Category: Orchestral

BAROQUE BRILLIANCE

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday October 15, 2016

                                                                                    Julia Lezhneva

It had nothing to do with the performance but I fell ill just before interval at this concert and went home, rather than risk disrupting my neighbours in the night’s second half; added to which, kidney-stones have a powerfully distracting effect on your concentration, no matter how ravishing a Handel aria’s execution.

Still, I stuck around long enough to hear soprano Julia Lezhneva sing Porpora’s In caelo stelle clare fulgescant motet and the Salve Regina antiphon setting by Handel.  This is a highly individual voice, light and buoyant with unexpected carrying power across its range, even in the lower registers.  Much of Lezhneva’s technical equipment is based around her rapid negotiation rate, which can be appreciated best in fast scale passages, but what startled me – so much so that I wasn’t sure of what I was hearing – was a kind of one-note trill during the Porpora work.  It recalled the effect that you hear in sections of the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610, where one note is repeated in rapid, detached semiquaver action. Lezhneva is adroit in handling the normal cadential trills but this not-quite-tremolo is strikingly unusual.

It first appeared when she reached the volent in fronde aves canendo phrase and immediately struck a response; what better way of simulating exactly that image?  Further on, the device is employed to just as brilliant an effect in the mecum gaudendo passage to suggest elated spirits.   But by this stage, Lezhneva had delighted with a richness of ornamentation and a splendid pliability of phrasing, almost caressing the line into shape. With a corps of about eleven strings only, Richard Tognetti and the ACO grounded proceedings with an accompaniment of exemplary subtlety.

Just as arresting as her decorative work, the soprano made a brilliant impression with her brisk and flawlessly accurate account of the motet’s concluding Alleluia, handled with bravado but sensibly so that the long chains of scale passages came across with clarity and balance – not the scramble that some Baroque interpreters give to such flights of vocal velocity.  The only fault you could pick with the whole account came in a high A (at least I think it was: Tognetti had brought his tuning down to 415) that for some reason came out as half-hearted, although it was awkwardly positioned – not cadential but not able to be thrown away as part of a roulade.

In the Handel piece, Lezhneva enjoyed even more success, probably because the combination of sentiment and fireworks is much more dramatically shaped.  The slow wide-ranging sentences of the opening, where the children of Eve emphasize their depressed state, enjoyed excellent exposition, notably at the point where the music becomes monosyllabic as the suspiramus setting brought out the dramatist in Handel and the actress in Lezhneva.

Despite the warm pianissimo ending, carefully negotiated by the soprano and her sparse string accompaniment, the Murdoch Hall audience relished the middle section’s rapid-fire jollity, particularly those sections where organist Erin Helyard and Lezhneva imitated and duetted in a setting where buoyancy and an old-fashioned desire for contrast resulted in an emotional musical language at odds with the text – well, actually riding roughshod over the images of the Virgin’s merciful eyes in favour of a vision of Jesus the fruit of her womb who for Handel was obviously a baby with a bent for the happier side of infant life.

But it satisfied both as a contrast and complement to the Porpora work, exhibiting both composers’ approaches to happiness and veneration, the interpretations equally satisfying although, as you’d expect, the merits of the Handel left the greater impression because of the felicitous flow of the master’s melodic genius.   But then, Handel had the advantage of setting a straightforward and well-known text with a limited emotional framework, so much so that he used it as a blank canvas, while Porpora was determined to relish the sidereal and bucolic riches of his text with galant flamboyance.

Just as enjoyable as Lezhneva’s contributions was the ACO’s account of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 1 in C with two oboes – Benoit Laurent and Ludovic Achour  – and bassoon Jane Gower fleshing out the strings,  as well as Helyard ‘s harpsichord and Axel Wolf‘s theorbo.  Tognetti directed a taut reading of this relative rarity – well, rare when compared to its B minor companion for flute and strings: a concert-hall regular  –  which was cleverly organised so that the wind trio weren’t called upon to play continuous doublings.  As with most of Tognetti’s re-examinations, this made an object lesson in shading, most obvious in the long-winded Ouverture where the continuo’s cutting undercarriage gave the violins a vital balance.

Each of the following dances spoke with distinct character: the slightly off-centre Courante, that odd Forlane melding the rustic with the courtly, an improbably fast rendition of the Bourees.   But the final Passepieds proved to be a touchingly gentle set of pages, investing the whole performance with a tolerant humanity, the composer’s three levels of activity fusing into a simple but elevating farewell.  This suite represents for me the sort of playing that the ACO accomplishes without peer in this country, and with precious little competition from what I’ve heard elsewhere.

