Category: The Diary

Thursday June 1

STEFAN DOHR: SERENADE

Australian National Academy of Music

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

Solo horn of the Berlin Philharmonic for the last 24 years or so, Stefan Dohr plays and directs this event, his second appearance for ANAM and a good deal  more mainstream than the first.  He and his local charges open with the Mozart C minor Serenade No. 12, a wind octet for pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns.  They will end their endeavours with Dvorak’s Wind Serenade, for the same instruments plus a third horn, as well as an ad lib contrabassoon, and extra parts for cello and double bass, presumably in case the woodwind bass isn’t available.  In between come Nielsen’s Serenata in vano (clarinet, bassoon, horn, cello and double bass) for semi-comic relief, and Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles for your normal wind quintet, an early work from 1953.  If you presume that Dohr has a strong work ethic, he’s going to be a busy boy to cope with this lot.

 

Monday June 5

MIGRATION

Australian String Quartet

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

Settled into position and playing with excellent flair, this ensemble centres its night on the big Schubert in G, D. 887.   At close to an hour in length and managing to be both profuse and diffuse, the work tests any group bold enough to attempt it.  As preludes, we hear a guitar quintet about quarter-of-an-hour in length by Ralph Towner that gives the night its title and refers to the American jazz composer’s reaction to the sight of spawning salmon in his country’s north-west.   Another guitar quintet by Iain Grandage enjoys the subtitle Black Dogs which refers to that well-known Churchillian state of depression and dejection. Another 15-minute piece, it can take on a slightly theatrical aspect by having the violinists start playing at either side of the stage, gradually advancing on the central performer; whether this carries on throughout all three movements will be revealed on the night but it sounds like an organizational nightmare.  The guitarist in both quintets will be the estimable Slava Grigoryan.

 

Thursday June 8

TRIO ALBA

The Melbourne Musicians

St. John’s Southgate at 7 pm

Not a regular program from Frank Pam and his string chamber orchestra, this night features an Austrian piano trio which I’ve not heard before, although the ensemble has been in existence at least since 2013 when they recorded the trios of Mendelssohn.  Its members are violin Livia Sellin, cello Philipp Comploi, and piano Chengcheng Zhao.  The program for Southgate will begin with Haydn in C Major Hob. XV 27 (presumably the same one they will be playing at St. Ambrose Hall, Woodend over the following weekend). The other major work is the mighty Schubert in E flat, a treasure-house of invention.  In between comes Give Me Phoenix Wings to Fly by the Canadian composer Kelly-Marie Murphy, with whom this ensemble has established a firm relationship as, three years ago, they commissioned and premiered her third piano trio,  Search My Heart.  If you happen to be in Woodend for that town’s festival, you can hear the Albans playing Suk’s Op. 23 Elegy from 1902, Smetana in G minor, as well as the Haydn mentioned above.

 

Friday June 9

ENSEMBLE MODERN: TRAILBLAZING

National Academy of Music

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

During its residency at ANAM, the famous German group which pioneers and sustains the contemporary is represented tonight by flute Dietmar Wiesner, horn Saar Berger, violin Jagdish Mistry, and pianist Hermann Kretzschmar (shades of Smiley’s People).  In league with some lucky ANAM musicians, these visitors are mounting a program that is demandingly disparate in nature and bound to flood the mind with information; whether much will be retained is another question.  To start comes POLLOK by one of the group’s founders, Brisbane-born Cathy Milliken, for flute, clarinet, string quintet, percussion and piano.  Then we hear Jorg Widmann’s Etude II for solo violin, followed by Kretzschmar’s own Eskalation, about which I can find nothing; the composer is a clarinettist and conductor, so this work could be for any force imaginable.   Heiner Goebbels is represented by a Toccata for Teapot and Piccolo; Warm-up by Vito Suraj for horn and two percussionists testifies to the composer’s love for tennis, although there’s little time for stretching during this 20-minute burst.   During these days of fraught political activity, Isang Yun’s Octet for clarinet, bassoon, horn and string quintet, written in 1978, brings to mind the composer’s two-year imprisonment by South Korea –  an over-the-top example of nationalism gone wrong.   John Cage’s Variations I allows anything – any number of players on any instruments – but then so do the composer’s other Variations.  The score is a chance construct and so everything is a surprise . . . to everybody.   Last is Enno Poppe’s Geloeschte Lieder for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano; let’s hope it doesn’t take its own title too literally.  Almost 20 years old and, at 20 minutes, this will be one of the more substantial works on this full program.

 

Tuesday June 13

Pacifica Quartet

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

I believe this group from Bloomington, Indiana has toured for Musica Viva before; there’s some mention of their playing all the Mendelssohn quartets in a visit here nearly a decade ago; presumably, all seven of them (the Mendelssohn, I mean).  Tonight, the group plays the first of two programs:  Haydn in G, Op. 76 No. 1 and Mendelssohn’s Beethoven homage, the A minor Quartet No. 2 are the book-ends.  In between, the Pacificas resuscitate Nigel Westlake’s String Quartet No. 2, which was commissioned for the Goldner String Quartet to perform by its dedicatee, Musica Viva eminence Kenneth W. Tribe, back in 2005.

In their second appearance on Saturday June 17, the quartet plays the Westlake, Beethoven’s last in F Major Op. 135, and Shostakovich No. 3, the fruit of this group’s extended study of the Russian writer in recording, between 2011 and 2013, all his quartets.

 

Thursday June 15

ZAPPA: YELLOW SHARK

Australian National Academy of Music

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

As well as Wiesner, Berger, Mistry and Kretzschmar from the ANAM concert of six days previous, the Ensemble Modern is also represented tonight by conductor Johannes Debus. Frank Zappa – one of the few interesting and really creative musicians to come out of rock – wrote The Yellow Shark for the Ensemble in 1992; well, compiled it with them is more like it.  The fruits of the collaboration came in a recorded concert where the Ensemble, partly under Zappa’s direction, played 19 of his pieces as their contribution to a festival in Frankfurt, just a month before the composer’s death.   The CD lasts about 70 minutes.   As a filler, the program also features Zappa’s The Adventures of Greggery Peccary, which the ensemble has recorded – a fantastic (literally) tale which lasts about 25 minutes, as the Moderns play it.

 

Thursday June 15

HAYDN’S CREATION

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

Sir Andrew Davis is on hand this month to artistically direct the MSO and its Chorus through this great oratorio.   His three soloists are Australian soprano Siobhan Stagg, and two British imports – tenor Andrew Staples and bass Neal Davies.   Instead of biting the bullet, the organizers have decided to have an interval, rather than running right through; which means that we sit through Parts 1 and 2 for 75 minutes, pause, then have to come back for the remaining half hour in the Garden of Eden.  But it doesn’t matter: performances of this monument are few and far between – most of those I’ve attended seemed to be living up to God’s operational time-span.

This program will be repeated in Costa Hall, Geelong on Friday June 16 at 7:30 pm, and again in Hamer Hall on Saturday June 17 at 2 pm.

 

Sunday June 18

SONGS OF THE NIGHT

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 2:30 pm

Rebecca Chan has curated and will direct this afternoon’s work, which is an ambitious medley.  The requisite singer is tenor Andrew Goodwin who will be vaulting between some strange orchestral interludes.   Chan begins with a string orchestra arrangement of the Tristan Prelude, which will put us on our toes as we imaginatively supply those wind chords that give the piece so much of its initial tension.  Goodwin opens his innings with two Chan arrangements: Strauss’s Die Nacht, then one of Schoenberg’s early 1897 songs, Waldesnacht.  As we’ve got him here, we might as well hear more – so the MCO strings will follow the song with that lush fruit of the composer’s late-tonal loins, Verklarte Nacht.   Still in arrangement mode, I hope,  we hear the Prestissimo from Bartok’s String Quartet No. 4, which should be worth the price of admission in itself.   For another piece of comic relief, Chan will lead the players in her own arrangement of the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream music.  A new work by young Australian Lachlan Skipworth precedes a welter of Schubert for Goodwin: Nacht und Traume, Gute Nacht, Nachtstuck and, after these introspective, if not gloomy, nocturnes, one of the great races in music: Der Erlkonig.

This program will be repeated on Thursday June 22 in the Deakin Edge, Federation Square at 7:30 pm.

 

Sunday June 18

SCHUBERT, SHOSTAKOVICH AND BEYOND

Team of Pianists

Rippon Lea at 6:30 pm

Mid-way through its season, the Team is mounting a fine recital that boasts pianist Rohan Murray and guest cellist Svetlana Bogosavljevic.   For the most part, the duo’s program is mainstream: Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata in A minor that is always heard in this instrumental format (I, for one, have never even seen an arpeggione in action), followed by the Shostakovich D minor Cello Sonata of 1934.  For local colour, we hear Elena Kats-Chernin’s Blue Silence, a work that exists in many formats, so it could be heard here as a duo or as a piano solo.   The piece was written for an exhibition devoted to artists with schizophrenia but the actual emotional content suggests more melancholy than any sort of mental disturbance – or perhaps I’ve got no insight to this work; wouldn’t be the first time.   All the Team’s events are enjoyable, and this stately house’s ballroom is as fine a recital space as any in the city.

 

Tuesday June 20

SCHUBERT GALA WITH TIMO-VEIKKO VALVE

Flinders Quartet

Hawthorn Arts Centre at 7:30 pm

No strangers to working outside the CBD, this ensemble is appearing at the lavishly endowed former town hall where Brett Kelly and his Academy of Melbourne used to perform.   With guest Valve, principal cellist with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the ensemble heads for the empyrean with the Schubert C Major Quintet, the ne plus ultra of chamber music.   As well, they give a foretaste of Schubert’s instrumental format by playing a Boccherini quintet in G Major, but then the issue is clouded by the attached sobriquet – Fandango  –  which, as far as I can tell, applies to one of the composer’s guitar quintets.   But then I have a vague memory of the Flinders people playing such a work, complete with castanets, at Montsalvat.   Anyway, the program begins with Sculthorpe’s Quartet No. 18, commissioned for performance by both the Tokyo String Quartet and the Flinders in 2010.

 

Thursday June 22

CUNNING LITTLE VIXEN

Victorian Opera

Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne at 7:30 pm

I can vaguely recall a production of this Janacek hymn to pantheism from the national company some time back in the 1970s at the Princess Theatre.  Even earlier, I remember a radiant recording of the opera from Sadler’s Wells starring June Bronhill and conducted by Colin Davis, being broadcast in the early 1960s and the Australian soprano’s voice made a remarkable impression.   In this version, directed by Stuart Maunder, the title role is to be taken by Opera Australia soprano Celeste Lazarenko; Antoinette Halloran has the furry trousers role of the Fox; Barry Ryan sings the part of the Forester, Dimity Shepherd is his wife and Brenton Spiteri the Schoolmaster.   Jack Symonds conducts a chamber orchestration of the original rhapsodic score; I suppose you couldn’t expect to fit the original forces into the Playhouse pit.  A shame, but here’s hoping the magic persists.

The production will be repeated at 7:30 pm on Saturday June 24, Tuesday June 27 and Thursday June 29, and at 1 pm on Saturday July 1.

 

Friday June 23

MSO PLAYS PASTORAL

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

Nothing new here, you’d expect.  Sir Andrew Davis will conduct Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6; fine, if ordinary programming.   But the night begins with a rarity: Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote, a lengthy (45 minutes) tone-poem comprising introduction, two themes, ten variations and finale.  The hero is represented by a cello – here, Daniel Muller-Schott – while his squire, Sancho Panza, enjoys the services of Christopher Moore’s viola, as well as tuba (Tim Buzbee?) and bass clarinet (Jonathan Craven?).  Somewhere between Strauss and Beethoven comes a melding of Brett Dean and Beethoven: Adagio molto e mesto, an arrangement for flute, clarinet and strings of the slow movement from the Rasumovsky String Quartet No. 1 and which is usually paired with the Australian composer’s Testament, referring to the German master’s heartfelt Heiligenstadt letter to his brothers.

