicant vocal line well suited to the poet’s effete self-description.   Coupled with this was Schubert’s Nacht und Traume: another Chan arrangement, this time giving Goodwin the opportunity to demonstrate his talent for manufacturing a splendidly sustained slow-moving vocal arc in a song that consists of little more than an emotional stasis, albeit a deeply moving one..

Before the Schoenberg string orchestra version of his own sextet, Goodwin ended his night journeys with two more Chan-arranged Schubert lieder: Nachtstuck, which depicts an old man’s progress through a consoling landscape to his death, and the first song from the song-cycle Die Winterreise where the disappointed lover sets out on his journey towards inconsolable grief.    In the first, attention oscillated between the deftness of the transcription and Goodwin’s warmth of tone in the valedictory last two stanzas; but in the reading of Gute Nacht, all the honours went to the tenor for an interpretation of high quality, the four-square phrases announced with assertiveness and  a subtle shifting of emphasis that was probably as much part of the performer’s musicality as it was built-in by Schubert.

Even after almost 120 years, Verklarte Nacht is still a taxing challenge for its executants.   Nothing about it comes easily, not even the slow threnody of the first pages.   When the polyphonic meshing kicks off and the modulations pour in on top of each other, the players can’t afford to relax or take their eyes off their own work or off that of their fellow labourers.   Chan and her charges gave a pretty solid account of this score which avoided quite a few of the expected deficiencies.   In fact, only one occasion raised eyebrows  – at about bar 246 in the lead-up to the first ‘transfiguration’ section where the lower strings sounded disorganized and uncertain in their triplets’ timing.   An unexpected moment came about when second violin Peter Clark appeared to change his focus by helping out Tom Higham with his viola line for a stretch before returning to his regular duties.    By this stage of the concert, I was sitting at the back of the Murdoch Hall but, even from that distance, I don’t think I was suffering from delusions.

Chan kept the score on the move, well aware that the point of the work is a journey, not a series of stops and starts. The players gave full measure to the thick welters of sound that make up the central, confessional part of the work, but the forward movement stayed on track, even if some of the sudden harmonic shifts had little time to breathe.   Still, the work made a neat balance to the opening Wagner, a score that set the bench-mark for chromatic Schoenbergian constructs.   In all, a worthwhile dark odyssey, despite a few mis-steps along the way.

SPANISH BAROQUE

Brandenburg Chamber Orchestra and CIRCA

Melbourne Recital Centre

May 13-14, 2017

                                                                                           Circa

I’m sorry but, try as hard as I may to wish it were otherwise, the musical content in these collaborations often goes through to the back of the net.   After three exposures to Circa, I thought I’d seen all their manoeuvres and manipulations; this last experience shows that, even when working with the tried-and-true, this troupe can often strike out in unexpected directions.   Added to which, the off-the-cuff showmanship and near-flawless expertise on display tends to swamp out the Brandenburg offering which on this night often became, to be kind, something close to aural wallpaper.

Paul Dyer and his small band of players began with an Entrada dinamica y ruidosa, put together by the man himself.   It was certainly noisy enough, being mainly for percussion and reminiscent of the sound onslaught generated by Les Ballets Africains of many years ago.   A canarios by Santiago de Murcia followed in an arrangement by Dyer and film-music writer Alex Palmer, which I seem to recall backed a rather impressive series of tall totem-poles and pyramid shapes  constructed from themselves by the eight Circa members.

Two women from the troupe then played balancing games on a long seesaw construct while soprano Natasha Wilson sang a Tarquinio Merula aria, Su la cetra amorosa – negotiated well enough although the singer’s range of vocal colours is not large and I think she underestimated the force of her accompaniment.   A Murcia fandango followed, arranged by Palmer and Stefano Maiorana, guest guitarist with the ABO for this program; lively and fiercely rhythmic, it was overshadowed by one of the Circa men twisting himself round a vertical pole, finishing off his routine with a heart-stopping vertical drop – the sort of accomplishment that threw the musical action well into the background, sad to say.