LEONSKAJA & MOZART

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall

September 4 & 5, 2016

                                                                                Elisabeth Leonskaja

Here was a puzzler.  The content was fine, typical ACO fodder: the Capriccio sextet, Mozart’s Jeunehomme, and the Beethoven Op. 127.   Both string works were arrangements by principal cello Timo-Veikko Valve, who knows what he’s about.  But the Monday night performances left a sense of dissatisfaction after all three works were completed.

Rather than launching into the Richard Strauss opera prelude with the full ACO involved. Valve began with the piece as the composer wrote it: two violins, two violas, two cellos pouring out a mellifluous harmonic concordance.   And so it continued up to Figure 2 where the tremolos begin in all lines and the rest of the players were brought into the discussion.   Fine: a proper place to do the transformation, swelling the texture  .  .  .  except that in the actual event it jarred and you had to adjust abruptly to allow for the shift where the sinuosity of the original sextet was lost in more solid sound-washes.

Later, Valve again cut back to the original format – at the point where the curtain goes up on Act 1, I think – bringing the corps back into play for the concluding bars.  The standard was what you’d expect from this body, for the occasion directed by Roman Simovic, concertmaster with the London Symphony Orchestra.   If the violin attack lacked the bite and uniform accuracy that obtains when Tognetti is at the front, that’s understandable, although this was the 7th out of nine performances of this subscription series program.

Elisabeth Leonskaja, soloist in the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 9, is a veteran performer with a pretty full calendar throughout the year, both as concerto soloist and as recitalist.  Her reading of the work could best be described as undemonstrative.   And that’s fine; who wants a full-frontal ego projected on this urbane, aristocratic music, some clown determined to make a difference by abrupt shifts in dynamic or slicing up defenceless passage work?   For those of us brought up on Ingrid Haebler, a certain reserve in the Mozart concertos is prized, particularly when it leads to readings of intellectual perspicacity and enunciative clarity.

But this Jeunehomme ambled.   Sure, the notes appeared in the right places and the mesh between soloist and orchestra was hard to fault –  except that the tuttis and the passages with exposed horns and/or oboes took on unexpected significance, compensating for a lack of intensity from the piano.   Leonskaja’s cadenzas came over with exemplary lucidity but infused with little personality; even that garrulously rapid concluding rondeau passed by without raising the performance temperature by much, missing out on any enlivening energetic kick.

The soloist gave us an encore: the Chopin D flat Nocturne, negotiated with sensitivity and a steady pace, yet deficient in sparks even during the right-hand decorative cadenza-spurts, the whole competent but emotionally bland: just the same as the concerto.

Valve returned to the lists with his arrangement of the Beethoven E flat Quartet, the later one in that key introducing the final five in the series.  And, after this hearing, it strikes me as being the one among them all that responds pretty poorly to expansion into string orchestra form.  The trouble with the first movement is that the developmental process is undramatic, non-theatrical, harmonically simple to follow; all you achieve by expanding the forces involved is a kind of middle-age spread.   Whatever tension exists between the lines is evened out, often smothered in plump amplitude. Further, the dynamic switches can’t strike home as hard when more than one player is involved.

The quartet’s second movement begins in even worse case; its opening theme’s A flat tonality might take some time to settle but there is precious little chromatic inflexion to disrupt its even presentation.  Yes, the complexities arise soon enough but even the slightly whirling activity generated by demi-semiquaver patterns turns to slurry when a group of four or five is playing them simultaneously.  The only pages that seemed to me to succeed here came at the third variation, Adagio molto espressivo, when the syncopated trills and violin lines’ imitations stopped, the key moved to E Major and the basic theme was transformed into a clear-speaking melodic line for the first violins with placid harmonic support.

The Scherzo worked best of all, despite some intonational slips among the violins.  The massive chord snaps at bar 60 – and, later, bar 330 – best illustrated how you could amplify the percussive power to be found all over the composer’s last works, and the Trio-Presto impressed for the rapid responsiveness of the ACO executants.   But the finale brought back memories of the initial Allegro where what interests you when four players engage in a clear-voiced argument becomes, in the string orchestra transformation, something more texturally diffuse, the modulations less striking, the driving animation verging on the mechanical.   Again, a generally well-accomplished performance but, instead of giving some insight into Beethoven’s compositional practice, the process seemed to summon up echoes of 19th century string serenades, or Grieg’s Holberg, even Elgar on an indifferent day.