The program will be repeated on Saturday June 24 at 8 pm and on Monday June 26 at 6:30 pm

 

Sunday June 25

SCINTILLATINGLY SCANDINAVIAN

Trio Anima Mundi

Holy Trinity Anglican Church, East Melbourne at 3 pm

You’d have to take this title on trust because I reckon that most of us have heard none of the music that the trio is presenting.   The promise of scintillation in chamber music is a big call at any time, let alone from the ultra-cool Scandinavian musical world.  This afternoon starts with a bit of Grieg, a 10-minute Andante con moto in C minor from an unfinished piano trio which is sombre and Brahmsian for most of its length.  From Norway to Sweden with Dag Wiren’s early Piano Trio No. 1 in four movements – Allegro, Adagio, Fughetta, Alla passacaglia – compressed into a quarter of an hour.   To end, across to Copenhagen for Emil Hartmann’s Piano Trio of 1867 which fools you by starting in the minor before launching into its B flat Major home key and which enjoys a scherzo livelier than most from its heavy-handed time.   But is it scintillating?  Could be: these players – violin Rochelle Ughetti, cello Noella Yan, piano Kenji Fujimura –  are more than capable enough of finding its sparkle.

 

Monday June 26

INTIMATE MOZART

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

The orchestra cuts itself down to real chamber proportions for a night with pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout.  The centrepiece will be Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 13 in C Major, here given in its a quattro setting with string quartet accompaniment only.  On either side lie two Schumann works: the last of his three string quartets, that in A Major, and the exuberant Piano Quintet in E flat Major which is a delight for the keyboard player if not that exciting for his escorting string colleagues whose parts have a good deal of padding.  Richard Tognetti will be in the first violin chair but so far there are no details on his companions  –  Timo-Veikko Valve on cello?  Satu Vanska or Helena Rathbone in second-violin spot?  Anybody at all up for the viola line?   Bezuidenhout has been involved for about  nine years in recording Mozart’s complete keyboard music and he recorded tonight’s concerto last year with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra; you can expect a solidly framed, idiosyncratic interpretation.

 

Thursday June 29

Behzod Abduraimov

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

Appearing in the Recital Centre’s Great Performers series, the Uzbek pianist is building on his success here in 2012 which I recall as being brilliantly technical if not endowed with insight.   This time, he plays Bach rather than the Scarlatti he essayed in 2012.  But it’s the Busoni transcription of the D minor Toccata and Fugue; cascades and flurries so early in the night?  The Liszt B minor Sonata is a solid test of interpretation, though, and Abduraimov follows this with the same composer’s Valse-Caprice No. 6 from the nine Soirees de Vienne paraphrases of Schubert; the direction Allegro con strepito gives this particular game away. For a contrast, we hear Schubert en clair – the restrained, meditative Moment musical No. 2 in A flat.  Then, it’s Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 6 in A: acerbic but dour, despite the brisk writing; like the Liszt sonata, it asks for more than a smash-and-grab approach.

 

Thursday June 29

MSO PLAYS DAS LIED VON DER ERDE

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

Coming up to the last two in his complete Mahler symphonies review, Sir Andrew Davis is preparing us for the deluge with this extraordinary song-cycle that lies between those final leviathans; indeed, the composer thought of Das Lied as a symphony.  He wanted a tenor and an alto as soloists: these readings have veteran Australian Stuart Skelton for Das Trinklied von Jammer der Erde, Von der Jugend, and Der Trunkene im Fruhling while British mezzo Catherine Wynn-Rogers will sing Der Einsame im Herbst, Von der Schonheit, and the heart-breaking Der Abschied.   As for the MSO, it will be in fuller form than usual, even if a good deal of the work has a chamber-like texture.   Preceding this, we will hear Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony No. 8 in B minor, possibly to leaven the emotional depths depicted in the pages of Mahler’s concluding song.

This program will be repeated in Costa Hall, Geelong on Friday June 30 at 7:30 pm, and again in Hamer Hall on Saturday July 1 at 2 pm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday May 4

BETWEEN STRINGS

Katapult

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

A kick-off for the Metropolis New Music Festival, this program comes from ‘ a trio of internationally acclaimed soloists’ and is part of a Festival sub-set called the Resonant Bodies Festival.  As far as the actual players go, they include Dylan Lardelli, Lizzy Welsh, Laura Moore, and an extra body in Eric Lamb.  Lardelli is a New Zealand-born guitarist; Welsh is a Melbourne resident and is practised on both violin and baroque violin; Moore is a Sydney-based baroque cello and gamba specialist.  The outsider, Lamb, is an American flautist.   As for their program, there’s a new work by Lardelli, as yet unnamed; Melbourne son Vincent Giles’ silver as catalyst in inorganic reactions and also an apparent spin-off, . . . of sediment; New Zealand musician (I think) Nancy Haliburton’s Music for Guitar; another unnamed piece by Chris Watson, the senior British composer (again, I think); and Austrian conductor Roland Freisitzer’s Music for Eric Lamb of 2015.  It’s a lot to fit into an hour but variety is the spice of new music recitals.

 

Thursday May 4

Metropolis 1

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

The MSO’s contribution to this festival seems to have shrunk behind my back to two programs instead of three.  And the definition of ‘new music’ also  has undergone something of a sea-change.  This night opens with a gem from the orchestra’s Composer-in-Residence, Elena Kats-Chernin: her re-version of the Prelude and Toccata from Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo.  To balance this, the C-i-R has produced a real new work for the occasion in Ancient Letters, although the title suggests a provenance older than the late Renaissance.   Conductor Brett Kelly (or is it Mahan Esfahani, who shares leadership duties and is apparently making a harpsichord contribution?) will revive Brett Dean’s Carlo, the Australian composer’s 20-year-old monument to the murderous Prince of Venosa.   Guest soloist Joseph Tawadros fronts his fresh Oud Concerto and the night is rounded by Boulez’s 1985 Dialogue de l’ombre double, a stunning near-20 minute solo, here in an authorized version for the night’s second/third? soloist, recorder player Erik Bosgraaf, the performer reacting as he moves across the music stands to a pre-recorded tape of himself.

 

Thursday May 4

Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

This ensemble is here for the first time ever, so I know nothing about them.  Not that they’re spreading their riches lavishly; just the one program performed for one night here, the following night in Sydney, and it’s home, James.   Their conductor is Jaap van Zweden, who is shortly going to take up a post as chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic as well.   The program is not exactly breaking new ground, apart from a work by one of the orchestra’s composers-in-residence, Fung Lam; Quintessence was premiered in 2014 and has been performed by the HK Philharmonic every year since. The main work is Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and guest Ning Feng, with his MacMillan Stradivarius, fronts the Mozart Violin Concerto No. 4.

 

Friday May 5

LA SONNAMBULA

Victorian Opera

Hamer Hall at 7:30 pm

VO is making a habit of  Bellini concert stagings  –  Norma and I Puritani in previous seasons  –   so we’re inured to the disbelief suspensions required for this smaller-framed masterpiece.   Jessica Pratt sings Amina and here’s hoping she has a happier time than she endured in the company’s Lucia di Lammermoor.  Another survivor from the Donizetti, Carlos Enrique Barcenas, has the role of the sleepwalking heroine’s fiance, Elvino;  Greta Bradman is the advantage-seeking  innkeeper  Lisa; Paolo Pecchioli features as the nobleman with the revolving bedroom door, Count Rodolfo, while Roxane Hislop appears as the heroine’s foster-mother, Teresa.  As yet, I can’t find details of who will take the role of Alessio, the song-writer who has the misfortune to be devoted to Lisa.   Richard Mills conducts and this is a one-night only presentation scheduled to last three hours, which seems pretty excessive unless the interval is a gargantuan one.

 

Saturday May 6

THE THINGS THAT BIND US

Latitude 37

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

In an unexpected change of repertoire, this period music trio takes on a contemporary field as part of the recitals in this year’s Metropolis New Music Festival.    The players cast a wide net, with music from Iceland, the UK and America, as well as New Zealand and Australia.  Two works from Maria Huld Markan Sigfusdottir will enjoy an airing: Clockworking for violin, viola, cello and electronics will present the players with a how-many-of-us-are-there challenge, while Sleeping Pendulum calls for only a violin and an electronics operator.   The music is pleasant enough – starkly folksy, if anything.   David Chisholm’s 2011 Trick fits Latitude’s personnel, as far as I can hear;  for bass viol alone comes Lines Curved Rivers Mirrored from 2014 by British writer Edmund Finnis; then follows the delightfully named Slow Twitchy Organs by that brilliant American arranger, Nico Muhly – I’ve heard Fast Twitchy Organs which is electronics only, I think, but not this one; New Zealand’s John Psathas is represented by a piano solo, Waiting for the Aeroplane from 1988, close to the first thing he wrote; Australian Brooke Green’s Reza Barati is a 2016 elegy for the Iranian refugee killed on Manus Island, written for gamba solo, viol consort and drum; and finally comes the work that gives the night its title, a 2013 piece by Australian Luke Howard for organ, violin and gamba.

 

Saturday May 6

METROPOLIS 2

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

A night of excess; there’s too much here.  Brett Kelly conducts but Mahan Esfahani is also billed as ‘play conductor’.  We begin with Ligeti: the Passacaglia ungherese for solo mean-tempered harpsichord (Esfahani).  Which is followed by Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No. 6 (the Brandenburg No 4 re-arranged).  A recorder concerto by Dutch composer Willem Jeths will enjoy its Australian premiere from Erik Bosgraaf, its dedicatee.  A Vivaldi violin concerto in A minor has been transcribed for oud by the ubiquitous Joseph Tawadros who presents it tonight; British composer Anna Meredith’s Origami Songs, also written for Bosgraaf, end the program.   And somewhere in the middle come two works from the Cybec Twentieth Century Composers Program earlier this year: Ade Vincent’s The Secret Motion of Things, and Connor D’Netto’s Singular Movement.

 

Saturday May 6

FRAGMENTS

Alicia Crossley

Melbourne Recital Centre at 10 pm

This is the Metropolis New Music Festival’s last gasp and it features a solo artist in recorder player Alicia Crossley.   She kicks off with Bach – the whole G Major Cello Suite arranged for one of her instruments.  Another familiar name is Debussy whose Syrinx for solo flute will also be moved across to a new/old medium.  From her own recording Addicted to Bass from 2015, Crossley performs Andrew Batt-Rawden’s E and Mark Oliveiro’s Calliphora, both for bass recorder and electronics.  Johann George Tromlitz, a contemporary of Haydn, was a flute master of that time; Crossley performs one of his partitas as well as contemporary Dutch writer Jacob Ter Veldhuis’ 2003 work for oboe and ‘soundtrack’, The Garden of Love.  This last, the Bach, Debussy and Tromlitz have also been recorded by Crossley on the Move Records label.

 

Sunday May 7

ACO SOLOISTS

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 2:30 pm

Eschewing the attractions of visitors, the ACO uses its own people as front-runners for this latest program in the national subscription series.  Satu Vanska is director in her husband’s absence and she takes solo responsibilities in Locatelli’s Harmonic Labyrinth Violin Concerto in D Major.   Glen Christensen partners her in Vivaldi’s Concerto in G minor for Two Violins and Cello, that bottom line taken by principal Timo-Veikko Valve, who also gets exposure in an arrangement of Debussy’s Cello Sonata.  The program ends with Mendelssohn’s Beethoven-quoting String Quartet No. 2 in a string orchestra arrangement.  The odd men out are a new work, as yet unnamed, by Western Australian-based James Ledger, and an Andante for Strings, the slow movement from the String Quartet of 1931 by American innovator Ruth Crawford Seeger, Pete’s step-mother.

This program is repeated on Monday May 8 at 7:30 pm

 

Thursday May 11

BENJAMIN NORTHEY CONDUCTS SIBELIUS 2

Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

Well, the youngish Australian conductor studied in Finland, so we’re expecting something of an affinity for this most popular of the composer’s seven symphonies; not that studying there or even being a Finn gives you much of an edge in these internationalist days.   The night’s first half is all-Beethoven: the Coriolan Overture, then the Emperor Piano Concerto in E flat where Stefan Cassomenos is entrusted with the solo part.   I suppose this last is what will bring in the punters and hopefully justifies the MSO presenting this Prom (or have they discarded that nomenclature?) on two consecutive nights.

This program will be repeated on Friday May 12 at 7:30 pm.