An organ solo from Dyer that sounded like a scrap from the Bologna school followed before Wilson contributed an anonymous cancion, Muerto estais, in an adaptation by Dyer, Palmer, and the renowned Argentinian-born lutenist Eduardo Eguez.   This proved most interesting because of the singer’s restrained address and the fore-fronting of Tommie Andersson‘s theorbo (amplified?), while the acrobats performed four pas de deux, interweaving and exchanging places in an engrossing display of inter-dependence.

Suddenly, we left the Spanish Baroque for the familiar Spanish Modern when Maiorana broke into Albeniz’s Leyenda, arranged by Palmer for the rest of the ensemble to join in but a touch demanding for the baroque instrument that the main executant was using; the version moved beyond the original’s simplicity of texture, naturally enough, with various accretions and excisions while a female acrobat climbed up a cluster of white ropes in an enthusiastic if not over-original solo.

Wilson sang Con que la lavare, better known to most of us as one of Rodrigo’s Cuatro madrigales amatorios; the earlier version by Luis de Narvaez sung here is a more languorous construct, even in this arrangement by Sydney-based composer Tristan Coelho.  As things turned out, the singer gave some of her best work in this piece, supporting seven of the Circa players before the rope-specialist from the preceding turn came on for an ensemble displaying sheer muscular control.   Vivaldi’s version of La folia, that simple theme subjected to so many variation-sequences across the centuries, is inevitably more light-filled than most, handled here with plenty of free-wheeling abandon by the Brandenburg strings (what there were of them), while a female trapeze artist dealt handsomely with the four Circa men who tried to disrupt her routine.

Palmer’s arrangement of the traditional Catalan song La mare de Deu, another Palmer arrangement, also gave Wilson fine exposure as her visual competition was a solitary female carrying out a sequence of hand stands on three slender-looking pillars – again, simple craft without fireworks but somehow matching the quiet tension of the musical content.   Back came the men with a table for plenty of diving across and under with a scattering of near-misses to the backdrop of an anonymous villancico called Rodrigo Martinez, reshaped by Dyer and Palmer.   This pre-Baroque melody is fairly familiar – Jordi Savall has treated it and it turns up in all sorts of formats from other ensembles – but, once you’ve played it, there’s not much else to do except elaborate it; yes, you could say the same about a wealth of material on this program.   Eventually, of course, the whole Circa corps joined in this perfectly-judged and -calculated frolic.

Another Catalan song, La dama d’Arago, enjoyed the Palmer treatment,  Wilson again given a considerate Brandenburg accompaniment while a female acrobat re-visited a Circa regular in manipulating herself up two cloth ribands, although she avoided that extraordinary move where the performer wraps the cloth around her, then lets herself fall floor-wards, spinning all the while; yes, the child in me (never far from the surface) missed it.

A  jacara by Murcia put the spotlight again on Maiorana who revelled in the slashing rasgueado chords in this version constructed by himself and Palmer, while a wheelbarrow provided a bull-representation for the Circa’s turn as matadors – Spanish, I suppose, but not over-entertaining.   The finale came in an improvisation called Passacaglia Andaluz, notable for yet more apparently off-hand body-throwing and a sense of predictability from the musicians, their creativity well-harnessed to a set pattern – naturally enough, given this traditional format, but we could have done with more linear and vertical extravagance.

Look, it was most entertaining; my grand-daughter loved it from start to finish, the whole experience bringing out her latent Nadia Comaneci.   But, like quite a few in the packed Murdoch Hall, she was barely aware of the Brandenburg players.   Which may have been the musicians’ intention – not to distract from their guests.   But I think that the collaboration has reached its use-by date and could well be rested for a few years.   Their first appearance together in 2015 proved extraordinarily exciting, exhilarating even to these well-worn eyes and ears; Circa alone at the Playhouse for a Carnival of the Animals production reinforced impressions of the company’s prowess; this Spanish night entertained but, when all’s said and done, the prevailing ethos at work is physical.   Until the two bodies can mesh more with each other with both bodies inside each other’s space for extended periods rather than a few slight juxtapositions, the gymnasts will enjoy the limelight and the formidable Brandenburgers might just as well be sitting in an orchestral pit.