BLAZING BAROQUE

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

Sunday July 31, 2016

                                                                      Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

As artistic director/conductor/harpsichordist Paul Dyer pointed out in his first address on Sunday evening, this concert from the ABO featured no overseas guests but put to the forefront members of the orchestra itself, generating a congenial home-grown feel about proceedings as the ensemble worked enthusiastically through six works from the Baroque.  ‘Blazing’ is not really the adjective I would have used to typify the results, or even the group’s intentions; it suggests final curtain time in Gotterdammerung or Berlioz’s Requiem at its least penitential – but some points in this concerto-filled event proved exciting for all the right reasons.

The ABO concertmaster, Shaun Lee-Chen, was worked very hard, taking the solo line in Vivaldi’s D Major Violin Concerto, Il Grosso Mogul, then having the lion’s share of the work in the same composer’s Concerto in F Major RV 569 which also calls for pairs of oboes and horns, and finishing his work-load with Fasch’s Concerto in D Major.  The common cry is that the Italian composer’s work carries a great deal of facile passage work, indulges in repeated semiquaver patterns, employs focal melodies that don’t strain the diatonic budget.   These strictures are true, after a fashion, but all too often the solo violin is dangerously exposed for long stretches; the exponent has to operate in sections of the Mogul at a high tessitura; for example, the bariolage leading up to bar 50 of the first Allegro.

It’s not a work for the faint-hearted and Lee-Chen made a positive attack on it, crackingly paced and generally reliable in pitch with a few question-marks over the very top notes of his part – nothing that grated but a few points in an extended pattern that didn’t quite hit the centre.   Still, much appreciated was the extemporised-sounding Recitative leading into the Grave.    As for the final movement, what took attention here was an impressive bite to the company’s open D strings that emerged in the arpeggio-rich  ritornelli.  One of the concert’s chief pleasures came in the concerted enthusiastic gutsiness of the Brandenburgers in full voice.

Telemann’s Grand Concerto in D Major, the one with the unusual catalogue name TWV deest, asks for pairs of oboes (Emma Black and Kirsten Barry) and trumpets (Leanne Sullivan and Alex Bieri).  As always, you have to admire how much this fecund creator could make of a common chord, getting it to supply such vigorous material.  In the active second movement Allegro, both wind pairs impressed for the precision of their enunciation with only one suspicious blurt from an oboe and barely any spliced notes from the trumpets.   Other elements that grabbed attention were the rich, reverberant bass notes booming from Tommie Andersson‘s theorbo in the opening Spirituoso-Adagio-Spirituoso sequence, and the mobile energy of Richard Gleeson‘s timpani, notably the expressive crescendos achieved within very short bursts of notes.

I know that for most Baroque aficionados, the period-authentic horn is unremarkable, but I still find it a singular achievement that players confined to crooks can produce well-balanced, consistent lines without cracking some of the notes.   For The Vivaldi RB 569 per molti strumenti, Darryl Poulsen and Doree Dixon outlined their parts with force and an exactitude that rarely faltered, their sustained trills a sonic delight of this reading.  The addition of bassoon Peter Moore to the mix had some slight impact on the exposed woodwind sequences, but the outstanding voice was that of Lee-Chen, for whom the other soloists gave way in the brief central Grave – a 20-bar D minor siciliano with the violin a constant presence, chiefly supported by violins and violas only and here elegantly soulful in its expressiveness.

The duet work of flautist Melissa Farrow and Mikaela Oberg‘s recorder in Telemann’s E minor double concerto provided this concert’s high point; their shapely phrasing, down to mutually agreed breathing points,  exemplary in both largo and fast movements.   Also impressive was the dynamic equity of the partnership, vital in a score like this with so much dovetailing, imitation and stretches of parallel 3rds.   In fact, the performance kept on getting better, through the pizzicato-accompanied second Largo duet into the driving vehemence of the concluding Musette, with director Dyer contriving a brisk accelerando in the final ripieno bars.   This Murdoch Hall performance was recorded; and it would be worth listening to the broadcast, most particularly for this excellent, piercingly fine-spun reading  (ABC Classic FM, Thursday August 11, 1 pm).