 

Saturday May 13

BAROQUE JOINS THE CIRCUS 2

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra/Circa

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

I thoroughly enjoyed the last collaboration between the Brandenburgers and the Circa troupe in a French Baroque program, part of the orchestra’s 2015 season.  The focus has moved south this time round to Spain and, while actual details are currently lacking, the program will include works by Monteverdi, Falconieri, Kapsberger, Merula and Cazzati – none of whom, as far as I can see, ever visited Spain.  The orchestra has mined its own Tapas CD, which features tracks of music by each of the above-mentioned composers.  But then, most of the time your attention is focused on the acrobats and their extraordinary feats.

This program will be repeated on Sunday May 14 at 5 pm

 

Saturday May 13

TOGNETTI: PENDERECKI & BRAHMS

Australian National Academy of Music

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

Taking up a residency at the National Academy, Richard Tognetti directs a program split in two.  He concludes operations with the Brahms Symphony No. 1, that much-deferred and well-worth-the-wait product of the composer’s 43rd year.  By way of a lead-in, the ANAM forces perform Penderecki’s 1961 composition for 48 strings, Polymorphia, and the more famous Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, written a year earlier for 52 strings.   In between the Polish master’s works comes Jonny Greenwood’s 48 Responses to Polymorphia, a construction that the Radiohead personality wrote in collaboration with Penderecki.   All very neat, concise and inter-related but you’ll need the interval to carry out some mental gear-changes, swerving from 40 minutes of mid-20th century (pace Greenwood’s 2011 homage) experimentation to late 19th century conservatism.

 

Tuesday May 16

Angela Hewitt

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

Of course, there’s Bach: two partitas – No. 1 in B flat and No. 4 in D: well-known quantities just waiting for the clarifying exposition of this expert performer.   It’s a solid dose; Hewitt’s reading of both adds up to about 40 minutes’ worth.  Then comes a selection of Scarlatti sonatas, as yet unspecified but you’d expect about six of them, probably extracts from the pianist’s Hyperion album of 16.  Hewitt vaults across time for a bit less than 20 minutes of French music in  Ravel’s Sonatine and Chabrier’s Bouree fantasque, both also recorded on Hyperion.   Oh well, you play to your strengths but, for the dedicated fan, there’s nothing new here.

Angela Hewitt will perform a second program on Saturday May 20 at 7 pm, including Bach’s Partitas 2 and 4, and two Beethoven sonatas: No 2 in C minor and the Moonlight C sharp minor.

 

Saturday May 20

MSO + JAMES MORRISON

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 7:30 pm

After a day-time effort for the younger set (Fri May 19 at 10:30 am for Years 7-12), this is an event for those aged over 13 and ‘all  adult lovers of jazz’.   Trumpet veteran James Morrison, one of the most recognized characters in the field, is the focus on this limited odyssey of a night.  For the jazz/classical fogies, Benjamin Northey conducts the MSO in Gershwin’s tone-poem An American in Paris and the Symphonic Dances from Bernstein’s West Side Story.   The rest is less substantial, although covering a wide ambit.  There’s Spencer Williams’ Basin Street Blues of 1928,  Ray Henderson’s The Birth of the Blues from two years earlier, Benny Goodman’s Seven Come Eleven for his own sextet in 1939, and Cat Anderson’s El Gato, written for Duke Ellington and the Newport Festival of 1958  –  a real test for Morrison.   Other items will be Miles Davis’ All Blues, also from 1958; an Afro-Cuban classic, Manteca, by Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo and Gill Fuller; Weather Report‘s Joe Zawinul’s classic 1977 fusion gem and homage to Charlie Parker, Birdland; then back to 1931 for Ellington’s It Don’t Mean a Thing.   Pretty comfortable listening, nothing too confrontational and experimental, but then the night has to showcase Morrison’s trumpet and much of this will carry out that mission very well.

 

Sunday May 21

SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE

Team of Pianists

Rippon Lea at 6:30 pm

With an obvious Scotch touch and a promised Australian twist, this night in the National Trust stately home’s ballroom stars three singers  – Icon Trio –  and the Team’s own Robert Chamberlain.   Soprano Justine Anderson and mezzos Vivien Hamilton and Jeannie Marsh will lilt their various ways through Ye Banks and Braes, Charlie is my Darlin’, the Eriskay Love Lilt and a few other songs that generally lie undisturbed in the Caledonian ersatz-folk musical crypt.   As well, there’ll be no forgetting Beethoven, who arranged more than his fair share of Scottish airs for sundry vocal combinations.  And contemporary Scottish lights get a guernsey or three; first, the  prolific John Maxwell Geddes will have three extracts from his Lasses, Love and Life song-cycle expounded; we’ll hear two pieces from another cycle  –  William Sweeney’s five-part Luminate: from the Islands; the genders remain imbalanced despite the presence of three excerpts from Claire Liddell’s Five Orkney Scenes; Chamberlain gets to play music by Manchester-born Peter Maxwell Davies and the nationalistic drum beats loud with some more keyboard scraps from Percy Grainger.  Oh, and there’ll be a few Burns recitations to ram the message home.

 

Thursday May 25

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

Melba Quartet

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

What you see is all you’ll get  –  or is it?  The Recital Centre’s handbook promises a two-hour program in the Salon but the only work scheduled is the great Schubert quartet.  For the sum of $199, you and a select group of 64 others will also enjoy preliminary canapes and Narkoojee Winery drinks before and after the performance, an introductory address from the organisation’s executive director Richard Jackson, and the opportunity to mingle with the performers (violinists William Hennessy and Elinor Lee, violist Keith Crellin and cellist Janis Laurs) after they have expended their energies on one of the most draining works in the chamber music repertoire.   As they say in the world of PR, enjoy.

 

Thursday May 25

MSO PLAYS PETRUSHKA

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

Bramwell Tovey, that amiable British pianist/conductor/raconteur, is back in town for a night of Russian music, more or less.  There’s no denying the provenance of Stravinsky’s great ballet of 1911, written before the composer said goodbye to his motherland for many decades; of course, this is the 1947 revision, carried out from the physical safety if copyright badlands of the United States.   The best-known Russian piano concerto, Tchaikovsky No. 1 in B flat minor, will enjoy the services of Cuban-born Spanish resident Jorge Luis Prats who I believe is performing here for the first time.   He is of an age with Tovey so I’m expecting a steady two pairs of hands on the score.   Russian at one remove, Elena Kats-Chernin is this year’s Composer in Residence with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.   To celebrate her position, she has produced Big Rhap and tonight will be its world premiere.  The Tashkent-born composer can always be relied on for accessibility.

This program is to be repeated in Costa Hall Geelong on Friday May 26 at 7:30 pm, and again back in Hamer Hall on Saturday May 27 at 2 pm.

 

Saturday May 27

STEFAN DOHR: FANFARE & FANTASIES

Australian National Academy of Music

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

Dohr has been principal horn with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for 24 years, which is testament to his enduring ability and sense of service – although, once you have a job like that, where else can you go?   He is taking the Academy brass musicians (and others) through a program of ten segments, beginning with the famous and uplifting Fanfare from Dukas’ ballet, La Peri, followed by some more Dukas in the horn test-piece Villanelle arranged with brass accompaniment.   Thierry de Mey’s Table Music, where three or more performers percussionize on available table-tops, provides a break, after which the Belgian-French fin de siecle ambience continues with Trois Melodies by Debussy, arranged for trombone quartet.   Slovenian composer Vito Zuraj jolts us back to de Mey territory with his Quiet Please from 2014, a construct for three brass mouthpieces.    Back where we belong come Henri Tomasi’s Fanfares liturgiques – well, the final Good Friday Procession from this 1947 suite for brass, timpani and drums.   No concert of this nature would be complete with Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, derived from the splendid Third Symphony.   Chou Wen-Chung’s Soliloquy of a Bhiksuni for trumpet solo, brass octet and three percussionists continues the American connection briefly, only to have the night wrenched back to the mainstream with a Tristan Fantasie involving 6 horns, which I assume will offer a digest of the Wagner opera’s main points of interest.  But finally, The Great Satan has the last word with a suite from Bernstein’s West Side Story – arranged for brass and percussion, of course.

 

Monday May 29

Nikolai Demidenko

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

Two composers only on this program – Scarlatti and Schubert.   Like Angela Hewitt (see above – Tuesday May 16), Demidenko has recorded some of the sonatas – 39 on two albums – so he’s got a lot to choose from.  As with Hewitt, at the time of writing, which ones he will perform has not been determined; well, not to the stage of telling us.   He has also recorded one of his Schuberts – the A flat Impromptu from Op. 90.   But the big C minor Sonata, one of the great final three from the composer’s last months, is a fresh offering.  Mind you, I’d be content to hear this musician play even his beloved Medtner live; like Garrick Ohlsson, he enriches us by the insight and devotion he invests in large-scale and small works alike.

 

 

 

Sun April 2

BACH VIOLIN CONCERTOS

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 2:30 pm

That’s mainly what Richard Tognetti and his cohorts are offering: three of the violin concertos.  As far as I can work out, the man himself is soloist in the E Major No. 2, the one that starts with three chords and was later transposed by Bach for harpsichord soloist. Then, I think Tognetti will collaborate with Helena Rathbone in the D minor Double Concerto, forever associated in my memory with Oistrakh father and son – a performance that defies improvement.   Adding Satu Vanska to the mix, the Three Violin Concerto emerges, a reconstruction of the Three Harpsichords Concerto  BWV 1064.  And Tognetti offers some arrangements – the rapid-fire Preludio from the E Major Violin Partita and the E flat Cello Suite’s Sarabande.  Putting some Classical-era flesh into the stew are two Haydn symphonies  –  The Philosopher No. 22 and the G Major No. 27, both written about a decade-and-a-bit after Bach’s death; presumably inserted here on the principle that you can have a bit too much Bach.

This program will be repeated on Monday April 3 at 7:30 pm.

 

Friday April 7

MATTHEW McDONALD: ON THE DOUBLE

Australian National Academy of Music

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

This musician is principal with the Berlin Philharmonic, so he’d be expert in knowing what his instrument can do beyond Bottesini show-pieces and the Mahler Symphony No. 1 slow movement.  He begins with Mozart’s marvellous flight of fancy, the Serenata Notturna with a bass forming part of the concertino.  The evening concludes with Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite, which has a prominent bass role in the 7th movement, Vivo.  In the centre comes Francaix’s Mozart new-look, a 1981 bagatelle for bass and wind instruments based on the Don Giovanni serenade, Deh vieni alla finestra.  Then McDonald centres the solid four-movement Divertimento concertante by Nino Rota.  As well, he outlines some tangos arranged by bassist Peter Grans called Memories from the City of Turku which, in the version I’ve seen, involves only a quartet of basses.

 

Sunday April 9

FIERY FINGERS AND LILTING LOVE SONGS

Team of Pianists

Rippon Lea at 6:30 pm

Beginning its yearly series at the National Trust mansion in Elsternwick, the Team hosts a vocal quartet  –  soprano Cleo Lee-McGowan, mezzo Shakira Dugan, tenor Michael Petruccelli, bass Daniel Carison – in the Brahms Neue Liebeslieder Walzer which I haven’t heard live for many years.   In fact, I can’t recall the singers from the last time but I’m pretty sure that TOP musicians were involved at that recital in the unusual surrounds of 101 Collins Street’s foyer/atrium.  The piano four-hands accompaniment on this night will be provided by senior partners Max Cooke and Darryl Coote.  One of the Team’s products, Kevin Suherman, will play some piano solos: the first two Chopin Scherzi, Rachmaninov’s arrangements of Kreisler’s Liebeslied and Liebesfreud, and Carl Vine’s Five Bagatelles of 1994, the year of Suherman’s birth.  Cooke and Coote are also playing Debussy’s Petite Suite in its original four-hands version.