ACO SOLOISTS

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall

Sunday May 7, 2017

You may be from an old school, so you tend to look for themes, thematic links, but sometimes the search is futile.  Take this latest program from the country’s premier chamber orchestra.  The ensemble opened with a scrap of semi-modern Americana and ended with yet another string quartet arrangement, this time of Mendelssohn No. 2 in A minor .  At the core of the afternoon came two Baroque violin concertos – Vivaldi for two violins and cello, RV 578; and Locatelli in D Major, the Harmonic Labyrinth which is really nothing of the kind – an arrangement of Debussy’s Cello Sonata which became a new piece in the process, and a fresh work by Perth-based composer James Ledger, The Natural Order of Things.

A mixed bag, then, but not unpalatably so.  Under temporary director Satu Vanska, the ACO gave an airing to Ruth Crawford Seeger‘s Andante for Strings, an arrangement by the composer of the slow movement from her own String Quartet of 1931.   In the concert program, an appreciation of this movement came from critic Peter Dickinson, who described Crawford Seeger’s work as that of ‘a kind of American Webern’.   The assessment seems to have been based on the composer’s practice in this movement of quick crescendi so that the melodic element moves between the parts.  Cute but, even given the composer’s somewhat acerbic language, it falls a fair way short of the Viennese master’s Klangfarbenmelodie, which is what Dickinson is attempting to persuade us that the American innovator was attempting.

The Andante is pretty brief, but you wouldn’t want it more prolix, chiefly because the surges and recessions can’t hope to capture as much interest as that constant flickering of textures and gruppetti in Webern’s setting of the Ricercar a 6 from Bach’s Musical Offering, or, to be fairer, his master Schoenberg’s famous Farben movement in the Five Pieces for Orchestra.   The American work is quaint, a moderately interesting experiment but – and there’s nothing macho-sexist about this – the piece is bland in character when juxtaposed with Ives’ scores dating from previous decades.

More contemporary still, Ledger’s work was being given its second performance on Sunday, after an out-of-town reading in Wollongong.   The work celebrates the life of Simon Libling, an escapee from the Plaszow Concentration Camp in Poland (associated in my mind with the efforts of Oskar Schindler) who eventually migrated to Melbourne in 1960.   Ledger was commissioned by Libling’s son and daughter-in-law and has produced a five-movement work that offers a kind of odyssey; pictures marking certain stages in Libling’s life.   Ledger employs an accessible vocabulary, reaching its most aggressive reaches in the central Threatening and agitated section.   But he doesn’t overtax his audience in any of the movements, each segment having its own discernible character and dynamic impetus.   If anything, Ledger is determined to construct his five life-chapters without frills and sustains the atmosphere for just long enough.   Above all, it’s a music without self-consciousness, the composer’s voice present but channeled into the work’s narrative, not drawing attention to itself with sound-production tricks.

Satu Vanska and ACO regular Glenn Christensen worked pretty well as top lines in the Vivaldi concerto, principal Timo-Veikko Valve the sublimated cello.  You were hard pressed to find flaws in the soloists’ attack, although I would have preferred the violinists to work alongside each other, rather than facing from opposite sides of the stage.  The opening spiccato sounded less fierce and abrupt than when Richard Tognetti is at the first desk but, even for a L’estro armonico stalwart, this piece is forgettable.

Vanska took the solo Locatelli part and negotiated its endless stream of semiquavers with very few misses.   Most of the score’s interest comes in the solo capriccios/cadenzas of the outer movements, and Vanska gave bracing accounts of both.   But the work is over-hyped: it’s not complicated in any sense – it’s just busy.   For instance, the solo that interrupts the first Allegro is little more than a series of arpeggios in D Major and its close associates; playing them rapidly generates excitement but it strikes me as being little more than an eighteenth century precursor of Czerny.   Vanska gave considerable personality to the middle movement’s substantial melodic lines but raised the audience’s temperature with the long capriccio in the finale, packed with double-stops and flights across the instrument’s compass, including Locatelli’s favourite trick of asking for notes above the fingerboard.   In the end, the player displayed a formidable technique; pity about the repetitive content, but that’s the period.

At this work’s start, a baroque guitar crept in behind cellists Valve and Melissa Barnard; it took me a fair while to realize that this was the third of the ACO’s regular players – Julian Thompson – revealing an unheralded talent.   Speaking of personnel, the scheduled viola Alexandru-Mihai Bota didn’t seem to be present behind guest principal Jasmine Beams and Nicole Divall, unless he has altered radically in height and complexion.