For the Fasch concerto, Lee-Chen was joined by the two oboes and attendant bassoon, three trumpets, timpani, Andersson’s theorbo and the well-exercised Brandenburg string corps.   The upper range problem recurred in the solo violin’s E string top notes, although the rest of the player’s work proved accurate enough.   In this assertively-speaking score, if anywhere, you could find passages of burnished energy to justify the concert’s title, but the weighty orchestral force outweighed the solo violin’s carefully-spun sound-colour, so that the tutti punctuations dwarfed Lee-Chen’s output.   Yet again, we were treated to a work with a wealth of display but it needed a stronger right arm to produce a more aggressive and sustained attack.  Not exactly a disappointment, you were left with the impression that either the orchestra had been over-encouraged, or the soloist needed to lift his dynamic by several notches.

MID-WINTER BRILLIANCE

The Melbourne Musicians

James Tatoulis Auditorium, Methodist Ladies College

Sunday July 17, 2016

                                                                                    Rosemary Ball

Taking on the Classical canon with a vengeance, Frank Pam and his players presented a mixed Beethoven and Mozart afternoon at the MLC space  a room that I’d not visited for quite a few years.   With an excellent seating plan focused on the performing area, the Tatoulis auditorium gives musicians every consideration, although on this occasion the somewhat dry acoustic might have been softened if the hall’s six acoustic baffles had been retracted.   Nevertheless, Sunday afternoon’s best soloist enjoyed the plentiful air space and coped easily with any reduction in resonant bounce.

Young violinist Mi Yang performed the solo part to Beethoven’s Romance No. 2 with caution.   Her pitching wavered a few times but she kept to Pam’s directorial script, not helped on her way by a string accompaniment that was unusually tentative, feeling its way while dealing with a pretty simple F Major score that only occasionally deviates from a slow-quaver supporting pulse.   Yang had the notes – most of them – under her fingers; what she has to work out is when to take the lead and keep it, maintaining her dynamic leverage over the orchestra, particularly the wind element which took on undue prominence against a self-effacing string body.

Soprano Rosemary Ball sang the two arias for the Countess from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.   Her vocal output is firm and packed with interest although, like pretty much every opera singer I’ve known, she suits herself about pace, taking her time over phrases throughout the four-page, slow-moving work.   Still, she established a link with her accompaniment and maintained it, even through some hesitations at the beginning of phrases.

Yang returned for the Mozart Concerto No. 4 which she negotiated with more security than in her opening gambit for the afternoon.   But then, Mozart gave his soloist plenty of exposure and Yang made more than an exercise out of the work’s appealing Rondeau finale, even if she brought a tension to her reading that will disappear as she becomes more relaxed with this concerto’s benign detachment.  The Musicians had few problems with this score, agreably pitched in D, but they have a tendency not to give an emphasis to the first beat of a bar which makes their texture soupy, lacking an impulse especially in extended passages of simple accompaniment  –  which in fact constitutes most of the body of the first movement that holds only a few four-bar tutti passages outside the opening and closing pages.

When Ball returned for the E Susanna non vien?/Dove sono sequence,  the first page of the aria itself revealed the absence of the required two bassoons.   After a short search and their return to the fold, Ball gave an ardent interpretation of this vocal glory, marred only by some distracting breaks for breath in mid-phrase; surprising, as the aria is not that demanding in this regard, the melody’s arches rarely exceeding four bars in length.  Yet Ball brought a welcome fervour to the Allegro change at Ah! se almen, with a convincing dramatic force informing the di cangiar l’ingrato cor towering conclusion to the work.

After interval, Marcela Fiorillo fronted the Beethoven G Major Piano Concerto.  The exposition set the tone, which was off-puttingly heavy for a score that is viewed as poetic and lyrically buoyant.  The soloist sets the pace for this concerto, opening with a meditative solo; Fiorillo appeared to follow her own inclinations from this stage on and you were left in a state of continual tension, wondering how long the orchestra and pianist could continue without becoming obviously discrepant.  The likelihood became reality in the third movement, fortunately just before an unaccompanied passage, and the lumpy Vivace got to the final bars without another mishap.   A reading, then, with not much to recommend it – hard work for soloist and orchestra, even in the simple central Andante where the strings turned the crisp demisemiquaver/semiquaver snaps into mushy triplets.

However, the concert did reveal the potential of Yang who, in her best moments, displayed a driving sense of direction and a firm bowing arm; as well, it gave us the opportunity to hear Ball giving creditable readings to a pair of taxing arias and carrying them off with great musicianship and impressive power.