 

Wednesday April 12

EMMA MATTHEWS

Elizabeth Murdoch Hall

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

Appearing here in the MRC’s Great Performers series, the Australian soprano is working in collaboration with UK pianist/conductor/repetiteur Richard Hetherington.  She starts out well enough with three Schubert lieder (Gretchen am Spinnrade, Du bist die Ruh, An die Musik), followed by a bit of Richard Strauss in Morgen!   But then the operatic temptation proves too much.   She has programmed Bellini’s Ah, non giunge (La Sonnambula), the Mad Scene from that same composer’s Hamlet, Donizetti’s O luce di quest’ anima (Linda di Chamounix),  Bernstein’s Glitter and Be Gay (Candide),  Lehar’s Meine Lippen sie kussen (Giuditta). Victor Herbert’s Art is calling for me (The Enchantress), Kern’s All the Things You Are (Very Warm for May), and a stand-alone from Flanders and Swann: A word on my ear.  It’s rather like the sort of program that Sutherland used to give: a potpourri  with thrilling moments, although I never warmed to arias with piano accompaniment.  What do I know? This will probably be a house-full night.

 

Friday 14 April

ST. JOHN PASSION

Melbourne Bach Choir and Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 3 pm

Last year about this time, the Bach-centric organization presented a fine interpretation of the St. Matthew Passion.  So why not essay another main pillar of the Easter season in the composer’s liturgical chain?   Again, conductor Rick Prakhoff has acquired the services of Andrew Goodwin as his Evangelist – a standout artist in this genre.  Warwick Fyfe resumes the Christus role.  Lorina Gore returns for the soprano arias; Henry Choo takes on the tenor contributions once more; Jeremy Kleeman is turning up for his second year with bass responsibilities.   As well, Prakhoff’s choir is a formidable group, well prepared and capable of striking empathy with those intensely moving chorales that punctuate the work.  As last year, the concert is being given on Good Friday; it shouldn’t make a difference to your reception, but somehow it does.  I’m hoping for another red letter performance along the same lines as in March 2016.

 

Friday April 21

CARMINA BURANA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

Here is the Big Daddy of 20th century choral works, Carl Orff’s percussive and modernist version of medieval Latin/German/Provencal poems, involving three soloists, three choirs and a massive orchestra.  The opening strophes are part of the lexicon of modern advertising, very familiar to audiences the world over.  The music is very attractive, packed with singable melodies and striking illustrative effects, although its modernity has always been a vexed question: it occupies a layer of popular barbarism some streets away from the worlds of more serious composers, and these Carmina are the only pieces by the composer that you hear these days.  Soprano soloist is Eva Kong, the much-tested tenor is John Longmuir, and Warwick Fyfe sings the baritone part.  All are artists with Opera Australia. Yu Long from the China Philharmonic, Shanghai Symphony and Guangzhou Symphony Orchestras conducts and the MSO Chorus is assisted by the National Boys Choir.  As a filler, the MSO will play Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2, beginning with a magical Daybreak scene and ending in one of music’s most erotically suggestive General Dances.

This program will be repeated on Saturday April 22 at 8 pm and on Monday April 24 at 6:30 pm.

 

Saturday April 29

IN HONOUR OF LIFE: 20TH CENTURY SELECTIONS

Ensemble Gombert

Xavier College Chapel at 5:30

To begin a rather shorter year than usual in its Xavier series, this exemplary vocal group is taking on some unusual near-contemporary works, leaving till last one of the greatest in Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir, last sung here in July 2016 by the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge in a perception-sharpening, elegant interpretation.  Leading up to this challenge, John O’Donnell takes his singers through American composer/conductor Steven Sametz’s in time of, an e e cummings setting in its 1997 a cappella version for that fine group Chanticleer; Sametz is the only writer on this program who is still alive.  English musician John McCabe is represented by his double-choir Motet of 1979 to verses by the Irish poet John Clarence Mangan; this musician’s compositions are rarely heard here – in fact, my main memory of him is as a pianist working through Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis in the great days of the Port Fairy Music Festival under the late lamented Michael Easton. Welsh composer Mervyn Burtch’s Three Sonnets of John Donne sets some familiar lines in Batter my heart, Oh my blacke Soule! and Death be not proud – all in a simple SATB format.  Czech composer Antonin Tucapsky’s In honorem vitae suite of five madrigals on texts by Horace is also written for 4-part choir.

 

Sunday April 30

BEYOND BAROQUE

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 2:30 pm

Principal violist with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Christopher Moore will be the soloist here with the Telemann Concerto in G Major and a reconstruction by Wilfried Fischer of Bach’s E Major Keyboard/Violin Concerto (see above the Australian Chamber Orchestra on April 2/3).  Director William Hennessy surrounds these with a C. P. E. Bach Sinfonia in E minor, arranged for strings alone and called by the strange sobriquet Fandango, which I can’t hear in it.  Another Telemann piece, the Volker-Ouverture, is bracketed with the composer’s viola concerto; the overture-suite gives mini-pictures of the French (by means of two minuets), Turks, Swiss, Muscovites, and Portuguese before throwing the game away and ending with musical portraits of non-nationalistic types in Les boiteux (hobblers) and Les coureurs (runners).   Spreading the family joy around will be eldest son W. F. Bach’s Sinfonia in F Major which adds a pair of minuets to the normal three-movement structure.

This program will be repeated on Thursday May 4 in the Deakin Edge, Federation Square at 7:30 pm

 

 

 

Wednesday March 1

THE ROMANTICS

Seraphim Trio

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

It’s been quite a while – well, a year –  since I heard this piano trio in action.  To their credit, the musicians persist in presenting recital series despite their involvement in full-time careers: pianist Anna Goldsworthy at the Elder Conservatorium, cellist Timothy Nankervis among the Sydney Symphony Orchestra cellos, and violist Helen Ayres doing guest duties with the London Philharmonic.   For this Salon appearance, the program is mainstream: Beethoven’s Ghost and Mendelssohn in D minor.  Fine, although the musicians are falling back on repertoire that is all-too-familiar to them and to their audience, works that the trio has been playing throughout its 23-year-long career.  This is the second of a four-part series in which each recital holds two masterpieces;  I suppose dealing with old friends saves on rehearsal time.

 

Thursday March 2

CONCERTO FOR PIANO AND TOY BAND

Adam Simmons

fortyfive downstairs at  7:30 pm

You’d think that a toy band was just that – something like the extraneous instruments in that popular symphony by Leopold Mozart/Michael Haydn/Anybody Else.  But no: the name refers to an all-embracing Creative Music Ensemble headed by Adam Simmons who attempts in this time-honoured form to fuse the worlds of jazz and serious music, as well as melding a few other juxtapositions of what could be regarded as opposites.   The composition is to last an hour but the implications are that Busoni/Alkan-style concentration is not part of the experience.  The soloist will be Michael Kieran Harvey, one of this country’s more expert apologists for challenging musical experiences.

This program is repeated on Friday March 3 and Saturday March 4 at 7:30 pm, and on Sunday March 5 at 3 pm.

 

Thursday March 2

ROCOCO CELLO

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Deakin Edge, Federation Square at 7:30 pm

Starting off with a modified bang, the MCO hosts Li-Wei Qin, a fine cellist who is always a pleasure to hear in live performance.  The players are being conducted by Michael Dahlenburg, himself a graduate from the organization’s cello desks.  Li-Wei takes on the Variations on a Rococo Theme by Tchaikovsky: a killer of a piece that tests technique and interpretative skill pretty sorely, to the point that successful performances are rare.  Also programmed is C. P. E. Bach’s Concerto in A, although whether the major or minor one is unclear from my source.   For relief, the MCO plays the Idomeneo Overture and Chaconne/Pas seul by Mozart, and Haydn’s Letter V Symphony No. 88 in G.

This program will be repeated in the Melbourne Recital Centre on Sunday March 5 at 2:30 pm.

 

Friday March 3

JURASSIC PARK

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 7:30 pm

Last year, the final film/live-soundtrack MSO events made a big deal of promoting the first 2017 experience in the same mould: Spielberg’s first Jurassic Park adventure.  It’s possible that I saw this epic the whole way through; if so, I’ve forgotten the most important plot element – who gets killed.   Slightly less significant, I can’t recall anything of John Williams’score – not even the main title, which is the composer’s finest achievement in many another blockbuster.   Still, the orchestra can always rely on success with these music-fore-fronting occasions as Melbourne’s public regularly packs out each session.   A boost for the coffers and, of course, the chance to be associated with a familiar eye-catching poster.   But the best thing I find in these performances  –  so different to the theatre experience  –  is that nobody talks and the Arts Centre ushers (most of them) keep a sharp eye out for idiots with iPhones who want to take pictures of – the pictures!

This program will be repeated on Saturday March 4 at 1 pm and 7:30 pm.

 

Saturday March 4

2017 OPENING CONCERT: ENIGMA

Australian National Academy of Music Orchestra

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

Into the second year of his stint as chief conductor of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Nicholas Carter is visiting ANAM to direct an all-English program that features two favourites and a couple of rarities.   Clearly, the night’s apex comes in Elgar’s sterling sequence of variations, the composer’s first international success.   For a bit more retrospective entertainment, Carter will take the Academy’s strings through Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis which should resonate to pleasurable effect in the Town Hall’s wooden environment.   A tad more contemporary, Britten’s 1940 Sinfonia da Requiem, a memorial to the composer’s parents, is rarely heard live, even though it is Britten’s major purely orchestral composition.  The evening begins with Thomas Ades’s Three Studies from Couperin: Les amusemens, Les tours de passe-passe, and L’ame-en-peine – all concluding pieces from the 7th, 13th and 22nd ordres of the Pieces de clavecin, and all finely honed arrangements to challenge their young interpreters.

 

Thursday March 9

YOUTH  AND THE DANCE

Selby & Friends

Deakin Edge, Federation Square at 7:30 pm

Three works by relatively youthful writers begin Kathryn Selby’s recital series.  They don’t come much younger than Beethoven’s E flat Piano Trio Op. 1 No. 1, dating from when the composer was about 23 and here sustaining an untroubled aural landscape.  The F Major Piano Trio Op. 18 by Saint-Saens is attractively rustic in its inner movements and comes from the composer’s 28th year; young for a man who lived to be 86.  And the figure of an Old Reliable lurches forward in Dvorak’s Dumky, coming from the composer’s 49th year and based on dance, if not exactly youthful (he died aged 62).   Selby’s partners/friends for these three scores are violinist Grace Clifford, back for a while from the US, and American cellist Clancy Newman who has become a Selby regular.

 

Thursday March 9

MSO PLAYS MAHLER 7

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

Beavering enthusiastically through his cycle, Sir Andrew Davis is drawing close to an end with this one, the last of the central set of non-vocal symphonies.  With its two Nachtmusik movements and a powerful central nightmare, this score presents a musical imagist’s paradise, although the outer movements push against this with firmly argued declamation.   But the sounds of mandolin, guitar, cowbells and that oddity, the Tenorhorn, support the claims for this work being of more than usually high orchestrational, travelogue-coloured interest.  As well,  the MSO Chorus puts in an appearance for David Stanhope’s 1999 The Heavens Declare, a setting of part of Psalm 19 and probably – in its text, at least – more suitable as a prelude to the next symphony in Davis’ Mahler pilgrimage.

This program will be repeated on Friday March 10 in Costa Hall, Geelong at 7:30 pm minus Stanhope’s The Heavens Declare, and back in Hamer Hall on Saturday March 11 at 2 pm with the Stanhope score restored.

 

Saturday March 11

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

Victorian Opera

Playhouse, Melbourne Arts Centre at 7:30 pm

The production is being presented at 7:30 pm on Tuesday March 14, Wednesday March 15, Friday March 17, and at 1 pm on Saturday March 18.

This is an opera: La bella dormente nel bosco, written by Respighi and premiered in 1922. Composed for a marionette company, the work calls primarily for puppets, as well as for singers – a large slew of them – and an orchestra light on wind.   The composer revised it for a ‘normal’ production (children instead of marionettes) 12 years later, and a further revision followed Respighi’s death, that one overseen by his widow.   The VO is clearly mounting the original with puppets constructed by Joe Blanck, while the vocalists and instrumentalists are intended to be off-stage or in the pit which in the Playhouse is better suited to something like Into the Woods  .  .  .  still, the original scoring is pretty light. Phoebe Briggs, the company’s Head of Music, conducts.   As a novelty, they don’t come more refreshing than this work.  The cast includes Carlos E. Barcenas, Kirilie Blythman, Liane Keegan, Jacqueline Porter and Timothy Reynolds.