It was hard to warm to the Debussy Cello Sonata, although Valve made an excellent solo voice surrounded by a small group of piano-substituting strings.   You missed the keyboard’s bite and percussive force, of course; even stranger was the lack of contrast in this version, the cello merging into a bland cocoon of fellow strings.   The pay-off was that the string instrument remained prominent, unchallenged in that regard by its accompaniment.   Every pizzicato from Valve told and the calculated immersion of the string instrument’s activity in the piano’s occasionally vehement attack didn’t occur.   In this form, the piece is a radically different entity and you find that you’re pulling yourself up short when an anticipated harmonic clash is muted almost into non-existence.

The ACO is renowned for its adaptation of string quartets from the mainstream repertoire as expansions of its programs.   Alongside understandable fleshings-out of Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence, the ensemble has recorded and/or performed quartets (and the occasional quintet) by Grieg, Janacek, Schubert, Beethoven, Szymanowski and Haas.   Now Mendelssohn’s most accessible work in the form has enjoyed the string orchestra treatment (whose arrangement it is, I don’t know).   The work is big-statement-rich in its outer movements and so stands up well to dynamic and timbral aggrandisement in its bookends; added to which, the musicians are responsive to Mendelssohn’s shapely counterpoint, each line melding into its peers with the group’s inimitable mix of urging power and elegant finish.

As with other similar arrangements that the organization has presented, you experience the odd moment of dislocation, when the forces reduce themselves and the texture thins to regular quartet individuality, as in the Andante con lento, or at Vanska’s solo towards the final Adagio‘s conclusion; so that, when the full complement of players comes back on board, reinforced by Maxime Bibeau‘s bass, you have to make a jump back to accepting the larger sound as the norm.   They’re not as impressive in construction as this Beethoven homage, but I’d be more interested in hearing some of the composer’s early symphonies for strings than these re-writes.

Nevertheless, Sunday’s patrons were quite happy with the ACO’s work, even if one lady behind me commented unfavourably about Ledger’s piece.   You can’t please everyone all the time – which is the best rationale for a bitzer of a program like this one.

ROCOCO CELLO

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre

Sunday March 5, 2017

                                                                                       Li-Wei Qin

In a program for the MCO’s true believers, Sunday afternoon’s concert didn’t have much rococo about it, strictly speaking.   Popular cellist Li-Wei Qin fronted the Tchaikovsky Variations on a Rococo Theme but it’s a stretch to call the tune itself anything but a Classical/Romantic fusion.   The rest of the afternoon featured Mozart’s Idomeneo Overture with its pendant Chaconne and Pas seul de Mr le Grand, the Haydn G Major Symphony No. 88 and C.P.E. Bach’s A Major Cello Concerto Wq 172 which came closest to the rococo classification but sits some decades outside it temporally and at least a generation past it intellectually.

Michael Dahlenburg conducted three of these works, leaving the Bach concerto’s direction in the experienced hands of leader William Hennessy, the orchestra’s presiding eminence.   With the Idomeneo bracket, the main impression was of jubilation, the score representing a celebration of the organization’s start to another year’s work.   For a pretty straightforward work, you had to hand it to Dahlenburg: he showed a confident awareness of the spacious sound he wanted and he cued impeccably – nothing unnecessary or over-pointed.   His forces responded with plenty of zeal and an invigorating bounce from the strings; the only flaw I heard was a muffed horn note in about bar 44 of the Pas seul. But the reading proved excellent, well calculated to open an opera seria distinctive for its polish and subtle melodic content.

Li-Wei gave an object lesson while performing Emanuel Bach’s benign concerto with its agreable angularity of line and sudden harmonic jolts.   In front of only 14 strings, the soloist had no difficulty in projecting  a resonant timbre throughout, the only strident note emerging in the middle of the first movement’s development with an over-emphatic conclusion to a hectic passage featuring a plethora of semiquavers; relief to get there unscathed, I suppose.

In the program, this work’s second movement was billed as Largo maestoso.   Well, that’s half-right – it’s a largo but mesto, and con sordini.   Despite its misnaming, the performance proved admirable in shape and steady progress.  Later, the finale came over with infectious vigour, a real bite to the violins’ triple and quadruple stops with all concerned applying just enough tension to the composer’s sudden halts in the action.