 

Sunday March 12

HOANG’S GRAND TRIO

Hoang Pham Productions

Melbourne Recital Centre at 5 pm

I’m all for the enterprising artist who takes his career into his own hands and have admiration for pianist Hoang Pham who has set up his own company, as well as taking on work from other quarters.  To begin his operations for this year at the MRC, he has acquired the services of veteran violinist William Hennessy and another young entrepreneur on the Melbourne scene, cellist Christopher Howlett.   The trio is taking on three cornerstones of the repertoire, without any apparent detours into distracting byways.   Rachmaninov’s G minor, the Elegiaque in one movement, is followed by another G minor gem, Smetana’s Op. 15 written as a memorial to his daughter Bedriska who had died recently from scarlet fever.   Finally,  we enjoy that acme of trios, Beethoven’s warm-heartedly aristocratic Archduke in B flat where equable performers like these can hardly go wrong.

 

Tuesday March 14

Daniil Trifonov

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

Starting this year’s Great Performers series sponsored by the Recital Centre itself, Trifonov is known (well, to me) for competition wins: First Prize at the Rubinstein in 2011 , Gold Medal and Grand Prix at the Tchaikovsky in the same year.   Since then, he’s been busy enough recording and touring; this night’s appearance comes nine days after his 26th birthday,and follows a pretty tight schedule of appearances in Sydney and Perth as recitalist and concerto soloist, so he isn’t wasting any time.  Tonight he plays a Schumann group – the Kinderszenen and Kreisleriana with the hefty Op. 7 Toccata in the middle.   Then comes a selection from the 24 Preludes and Fugues by Shostakovich, and the Three Movements from Petrushka, which Stravinsky organised for Arthur Rubinstein although the redoubtable pianist never actually sat down and recorded them properly.   Trifonov is setting out to show his gifts across the spectrum, from the deceptively simple Schumann scenes to the dexterous leaps and scrappy brouhaha of the great ballet.

 

Friday March 17

MSO PLAYS TCHAIKOVSKY

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

Speaking of Daniil Trifonov, here he is in concerto-fronting guise, the MSO under Sir Andrew Davis supporting him in Rachmaninov No. 1, a work you rarely hear live these days.   Still, Trifonov will have performed it three times with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (and played there the same solo recital program outlined above), as well as performing the Tchaikovsky Concerto No. 1 in Perth, before he hits Melbourne.   Davis brackets this voluble effusion with Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel and the Tchaikovsky Pathetique Symphony No. 6, which offers you a range from brilliantly scored buffoonery to wrenching depression, all in the space of two hours.  A sad state when a not-exactly-unknown concerto offers the only glimmers of originality on this menu.

This program is to be repeated on Saturday March 18 at 8 pm and on Monday March 20 at 6:30 pm.

 

Friday March 24

THE LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

The last part of this occasion doesn’t need spelling out.  Sir Andrew Davis will direct –  as he did for many years in London – the usual Proms rabble-rousing roster of Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs, Arne’s Rule Britannia (with an as yet unnamed soprano and the MSO Chorus), Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 interrupted by the non-obligatory chorus, and probably a run-through of Parry’s Jerusalem, possibly followed up with an all-in You’ll Never Walk Alone.   There’s a bit of home-grown nationalism on display in Grainger’s Irish Tune from County Derry and Country Gardens (English).   A rousing opening to the night comes through Berlioz’s Le Corsaire Overture (as misplaced here as the Roman Carnival was at the otherwise all-Russian program that started this year’s free Myer Bowl concerts).   But the interesting content arrives with the superb Song of Summer tone poem by Delius, some Facade scraps by Walton, and a completely out-of-the-box resurrection of John Ireland’s Piano Concerto of 1930 which I, along with many another spectator, will be hearing live for the first time.

This program will be repeated on Saturday March 25 at 8 pm.

 

Saturday March 25

MESSIAEN

Australian National Academy of Music

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

Having a formidable Messiaen expert in residence has caused the ANAM authorities to dedicate a night to the Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jesus.  It’s not clear exactly what is going to happen because the participants will include Hill himself, but also an unknown quantity of ANAM pianists.   Fair enough: the work, in its proper form, lasts for two hours and, although we’ve seen some pianists carry out the whole task by themselves, it speaks volumes for Hill’s pedagogy that he is sharing this labour with his charges.  There’s no denying that the Vingt regards can induce transcendent illumination and mental delight, but it can irritate to breaking-point many listeners who find it impossible to enter the dense and clangorous sound-world of this remarkable composer.  No, not easy listening but well worth the effort.

 

Thursday March 30

MSO AND THE AUSTRALIAN STRING QUARTET

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 8 pm

Since the first violin of the Australian String Quartet is Dale Barltrop, who is also one of the MSO’s concertmasters, it’s not surprising to see the chamber music ensemble appearing as guests in this program.  The problem comes in finding a work for string quartet and orchestra; there are less than you’d expect but Barltrop & Co. have revived Matthew Hindson’s 15-year-old The Rave and the Nightingale, which takes its fanciful flight from Schubert’s final G Major String Quartet and suggests what Schubert could have been writing if he were our contemporary.   Apparently, he might have chosen the path of popular music because he wrote so many songs  –  a finding that suggests an imaginative vault I find hard to negotiate.  Still, to each his own fantasy and Hindson follows the implied Granados’ avian scene-stealer with some coloristic solo violin work  .  .  .  and the piece is 15 minutes long.   Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto in E flat for five winds and ten strings would seem to be the sole program component that ventures outside the night’s dominant instrumental format and it lasts about as long as Hindson’s piece.  The evening’s major work is real Schubert, his Death and the Maiden String Quartet No. 14   –   the predecessor to the work that Hindson’s Rave/Nightingale employs.  This scorching D minor masterpiece will be offered in orchestral guise, which I assume implies strings only in the well-ploughed Australian Chamber Orchestra pattern.

The program will be repeated in Robert Blackwood Hall, Monash University on Friday March 31 at 8 pm.

 

 

 

 

A few Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concerts have been left off the list, mainly because they don’t raise my jaded eyebrows.  The organization is handling a good deal of material throughout the month, apart from the events itemised below.  On Thursday February 16, Indian film composer AR Rahman is appearing at the Bowl, fronting his own music although not doing very much as UK conductor Matt Dunkley seems to be directing matters.  In Hamer Hall on Friday February 24, the film Satan Jawa will be screened while the MSO performs Iain Grandage and Rahayu Supanggah’s score live.  The following night, Jose Carreras finishes up the Australian leg of his final world tour at the Margaret Court Arena, helped along his way by Antoinette Halloran while the MSO provides underpinning for the predictable selections from operas, operettas and musicals.

 

Saturday February 4

EAST MEETS WEST

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 7 pm

It’s Chinese New Year again, although this concert falls outside the calendar week of celebration.  Popular composer/conductor Tan Dun is back to direct the MSO in yet another program that makes little sense on paper, even if it’s harmless fun in its delivery. The bookends of this night, which comes four days after a similarly structured event in Auckland, are Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite; perhaps both have some combustible connection to the Year of the Rooster,  In the centre are three works by Chinese composers, including the conductor’s own Farewell My Concubine Concerto for Piano and Peking Opera Soprano; the volatile keyboard part is played by Dutch contemporary music expert Ralph van Raat and the singer is Xiao Di.  Also on offer are 100 Birds Flying Towards the Phoenix by Guan Xia (who has also written a Farewell My Concubine score) featuring Liu Wenwen’s suona, a double-reed instrument with a similar penetrating timbre to any self-respecting Peking Opera soprano, and Tan Weiwei’s Song Lines.   Tan could be the well-publicized Mandopop singer, but I doubt it.

 

Saturday February 4

‘TIS PITY

Victorian Opera

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

A year-opening oddity, this is an operatic fantasia, the music provided by company artistic director Richard Mills, its libretto composed by Meow Meow, Cameron Menzies and Mills. The titular reference to John Ford’s rarely-staged tragedy seems ill-suited to the fantasia’s promised subject matter  –  ‘selling the skin and the teeth’  .  .  .  whatever that actually means.   Meow Meow will be partnered by Kanen Breen as the two-hander vaults across the centuries and treats of the Ewigweibliche in her several forms, mostly as a moral outcast or solitary: courtesan, concubine, conqueror, queen and ‘sing song girl’.  The heart of the matter comes in the blurb’s self description as a song cycle.  And the texts are wide-ranging.

 

Sunday February 5

MURDER & REDEMPTION

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 2:30 pm

Pekka Kuusisto is director and soloist for the ACO’s first subscription series concerts in 2017.   Also featured is Sam Amidon, American singer and banjo player, who is probably involved in the afternoon’s two brackets of American folk songs and possibly will participate in an arrangement by Kuusisto of the Shaker tune Simple Gifts.   Pushing even further into the US musical mythos,  the orchestra performs John Adams’ Shaker Loops, its four movements split around Brackett’s seminal hymn.  Which covers the redemption element, while murder is exemplified by Janacek’s Kreutzer Sonata Quartet No. 1, which took its inspiration from Tolstoy’s overwrought, repulsive novella.   The quartet will be performed in string orchestral format, of course, so that the psychological drama can be delivered with even more heightened theatrics than usual.

This program will be repeated at 7:30 pm on Monday February 6.

 

Wednesday February 8

MSO PLAYS THE RUSSIANS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Sidney Myer Music Bowl at 7:30 pm

And the musicians will get around to Russian music, but only after a bracing overture: the Roman Carnival by Berlioz   –   one of the repertoire’s finest fire-crackers and a test in vivacity for conductor Benjamin Northey and his band.   Another educational opportunity is wasted as the night moves into predictable waters with the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 2, Jayson Gillham doing the solo honours.  A suite from Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty pushes all the predictable buttons, the inter-movement applause (a specialty of this audience) an inevitability.   Oddly, Northey and Co. finish up with a score that used to be reserved for the end of this whole free concert series: Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.   In past years, these free concerts have served as a mode by which the musicians can play themselves in for a heavy year’s work through familiar repertoire; not much has changed.

 

Saturday February 11

MSO PLAYS ROMEO & JULIET

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Sidney Myer Music Bowl at 7:30 pm

This program carries on from the first night in the series and is even more Russian in content.  The doomed lovers tonight emerge through Prokofiev’s ballet score: one of the last century’s orchestral marvels, so finished and evocative that it always delights, especially in a staged performance where the calisthenics can get you down.   Once again, this audience claps everything: Montagues and Capulets, The Young Juliet, the Death of Tybalt. Mind you, this isn’t one of the set suites; just an amalgam under the descriptor ‘excerpts’. For 2017, the MSO’s Composer-in-Residence is Elena Kats-Chernin and, for her first official outing, she offers a score from 2009, Golden Kitsch, written for and performed tonight by Sydney percussionist Claire Edwardes  –  with, one assumes,  the orchestra’s support.  The composer has found her inspiration in Klimt paintings, quite a few of the most popular heavy on gold – The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer encapsulating the kitsch that Kats-Chernin is celebrating.   To end, Benjamin Northey takes the players through one of their show-pieces: Rachmaninov’s three Symphonic Dances.

 

Wednesday February 15

MSO PLAYS LA VALSE

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Sidney Myer Music Bowl at 7:30 pm

Here is a night with lots of waltzes, although the programmers found it hard to leave their Russian motif alone.   Before the light-hearted comes Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka in the 1947 version; always a pleasure to experience, especially the many folk-tunes embedded in its crowd scenes that the composer refused to acknowledge during his lifetime.  The title work is, of course, Ravel’s phantasmagoria in which the infectious whirling action becomes impressively hysteric and disjunct.   A harmless oddity emerges in Korngold’s three-movement Straussiana suite – a polka, mazurka and waltz using Johann Strauss’s music taken from unfamiliar sources and written for high school musicians.  To end, Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier Suite reveals a composer on whom Korngold drew heavily for his heftier works.   Opulent, sparkling and loaded with exquisite detail like the luminous Presentation of the Rose sequence, it serves as a reminder of the composer’s recoil to Toryism after the striking operatic marvels of Salome and Elektra.  Oh, Benjamin Northey has a night off so that Kazuki Yamada can dominate from the podium; he’s permanent conductor of the Japan Philharmonic and is a welcome and regular guest with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.

 

Friday February 24

NICHOLAS CARTER CONDUCTS TCHAIKOVSKY 4

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

This ex-Proms series begins tonight with the prospect of yet another predictable menu.  Young Australian conductor Nicholas Carter opens accounts with the Prokofiev Classical Symphony, the precocious first of the seven that the composer produced and a barrel of restrained Haydnesque laughs, if some interpreters are inclined to over-egg its humour. The night’s title work is another affair altogether: a Fate-encrusted sequence of four well-known movements, wrenchingly fraught with emotion at its opening, Tatiana/Lensky-lite in the Andantino, full of balletic beans in the scherzo, and a chain of welters on the hapless Birch Tree folk-tune in a lashing finale.  Guest Anne-Marie Johnson takes centre-stage for the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor: a sure-fire crowd-pleaser and, I’d guess, bound to attract a full house.

 

Saturday February 25

HANDEL’S MESSIAH

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

Paul Dyer and his fine orchestra are stealing a march on everybody with this pre-season airing of Handel’s famous oratorio.   I’ve always thought Messiah was more relevant to Easter than Christmas; so did the composer, if his Dublin premiere date is any guide (which it probably isn’t) and if the concentration of Passion/Resurrection themes in Parts Two and Three is taken as outweighing the Nativity message of Part the First that has ensured the work’s usual allocation to Christmas.   Dyer is also bringing his Brandenburg Choir to Melbourne and that group is well worth hearing in a chorus-rich score.  The advertised soloists at time of writing are: Spanish soprano Lucia Martin-Carton, Greek alto Nicholas Spanos, American tenor Kyle Bielfield, and local David Greco singing the bass arias.  These promise to be a mixed bag, the upper voices experienced in Baroque operations, Bielfield sitting on the cusp of serious and pop arenas, while Greco recently appeared at the Peninsula Summer Music Festival in a program of Schubert lieder.  But that’s part of the ABO ethos: surprises.  And some of them are strikingly fine.

The oratorio will be presented again on Sunday February 26 at 5 pm

 

Sunday February 26

MOZART MARATHON

3MBS FM

Hawthorn Arts Centre from 9:30 am

This all-day sucker comprises six sessions spread across twelve hours: 9:30 am, 11:30 am, 2pm, 4 pm, 6 pm, 8 pm.   You could stay for the whole thing or you can do the eastern suburbs thing and spare yourself overload by dipping in and out.   The programs have probably been settled by now but I can’t find them.  What anyone can get to without much trouble is information on some of the works to be performed: the A Major Piano Concerto K. 414, the Clarinet Concerto, the Rondo alla turca Piano Sonata in A, the Gran Partita Serenade in B flat with its incomparable Adagio, the Eine kleine Nachtmusik Serenade, the last Piano Trio K. 548, and something unidentified for piano four-hands – one of the four complete and authenticated sonatas?   As for the participants, you are assured a lot of familiar ensembles: Goldner String Quartet, Australian Piano Quartet, Arcadia Quartet,  Sutherland Trio, Melbourne Chamber Orchestra and an unknown quantity to me called the 3MBS Choir, directed by Michael Leighton Jones.   Pianists are numerous: Timothy Young, Elyane Laussade, Tristan Lee, Kristian Chong, Kathryn Selby, Stefan Cassomenos, Daniel de Borah.   You’re offered several violinists including Curt Thompson, Wilma Smith, Rebecca Chan, and Sophie Rowell; cellists Christopher Howlett and Svetlana Bogosavljevic, viola Christopher Moore, veteran oboist Jeffrey Crellin, clarinetists David Griffiths and Paul Dean, and tenor Andrew Goodwin.  There’s also an appearance by Richard Mills in his capacity as artistic director of Victorian Opera; whether he’s bringing along the company is unclear.

 

Monday February 27

THE CLASSICAL TRIO

Seraphim Trio

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

This popular ensemble, having despatched the complete Beethoven and Schubert oeuvres over recent years, now moves into the solid mainstream without any deviations – sort of. In 2017, the series heading runs The History of the Piano Trio in Ten and a Half Chapters. Tonight, the musicians perform the Haydn Piano Trio in G, called the Gypsy because of its rapid-fire finale with atmospheric early-Ziegeuner references.   With the Schubert nine-minute Notturno as a makeweight (but very popular in My Favourite Chamber Music lists), the evening’s main constituent is Mozart in B flat of 1786, one of the half-dozen works in this form from the composer.   All this is fair enough, as a solid Classical start to this four-part review.  The Romantics will feature Schubert in E flat and Mendelssohn in D minor; The Nationalists are Brahms No. 1 and Dvorak’s Dumky; The Moderns are Ravel, Shostakovich in E minor, and Sculthorpe’s From Irkanda 3   –   the only surviving movement from a 1961 trio and, although just six minutes long, evocative of the composer’s lonely emotional landscape.

 

Tuesday February 28

Eighth Blackbird

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

This ensemble has visited Australia a few times but not previously under the Musica Viva umbrella.   A sextet  –  flute, clarinet, violin/viola/,cello, percussion, piano  – it is a crossover group that specialises in music by living composers.  Pretty much home-grown, though; the only non-American on this night is Sydney writer Holly Harrison with a MV commission: Lobster Tales and Turtle Soup, inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.   The evening’s other four elements are relatively fresh USA products: Nico Muhly’s 2012 Doublespeak, written for Eighth Blackbird and a tribute to Philip Glass, so starting out with a close triple canon; Bryce Dessner’s Murder Ballades of 2013, also composed for this ensemble, comprising seven movements with elliptical titles lasting 20 minutes in all; Ted Hearne’s By-By Huey from 2014, memorialising the murder of Black Panthers’ co-founder Huey P. Newton – another Eighth Blackbird commission; and Timo Andres’ Checkered Shade, also from 2014, also written for these players, and inspired by drawings created by Pennsylvania artist Astrid Bowlby.  Not your typical MV presentation, but maybe there’s a segment of the patronage crying out for US avant-garde.

The program will be repeated on Saturday March 4 at 7 pm.

 

Tuesday February 28

MAXIM VENGEROV

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

The gala opening to the MSO’s season features the excellent Russian violinist as soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.   Nothing amiss with hearing a master play a masterpiece, but no marks for originality, especially when you consider the violinist’s impressive repertoire.   Benjamin Northey conducts, but then yields place to Vengerov who will direct the only other work programmed: Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade  –  that voluptuous four-movement suite that almost plays itself.  Don’t know anything about the violinist’s conducting abilities but I doubt that he’ll be exercised by this warhorse that is nevertheless very appropriate for a festive concert where nobody wants profundities or pontifications. Still, I can’t help feeling that an opportunity has been missed to raise the bar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s a tale of two festivals, January.   I can’t find much else happening apart from the Peninsula Summer Music and Organs of the Ballarat Goldfields Festivals  –  veterans of previous years with varying standards of satisfaction and performance.  This year, fortunately, their timing barely overlaps although there is a bit of program carry-over from the peninsula to the country.

 

Monday January 2

CANTATE AMOROSE

Ensemble 624

Hurley Vineyard, Balnarring at 6 pm

This starts off the festival’s serious content in the Mornington Peninsula chain of small-scale events; well, that descriptor applies to just about the entire 11 days.   The hosts for this occasion – Ensemble 642 – here constitute Hannah Lane playing harps, and Nicholas Pollock on theorbo, lutes and guitar, with guest soprano Karen Fitz-Gibbon.  This trio combines to sing the lyrics of Barbara Strozzi, the iconic Baroque female composer and sonorous equivalent of Artemisia Gentileschi.   We’re promised arias and dances, which broaden the field as Strozzi wrote only vocal music.

 

Wednesday January 4

THE NOBLE PATRON

Acacia Quartet

Lindenderry, Red Hill at 5 pm

The only Acacias I’ve come across (I think) were a wind quintet some weeks ago. Here is a string quartet from Sydney which has performed previously at the Peninsula festival.  This time around, the group performs Beethoven’s Harp in E flat and the first of Haydn’s two Lobkowitz Op. 77 compositions, the one in G Major – written for the nobleman who would become one of Beethoven’s long-suffering patrons and who actually commissioned his Harp work.  They don’t come much nobler.

 

Thursday January 5

GLASS AT PORT PHILLIP

Acacia Quartet

Port Phillip Estate, Red Hill South at 6 pm

The Acacias are playing two works by Philip Glass – the 10-minute Quartet No. 2, Company (originally written for a dramatisation of Beckett’s novella),  and (double the length) the Quartet No. 7 which was composed for use by the Nederlands Dans Theater.  As well, we are promised music by Gershwin (Lullaby, you’d assume) and something from Nick Wales – presumably Harbour Light which, with the Glass No. 2 and  Gershwin’s bagatelle, featured in the Acacia’s Opera House recital last month.

 

Friday January 6

BEETHOVEN’S SCOTTISH SONGS

Elgee Park Gallery, Dromana at 5 pm

Assuming these are the 25 Songs of Op. 108, the number that can be programmed is plentiful; only five have to be omitted for practical reasons.  The original asks for solo voice, mixed chorus, violin. cello and piano.  The instruments are fine: Rachael Beesley at the top, Erin Helyard on keyboard, Natasha Kraemer spinning the bass line.  The one singer is British soprano/director Sophie Daneman.  So Nos. 1, 9, 13, 19 and 22 miss the bill as they involve two, three or four voices.  Some of the tunes are very familiar but the interest for me lies in the settings.

 

Saturday January 7

GREAT ROMANTICS

Kevin Suherman

Church of St. John the Evangelist, Flinders at 11 am

Recently, this young pianist won the Melbourne Recital Centre’s Great Romantics Competition, and here he is going to re-visit some of his repertoire.  The definites are Chopin’s Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante, and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 – very voluble works for this small church.   Added to this,  there will be some unidentified Mendelssohn to round out the package.

 

Saturday January 7

A SCHUBERTIAN DELIGHT

David Greco and Erin Helyard

Church of St. John the Evangelist at 3 pm

The Australian baritone, back after spending 7 or 8 years in Europe, here collaborates with Helyard in Death and the Maiden, Im Fruhling and The Wanderer  .  .  .  among other lieder, you’d suppose.  The pair is presenting the program as something of a musicological exercise, employing performance tropes of the period – whatever they may be –  Helyard working through his accompaniments on a Graf piano.

 

Saturday January 7

BAROQUE OPERA GALA

Church of St. John the Evangelist, Flinders at 7 pm

We’ve got When I am laid from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, part of the same composer’s The Faerie Queen, Handel’s Lascia la spina from The Triumph of Time and Truth oratorio,a bit of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and some Vivaldi.  The performers are David Greco, mezzo Sally-Anne Russell, Ensemble 624 (see Monday January 2), and a Baroque string quartet headed by festival director/violinist Julie Fredersdorff, Lizzy Walsh playing second violin, Laura Vaughan on gamba and lirone, Natalie Kraemer again bringing up the cello rear.  The performance is to take place on the church lawn – not my favourite site but the organisers obviously feel that the open air caters best to their patrons’ passion for the unbuttoned.

 

Sunday January 8

DUO FRANCAIS

Lisa Stewart and Stefan Cassomenos

Church of St. John the Evangelist at 11 am

A violin/piano recital of three sonatas: Debussy in G minor, Ravel No. 2 in G Major and Messiaen’s early Theme and Variations – all of them written within a 15-year time bracket. Stewart, first desk in the Acacia Quartet, has been a regular collaborator with orchestras across the country.  Cassomenos has a name for taking up every challenge, although there’s not much here that raises the perspiration level.

 

Sunday January 8

DE PROFUNDIS

David Greco & Latitude 37

Church of St. John the Evangelist at 5 pm

The event takes its impetus from Nicolaus Bruhns’ setting of Psalm 130 – gloomy and ornate simultaneously.  Other works include Biber’s Nisi Dominus and other pieces by Buxtehude, Muffat and the organist predecessor of Bach, Franz Tunder.  The usual Latitude 37 members – Julie Fredersdorff, Laura Vaughan, Donald Nicholson – are assisted by Ensemble 642’s Hannah Lane on triple harp.    Nicholson abandons his usual harpsichord for the St. John’s organ.