For the Haydn symphony, Dahlenburg returned and led a remarkably clean operation, with few glitches from the brass quartet and a fine amplitude of colour in the opening Adagio.   I found the accents and/or sforzandi too heavy in the Menuetto, even more so in the Allegretto/Trio.   And, while you could hear every note sound clearly in the final Allegro, a continuation of the sparkling opening bars would have been more exhilarating than the rhythmic variations and heftiness that took over before the movement was far advanced.

The Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations is one of the repertoire’s gems, without a doubt, but you’re lucky to strike a reading that satisfies; too often, the sense of effort is almost palpable and most executants over-strain at their work when a simple delineation of the notes would serve the composer much better.   I last head Li-Wei perform this some years ago – with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, I think – and that reading proved a trial because the soloist seemed uncomfortable in his work.  This time around, the outcome was much more convincing, in some part due to the (obvious) chamber quality of the fabric where the wind choir, especially in their recurring post-variation commentary, were very exposed.

Li-Wei offered a lucid view of the solo line, happy to reserve his warmest colour for the Variation III Andante sostenuto which he lavished with an all-embracing vibrato and a disciplined rubato both here and in the minore Andante Variation VI, still having plenty of powder dry for the preceding cadenza.   A wonky harmonic aside, this was a top-notch interpretation, full of the milk of Tchaikovsky’s kindness yet capable of brisk drive and a confident despatch of the technical fireworks.   During the later stages, the clarinet duo dominated the woodwind choir on occasions, their support drowning out the more melodically important matter carried by oboes and flutes.   But, more importantly, Dahlenburg exerted a flexibility of phrase-shaping in most parts of the score that did justice to this amiable music.

CYBEC 21ST CENTURY AUSTRALIAN COMPOSERS CONCERT

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Saturday January 28, 2017

                                                                                        Brett Kelly

Not quite yesterday – in fact, almost a year ago.  But the time has flown since the last Cybec Foundation concert in which four young composers heard their original creation performed by competent professionals.   On Saturday, the process was repeated involving another quartet of fresh-faced enthusiastic creators introducing their scores with the by-now anticipated mixture of diffidence and brashness, information and burbling, jargon and deliberation – all set in motion by interviewer/conductor Brett Kelly who gave the composers a forum to engage with us verbally, then through their music.

As with last year’s field, this crop proved a mixed one.  But that’s not saying much: from my experience, the Cybec events offer markedly differing tongues, even if the conversationalists are constrained to operate with the same array of sound-colours.   This year, the available forces numbered 25 players – one each of the woodwind except for two clarinets, pairs of trumpets and horns with a trombone and tuba, pairs of strings with a solitary double bass, piano, harp and three percussion.  And each participant enjoyed the services of a mentor to help shape the work;  not that this assistance was at all obvious as the young composers all displayed an idiosyncratic voice, if their mastery of form presented as veering to the rudimentary.

Saturday night began with Sydney-based Cassie To‘s The Reef, a series of sound pictures dealing with this country’s marine wonder and celebrating its current breadth and vitality with a lavishness that would have admirably supported an Attenborough wild-life special.  The piece’s progress presented as a set of contrasting episodes, polemical brass-dominated passages set alongside smaller-framed paragraphs like the harp+flute+strings passage at the work’s conclusion that brought the first of the Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes Sea to mind.  Still, originality in the score’s harmonic structure proved difficult to find with an emphasis on diatonic straightforwardness amounting to insistence and, although flourishes and intimations of nature’s majesty abounded, individual touches in orchestration came around pretty infrequently.  As a homage to the Great Barrier Reef, the work made the proper gestures and succeeded in suggesting the current structure’s majesty of scale as a whole alongside its fragility   A pity To couldn’t confront us with a canvas projecting the mental bankruptcy of those who sponsor the Adani development which currently menaces the treasure that she has memorialised.