 

Wednesday January 11

NOTTURNO

Hoang Pham Trio

Moorooduc Estate, Moorooduc at 5 pm

The well-known Melbourne pianist has acquired a violinist (Katherine Lukey)  and cellist (Paul Ghica) to form an ensemble that is presenting a chaste enough program.  Obviously, they begin with the delectable Schubert miniature of the program’s title, then proceed to the evening’s meat in Dvorak Op. 65 in F minor.   Both Lukey and Ghica have been heard recently in the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra; how they will combine with Pham is anyone’s guess, but hope springs eternal.

The program will be repeated at 7 pm.

 

Thursday January 12

TREASURES OF THE HIGH BAROQUE

Morning Star Estate, Mount Eliza at 7:30 pm

The draw-card here is Genevieve Lacey, bringing her recorders to bear on a program of Telemann, Bach and Handel.  She is joined by violinist Lars Ulrik Mortenson, artistic director of Concerto Copenhagen, and bassoonist Jane Gower of the same Danish ensemble,  the Academy of Ancient Music and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. With this rich expertise, here is one of the festival’s red-letter elements.

 

Friday January 13

ACIS AND GALATEA

Church of St. John the Evangelist, Flinders at 7:30 pm

Handel’s opera-of-sorts, in its generally practised form, has four main roles, as well as a chorus.  Sophie Daneman, who is singing some of Beethoven’s Scottish Songs on  Friday January 6, sang a solo role in the recording made of this work by Les Arts Florissants; she is stage director and singing coach for this open-air church lawn mounting of the work.  Donald Nicholson, the keyboard in Latitude 37, will be directing the music, which is supplied by the Festival Academy singers and instrumentalists who will have worked with assorted Baroque music experts in preparing this pastoral entertainment – hard to define as fish or fowl or good red oratorio.

This program is repeated on Saturday January 14 at 7:30 pm.

 

Friday January 13

HOMAGE A RAMEAU

Choir of Newman College

St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Ballarat at 7:30 pm

Newman College’s musical eminence, Gary Ekkel, is taking his singers and a baroque orchestra through a concert spirituel as it would have been done in the Tuileries about 1750. The night’s title has me perplexed, though; from my meagre research sources, I can’t see Rameau’s name featuring strongly among the composers performed at these concerts, originally held in Holy Week because every other entertainment venue was closed.  Still, it’s a homage and God knows his successors had a lot to thank the great man for.

 

Saturday January 14

ORGAN RECITAL

Giampaolo do Rosa

St. John’s Anglican Church, Creswick at 10 am

This musician from Rome, well-travelled through Italy and the Iberian peninsula, is playing Bach and Faure on the Creswick church’s Fincham and Hobday instrument of 1889.  The Bach could be anything but the Faure is a mystery; the only organ work I could find is an Ave Maria involving two sopranos.  Could be an arranged nocturne, barcarolle, or song.

The program will be repeated at 12 noon.

 

Saturday January 14

CLASSICAL GUITAR DUO

Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Neil St. Uniting Church, Ballarat

The brothers are always worth hearing but there are no details available concerning their program.  Without any substantiation beyond a hunch, I think they could re-present their October program from the Melbourne Recital Centre which promoted a new CD.  This comprised arrangements by Grigoryan pere, Edward, of music by Elgar, Dvorak, Faure, Rachmaninov and Falla.  But then, this could all be nonsense and the brothers might be set to play anything from their expansive repertoire.

 

Saturday January 14

TRIOS – TELEMANN, HANDEL AND VIVALDI

Genevieve Lacey, Jane Gower, Lars Ulrik Mortenson

Mary’s Mount Centre, Ballarat at 8 pm

See Thursday January 12 above.

 

Sunday January 15

ACIS AND GALATEA

Mary’s Mount Centre, Ballarat at 3 pm

See Friday January 13 above.

 

Sunday January 15

RECITAL FOR ORGAN AND THREE TRUMPETS

Anthony Halliday, Joel Brennan, Mark Fitzpatrick, Yoram Levy

St Patrick’s Cathedral, Ballarat at 8 pm

The definite program elements are Britten’s 3-minute  Fanfare for St. Edmondsbury that doesn’t use Halliday’s organ, and a Telemann concerto for three trumpets.  For the rest, we are promised an acoustic exploration as the brass players move to different places in the cathedral.

 

Monday January 16

RECITAL FOR ORGAN AND TRUMPET

Rhys Boak and Bruno Siketa

St. John’s Anglican Church, Dunolly at 10 am.

Am assuming this will feature music played on the CD from Move Records that features these artists in collaboration.  See a review above – August 9 – headed What’s your fancy?

This program will be played again at 12 noon.

 

Monday January 16

ORGAN RECITAL

Rhys Boak

St Michael and All Angels, Talbot at 8 pm

A real curiosity.  The organ in this church has only been restored in 2016.  It’s the earliest still-functioning Fincham in Victoria; originally from Warnambool, later Hughesdale, it reached Talbot in 2007.  As for Boak’s program, it will be calculated to show the instrument to advantage: one manual with 8 stops, pedal bourdon and coupler.

 

Tuesday January 17

ORGAN RECITAL

Giampaolo di Rosa

St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Ballarat at 10 am

The overseas guest is set to work on the 1864 Walker organ.  He promises Bach’s Fantasia super: Komm, Heiliger Geist and the Schumann Fantasie on BACH, which I don’t think exists.   He might be playing the 6 Fugues on B-A-C-H; that would be a great move and very substantial: they last over half an hour.  Further, this church’s organ is one of Ballarat’s finest.

 

Tuesday January 17

BACH’S CIRCLE

Latitude 37

Ballarat Mining Exchange at 8 pm

The Peninsula Summer Music Festival’s artistic director/violinist, Julie Fredersdorff, and her ensemble partners  –  gamba Laura Vaughan and harpsichord Donald Nicholson  –  will perform Baroque trios by the great paterfamilias, Buxtehude, and their contemporaries. You’re assured of spiky, clean-voiced playing; these musicians have been working at their craft for quite a while now and I can’t think of another ensemble that comes near them in this area.

 

Wednesday January 18

HANDEL ORGAN CONCERTI

Giampaolo di Rosa

Former Wesley Methodist Church, Clunes at 11 am

All twelve of them?  Probably not.  Di Rosa plays with the Festival’s chamber orchestra, which appears at this event only.  The organ is another one that has roamed: Prahran, Daylesford and an interim stint in Bendigo before coming back to its Clunes home.  A small organ with one manual, pedals and 7 stops.  Which should be just right for these plain-speaking works.

 

Wednesday January 18

ORGAN AND BRASS ENSEMBLE

Giampaolo di Rosa and the Little Brass Band of Ballarat

St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Clunes at 2:30 pm

The program heading proposes Handel, Bach and Pachelbel – yes, the Canon in D, beloved of prospective brides.  Also in an afternoon of pops, we get Handel’s Water Music – but probably not all three suites – and Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring chorale movement.  For a mystery, the afternoon contains a concerto for brass quintet by Handel.  I know of a concerto for brass quartet, an arrangement by Gerard Schwarz of the Concerto Grosso in F, Op. 6 No.9.   Maybe that’s it; maybe there is another work altogether.

 

Wednesday January 18

Duo Chamber Melange

Wendouree Centre for Performing Art at 8 pm.

Violinist Ivana Tomaskova and pianist Tamara Smolyar are playing Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 1, Beethoven’s Eroica Sonata (which seemingly refers to the Violin Sonata No. 7 in C minor) and a work by Rumanian composer, Mihail Andricu.  These musicians have been working together for over a decade and their approach is solid, based on sound European scholarship and technique.

 

Thursday January 19

SOPRANO AND ORGAN

Larissa Cairns and Christopher Trikilis

Carngham Uniting Church, Snake Valley at 10 am

Cairns I last heard of in Anthony Way’s choir for St. Francis’ Church in Lonsdale St.  Trikilis is spreading himself between music director functions at St. Patrick’s, Mentone, teaching at St. Kevin’s College, Toorak and tutoring for the Corpus Christi Seminary, Carlton.  The small Fincham instrument in this church doesn’t offer much timbral variety so this morning’s program will test Trikilis’ inventiveness.

The program will be repeated at 12 noon.

 

Thursday January 19

VIRTUOSO ORGAN

Giampaolo di Rosa

Ballarat Central Uniting Church at 8 pm

A well-exercised guest, di Rosa is playing Liszt  –  don’t know what but we can only hope for the Ad nos, ad salutarem undam Fantasia and Fugue – and an improvisation, at which occupation he has a considerable reputation.  This is his last – and fifth – Festival appearance.

 

Friday January 20

SCARLATTI ESSERCIZI

Jacqueline Ogeil

Loreto Chapel, Ballarat at 12 noon.

The Woodend Festival director presents some – one expects – of the Italian composer’s 30 sonatas published as exercises.  As the works were written for a Cristofori piano, Ogeil is upping the musicological ante by performing on a copy of that instrument.  You can expect highly authoritative interpretations, Ogeil’s experience with this composer going back many years.

 

Saturday January 21

RECITAL FOR ORGAN AND FLUTE

Frank de Rosso and Brighid Mantelli

St. Alipius’ Church, Ballarat East at 11 am

Prior to presenting this program in Queenscliff, Mantelli and de Rosso – two Geelong-district musicians – are giving it an airing here.  There is no indication of what is being played, but the flute/organ repertoire is pretty slim, I think.  So, either lots of arrangements or a welter of freshly written compositions.

 

Saturday January 21

TONY FENELON PLAYS THE COMPTON THEATRE ORGAN

Her Majesty’s Theatre, Ballarat at 3 pm

For my generation – and probably a few after that – Tony Fenelon is Mr. Theatre Organ Australia, the master of all those Wurlitzer special effects and a ceaseless pedal line.  On this occasion, he is including accompaniments to some short silent classics, which may be screened simultaneously with their scores.  A chance for many of us to hear this instrument which I, for one, didn’t even know existed.

 

Saturday January 21

CONCERTI

Hoang Pham, piano, and Massimo Scattolin, guitar

Her Majesty’s Theatre, Ballarat at 8 pm

This event sees the launch of the Melbourne Orchestra, under the direction of Mark Shiell, conductor of the Zelman and Ballarat Orchestras as well as the Macquarie Philharmonia. Pham is soloist in the Chopin Concerto No. 1 in E minor; admittedly, the orchestra is not over-stressed by the work but Pham will be tested throughout this spotlighting score. Scattolin, a regular at this festival, fronts Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, the guitar concerto.

 

Sunday January 22

THE AGONY OF HELL AND THE PEACE OF SOUL

e21, Unholy Rackett, Melbourne Baroque Orchestra

St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Ballarat at 8 pm

Stephen Grant takes his e21 ensemble and a combination of instrumentalists through works by Schutz, Gabrieli and Monteverdi.  The night’s title is suggestive enough, if a tad ungrammatical; without any details, you’d have to guess that the music will illustrate spiritual and theological opposites.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday December 1

THE PIANO IN ARCADIA

Arcadia Quintet

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

A half-French, half-Australian program from an ensemble new to me, although it’s been going since 2013 and has been all around the country, performing in venues big and small. The Arcadias comprise flute Kiran Phatak, oboe David Reichelt, clarinet Lloyd van’t Hoff, bassoon Matthew Kneale, and horn Rachel Shaw – all of them ANAM musicians, so the cream of their particular crops.  The visiting piano is Peter de Jager, also an ANAM graduate.  The evening starts with Techno-parade from 2002 by Guillaume Connesson, a taxing five-minute romp for flute, clarinet and piano, the last-named played both ‘straight’ and with a bit of internal manipulation. Poulenc’s piquant oboe/bassoon/piano Trio celebrates to the full the composer’s wit and melodic resourcefulness.  De Jager is mounting one of his own compositions; details remain sketchy at the time of writing – no name, no instrumentation.   The program concludes with Brett Dean’s Polysomnograhy – ‘a multi-parametric test used in the study of sleep’, according to the composer who wrote this five-movement sextet nine years ago.