After this, Stephen de Filippo‘s Static Anxiety moved into a different form of representation, psychological rather than geographical.   The proposed stasis is represented by a sustained note that shifts between instruments and methods of articulation across the score’s span – an A, possibly?   On top of this fulcrum, the Western Australian composer involves his players in tachisme, dollops of sound coming from all quarters in an instrumental web of considerable sophistication that demonstrates de Fliippo’s consciousness of the value and worth of each strand in the overall complex.  This is music that is not so much up-to-date but of its time, packed with energy; very few young writers would be capable of depicting in such a sustained fashion the title’s intimations of mental fragility and nervousness operating above a sanity-inspiring ground.

Alongside this chameleonic continuum, Brisbane-based Connor D’Netto‘s Singular Movement impressed for its inbuilt firmness of statement.   The composer is comfortable in employing recognizable melodies that amplify themselves by slow accretion.  This work’s central section involves a deft rhythmic moto perpetuo, first for strings, then for a wind/brass combination while a long, slow-moving arch emerges from the bass layers of the sonic mesh.   D’Netto, for all this middle segment’s zappy energy, develops an argument with his material, albeit one that is deliberately limited in its breadth, and at the end its grinding power of motion and statement is reduced to a strangely affecting, inaudible pianissimo.   For reasons I can’t quite fathom, the name that kept on suggesting itself was Roy Harris, that hard man of early American modernism who also favoured building sonorous blocks from simple material, although without D’Netto’s spiky jauntiness.

Last cab off this particular rank was Melbournian Ade Vincent‘s The Secret Motion of Things which found its impetus in Francis Bacon’s 1627 utopian novel, New Atlantis.  The composer is preoccupied with Bacon’s account of disinterested but benign scientific experimentation in his mythical settlement of Bensalem, and he proposes a musical exploration of what such progress entails for our times where each year brings about unpredictable developments and changes in our lives.   So , while Vincent is treating tangible (scientific) intangibles (philosophy)  –  he’s not alone in that  –   he sensibly refrains from producing a frenziedly busy sound scape or a po-faced Hymn to Optimism.  Yes, the core of the work is highly mobile, both racy and pacy, but what impresses is a deftness in handling orchestral timbres which in this case, given the small number of strings at work, remains disarmingly lucid, marrying mass timbre with individual dynamic masterfully.  Mind you, the boom-bash unisons of the final pages seem theatrical and unnecessary, given the work’s emotional context, but perhaps the sense of definite accomplishment they propose to this listener would sound more convincing with greater forces involved.

The outcome of this event is the usual one: two of these scores will be performed during the MSO’s Metropolis series, at the concert on Saturday May 6 conducted by Brett Kelly in the Melbourne Recital Centre.   Which of them merits this distinction is in the hands of an expert committee but I’d be surprised if Static Anxiety missed out on selection.

NOEL! NOEL!

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday December 10, 2016

                                                                                  Madison Nonoa

Each year, Paul Dyer and his Brandenburg Orchestra and Choir mount a Christmas program that serves as a kind of intellectually regulated Carols by Candlelight, an event where the current season is paid its dues through familiar tunes and words, as well as some almost-explicable ring-ins that carry referential overtones.   And this time round, we got to hear some scraps that had absolutely no relevance to this celebratory fortnight at all, hiatus points where the lethargic among us are tempted to slump back and just let the sounds of this inescapably anodyne music creep in our ears.

With no attempt to engage the audience in sing-alongs, the ABO forces saluted general expectations with three verses only of  Once in royal David’s city, led by soprano soloist Madison Nonoa; O little town of Bethlehem from trumpets and sackbuts with percussion trimming; the Coventry Carol, again featuring Nonoa with both melody and descant; God rest you merry, gentlemen not living up to its name with some wayward trumpet articulation; a straight Hark! the herald angels sing; a bi-lingual Silent night, where Tommie Andersson‘s guitar reminded us of the work’s original form; and a rousing O come, all ye faithful that avoided the usual fortissimo bursts whenever the line O come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord! occurs.

So far, so fine – just what you’d expect to hear in any church lucky enough to have a choir at this time of year. Surrounding these regulars came a grab-bag of works that surprised but didn’t startle.  For example, the ABO Choir began the evening with Praetorius’ arrangement of Nicolai’s Wachet auf!, performed a cappella and very impressive in its English garb.   I can’t remember from other years the group’s altos all being male, but the body sings here so rarely that it might have been the case on previous occasions; the texture they generate is an oddly unsettling one in lucid writing like this, suggestive of Anglican cathedral choir-stalls, if tempered by the presence of female sopranos.   Vavilov‘s pseudo-Caccini Ave Maria gave Nonoa her first solo on the program: an inane lyric carried off effectively with organ underpinning, some vocalising from the choir and a liberal dose of sonic confectionery supplied by Brian Nixon‘s chimes.

The Kyrie section of Ola Gjeilo‘s Sunrise Mass for divisi SATB moves slowly enough in the best Scandinavian/Baltic spiritualist style, its subtitle of The Spheres giving some clue to its inspiration, suggesting the quieter moments in Ligeti’s 2001: A Space Odyssey music.   In realising this score, I think the ABO singers could have taken a more slow tempo, especially across its outer pages, although in the Murdoch Hall any group would find it hard constructing the ethereal bands of disembodied overlapping chords that the composer has made his basic constructional implement.

Eriks Esenvalds‘ O salutaris hostia paired Nonoa with an anonymous ABO soprano for the Latvian composer’s amiably euphonious setting of Aquinas’ moving hymn while the 8-part choir worked with a touch too much insistence through their chordal setting of the text as underpinning.   It’s an attractive post-Bernstein Mass creation, the choral numbers here available probably insufficient to do it justice, especially when Esenvalds calls for more sopranos to take up the top lines at the opening to the second verse.   While the program notes gave a fair sense of the text, the final line’s interpretation would have astounded Hilaire Belloc, who couldn’t hear its plea without weeping.   As for the statement that this hymn is used at the Mass’s Consecration, I’ve never heard it in that position but only as the opening step in the odd ritual of Benediction (of the Blessed Sacrament).

Adam’s Cantique de Noel enjoyed a richly resonant treatment.  Nonoa sang the two verses of the original text by Placide Cappeau while the ABO Choir gave her a lush chordal backdrop.   So did the instrumentalists, the trio of sackbuts generating an opulent bass-heavy texture.   After over-much exposure, I can take or leave Amazing Grace; the hymn is trotted out at all sorts of events, public and private, to the point where its gentle lilt has been subjected to as many variants as the American national anthem has suffered in that nation’s sporting arenas.   Nonoa gave it a simple expressiveness over tremolo violins, then with added sackbuts, then with the choir providing their supplementary input – no surprises or whipped-up dynamics, for which relief much thanks.

Alongside these samples of religious music, we heard some strange oddments.  The opening Allegro to Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Trumpets in C is festive in character, I suppose, but the performance on natural instruments was marred by too many bloopers.   An anonymous 17th century Sonata a 9 smacked of Venice, but so do an awful lot of compositions from that time involving brass and strings.   It remains unclear what the band was attempting with Rittler’s Ciacona a 7.   The two violins, Matt Bruce and Ben Dollman, and viola Monique O’Dea started wandering round the stage, apparently improvising above the ground bass, but their efforts did not meet with happy rewards. Fortunately, the entry of the brass forces pushed matters back into a sensible mould.

What Con que la lavare by Luis de Narvaez had to do with anything remains a mystery; if nothing else, it offered a space for Nonoa to display her talent at Renaissance affects, foregrounded by a profusion of supporting musicians, the richest I’ve heard in association with this plaintive cancion  –  theorbo, harpsichord, organ and strings.   For The Luckiest by Ben Folds, the choir sang a cappella with a modest tenor soloist calmly coursing through the song’s unremarkable verses with a telling detachment that suited the work’s character admirably.

This concert began 15 minutes late because the orchestra’s transportation had proved unreliable.   Even so, the program itself, including Dyer’s inevitable address substituting gush for content, lasted an interval-less 75 minutes or so.

You can’t come along to a Noel! Noel! concert expecting to experience the musicological revelations that you find at an Ensemble Gombert Christmas to Candlemas recital.   Furthermore, the ABO organization, like those who sponsor the Bowl and Domain extravaganzas, spreads a pretty wide net to satisfy its intentions of diverting and entertaining.   But this excellent group of performers, even in a reduced-numbers chamber format, has a wealth of material to draw on, with no need for stocking fillers or costume padding.