 

Thursday December 1

SIMONE YOUNG CONDUCTS WAGNER AND BRUCKNER

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

While Opera Australia is struggling with its Ring production for the second time (why?), Simone Young will front the MSO to show how Wagner should be done; an object lesson to the OA board on what a great talent left the building when it sacked her.  Not that she is laden with the fripperies and inanities of the tetralogy: her task is Parsifal, the least attractive of the whole Bayreuth oeuvre.   With tenor Stuart Skelton in the title role and veteran American mezzo Michelle de Young finishing off her year as Kundry, Young conducts part of Act 2 – possibly all of Scene 2 after the Flowermaidens have done their worst.   As a filler, Young also conducts the incomplete (although you’d never know it) Bruckner Symphony No. 9: a leviathan, not for the faint-hearted.

This program is repeated on Saturday December 3 at 8 pm

 

Monday December 5

MUSIC OF THE NEW WORLD

Continuo Collective

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

Haven’t heard this duo – theorbo Samantha Cohen, guitar Geoffrey Morris – for some time; am assuming the work continues in much the same vein as before.  Tonight, the Collective expands to take in Marshall McGuire’s triple harp and some percussion titillation from either Dan Richardson (MRC website) or Matthew Horsley (MRC publication).  The music is all Santiago de Murcia: dances and tunes collected from European, African and American (South) sources – a toe-tappin’ hour of exuberant 18th century ‘world’ music.

 

Tuesday December 6

PROPULSION

Plexus

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

Details about this recital  have been stuck in a time-warp for quite a while.  Doubtless, the musicians involved will include – or consist entirely of – violin Monica Curro, clarinet Philip Arkinstall and piano Stefan Cassomenos.  The musicians are playing five new works by Hue Blanes, Ross Irwin, Stephen Magnusson, James Mustafa and Niko Schauble; except the last, names that are new to me but that’s not unexpected – they all come from the worlds of jazz/indie pop/folk.   Oddly enough, they are all male, which probably has something to do with the event’s title.  So far as I can discover, the composers’ material is still nameless; not that it matters too much when the participating personnel remain an unknown quantity.

 

Wednesday December 7

RICHARD TOGNETTI/ACO SOLOISTS/VIVALDI & BACH

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

A one-off event for Melbourne – welcome, of course, but I don’t know why it’s happening – this program features Richard Tognetti  and a select few of his bright-as-a-button band as soloists: violins Satu Vanska and Helena Rathbone, cello Timo-Veikko Valve, bass Maxime Bibeau, with recorder Genevieve Lacey coming in for good measure.  You’d have to assume that more of the ACO will attend to provide tutti components for Bach’s A minor Violin Concerto and the Orchestral Suite No. 2 (a great workout for Lacey), as well as Vivaldi’s Two Violins-and-Cello Concerto RV 565 and the Four-Violin Concerto RV 549.  For that gracious genuflection to the home-grown, Tognetti has programmed Elena Kats-Chernin’s Miniatures for Strings, about which I can find out nothing and so assume that this will be its premiere.

 

Saturday December 10

EVOLUTION

Benaud Trio

Melbourne Recital Centre at 3 pm

The program will be repeated at 6 pm

The Bramble brothers – violinist Lachlan, cellist Ewen – are visiting from their duties with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, and pianist Amir Farid is back from the US for a rare Melbourne appearance; only three times this year whereas the group used to turn up around many a corner.  Tonight is a short Salon event featuring two piano trios: Mozart in C K 548 and the Schumann No. 1.  It’s not so much an evolution of the form as a juxtaposition.  Still, these players are always welcome for their robust approach and the individual character of their communal sound . . . which has probably changed, given the wear and tear of settled professional life and expanded horizons.

 

Saturday December 10

NOEL! NOEL!

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 5 pm

This will, once again, not be a night for the purists.  Yes, you get a lot of indisputable Christmas music: Once in Royal David’s City, O Little Town of Bethlehem, the Coventry Carol, God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen, Hark! the Herald Angels Sing, Adam’s O Holy Night, Silent Night, and O Come, All Ye Faithful – a pretty exhaustive list of carols there, lyrics that have been part of the season’s celebrations for yonks.  Then you get a few tenuously related items, like Amazing Grace, Nicolai’s arrangement of Wachet auf, Caccini/Vavilov’s Ave Maria, Eriks Esenvalds’ O salutaris hostia and Norwegian writer Ola Gjeilo’s Kyrie setting, The Spheres for a cappella choir dividing and contracting in multiple lines.  On top of all this, Paul Dyer will air some inexplicables like Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Trumpets, The Luckiest by Ben Folds, the villancico Con que la lavare by Luys de Narvaez and a Ciaconna (which one? by the 17th century Moravian musician Philipp Jakob Rittler.  The ABO, in other words, ticks all the seasonal boxes but fleshes things out with music that will please patrons through its celebratory or sentimental character.  The Brandenburgers’ guest will be Madison Nonoa, a young soprano from New Zealand.

This program will be repeated at 7:30 pm.

 

Saturday December 10 

MESSIAH

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 7 pm

Pretty much the MSO’s last work for the year and still a fairly popular event, although I seem to remember the days when this great oratorio ran to three performances in a row.  The conductor is Paul Goodwin, recently here in July to lead the MSO in one of its Melbourne Recital Centre nights, notable on that occasion for some excellent Haydn.  His principals are: our own Emma Matthews for the soprano solos;  mezzo Luciana Mancini making what I think is her first appearance in this country following the budding of her career in Europe and the United States; British tenor Charles Daniels who is very experienced and popular enough to have his own fan club/ society; Christopher Richardson from Sydney the night’s bass and he has impressed on his few showings here.  The MSO Chorus will be prepared by Warren Trevelyan-Jones who directs the Consort of Melbourne and St. James Church in Sydney’s King St.

This program is repeated on Sunday December 12 at 5 pm.

 

Saturday December 10

CHRISTMAS TO CANDLEMAS: THE FRENCH COURT

Ensemble Gombert

Xavier College at 8 pm

You could be flippant and say that John O’Donnell and his excellent choir are bringing out the usual Gallic Renaissance suspects for the season: Ockeghem, Mouton, Desprez, and Compere as well as a newcomer to me in Johannes Prioris.   Serving Charles VII and Louis XI, Ockeghem is represented by his Marian motet, Alma redemptoris mater.  Four works – Nesciens mater, Noe, noe, Quaeramus cum pastoribus, and Illuminare, illuminare, Jerusalem speak for Jean Mouton, who wrote for Louis XII and Francois 1.  The Gomberts sing two Josquin motets – his setting of the first 14 verses of St. John’s Gospel, In principio erat verbum, and the lactation celebration  O admirabile commercium, from a composer who might have known Louis XI but certainly knew Louis XII.   Compere worked for Charles VIII and tonight his Hodie nobis de virgine Introit from a substitution mass/motet cycle brings the program to an end.   But not before another In principio setting by Prioris who was for a time maitre de chapelle for Louis XII.  So a great swag of court music from a richly productive musical era in French music.

 

Sunday December 11

CHRISTMAS

Australian Boys Choir

Melbourne Recital Centre at 3 pm

Always a pleasure to hear these singers, prepared to the nth degree by Noel Ancell.  At the core of this year’s program sits Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols – a gratifying evocation of the Christian feast, if essentially English in its ambient ethos, and an always challenging series of hurdles for its choir of trebles and accompanying harp.  The ABC has a number of offshoots, all of whom enjoy exposure on these nights.   And, in the all-in-together participation carols, the parents and friends come into their own, raising the Recital Centre roof and singing the well-known arrangements in parts as only a well-disciplined and musically educated audience can.

Wednesday November 2

ANICCA

Speak Percussion

Arts House North Melbourne at 7:30 pm

This is promoted as a 45-minute exercise – which I’ll believe when it ends on time. Percussionist Matthias Schack-Arnott has created a new variable speed rotating instrument with engineer Richard Allen.  The construct has been complemented on this night with a rotational lighting system and multi-channel audio; in other words, it will bathe you in a super-sensory experience.   Assisted by Speak Percussion’s Eugene Ughetti, Schack-Arnott will perform his Anicca, a word that denotes impermanence with references to both Hinduism and Buddhism, both sources of inspiration, if not theological/experiential crutches, for many Western artists.  I’m hoping for something a touch more coherent than Ensemble Offspring’s offering during the Melbourne Festival which also promised a journey towards the immanent.

 

Wednesday November 2

ANNA BOLENA

Melbourne Opera

Athenaeum Theatre at 7:30 pm

This is being advertised as the first professional presentation of this oddity in Melbourne, if not the country.   I must admit to having been primarily attracted by the opportunity to watch Richard Divall at work in the pit once more, but I understand that his appearances have been cancelled because of illness and Melbourne Opera regular Greg Hocking will conduct.   Elena Xanthoudakis is singing the title role, Sally-Anne Russell the part of Jane Seymour, Eddie Muliaumaseali’i takes on Henry VIII, Boyd Owen plays Henry Percy, Dimity Shepherd will sing Mark Smeaton, and Phillip Calcagno appears as George Boleyn.

At least, I think that’s the way the singers will be arranged; I’ve got the names but the matching roles are unspecified, so these allocations are guesswork.  This opera is a closed book to me, as I’ve not heard one skerrick of Donizetti’s score.  A lot of homework, then, between now and November 9.

Further performances are on Saturday November 5 and Wednesday November 9 at 7:30 pm, and at Monash University on Saturday November 12, possibly at 7:30 pm.

 

Thursday November 3

FROM BACH TO BRAZIL

Xuefei Yang

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7: 30 pm

Last in this year’s Great Performers series for the Recital Centre, Xuefei Yang is a guitarist who is best known here for her performance of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra two years ago.   Here she plays solo, of course, beginning with a Bach lute suite, her own arrangements of some Granados and a Chinese traditional song, as well as a Ross Edwards premiere – Melbourne Arioso.  Then she moves to South American names, all Brazilian and most (all?) of them would be known to guitar aficionados and fans of the Grigoryan brothers.   The lead-in is easy enough with three pieces from Villa Lobos’ Suite populaire brasilienne; then it’s over to teacher/performer Dilermando Reis, the bossa nova master Antonio Carlos Jobim, his one-time collaborator Luiz Bonfa, and Anibal Augusto Sardinha  –  the last three composers’ pieces all in arrangements.   We’ve seen many Chinese-born pianists and violinists, and also masters of the country’s own instruments performing in Tan Dun’s concerts with the MSO.   But Beijing-born classical guitarists are rare creatures in this city, let alone in this pianist-heavy series.

 

Thursday November 3

INDIANA JONES AND THE RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

There’s no denying the MSO’s enthusiasm for these screen-the-film-and-play-the-soundtrack events; judging by the information coming out now, there’ll be lots more of the same in 2017.   Meanwhile, Harrison Ford commits his first Dr. Jones adventure tonight – probably the best of the four, from its scene-setting rolling stone opening sequence complete with Amazonian natives’ blow-darts to the apocalyptic finale  where the baddies feel the full wrath of a vengeful-in-disturbance Old Testament divinity complete with howling angels.   We all recall the jaunty main title theme without much prompting; as for the rest of John Williams’ score, I’m sure that everything will slot into its half-remembered place.  No idea who is conducting but will it matter?   The administration keeps on adding extra shows as the original sessions fill up.

The program is repeated on Friday November 4 at 8 pm and on Saturday November 5 at 2 pm and 8 pm.

 

Saturday November 5

AVI AVITAL

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

A mandolin player from Israel, Avital appeared with the ABO two years ago to a warm response.  Tonight he is soloist in Vivaldi’s Mandolin Concerto RV 425 and Paisiello’s Concerto in E flat.   But there’s more  –  possibly.   Also on the program are three other Vivaldis: the Concerto for Strings RV 110, a three-movement overture;  the A Minor Concerto RV 356 which is for violin solo; and Summer from The Four Seasons, which also needs a violin soloist.   You’d have to assume that Avital will fill in, wouldn’t you? Giovanni Valentini’s Concerto Grosso in A minor is complemented by a piece for mandolin and string quartet, written for Avital by American composer David Bruce.   Cymbeline has nothing to do with Shakespeare, it seems, but is closely connected to Celtic sun myths. The piece has had a fair few performances in America, Germany, Canada and Israel; sadly the composer’s website shows he’s unaware of these upcoming ABO airings.

This program is repeated on Sunday November 6 at 5 pm

 

Sunday November 6

The Tallis Scholars

Hamer Hall at 6:30 pm

This well-known vocal group is appearing under Arts Centre sponsorship, in association with Orchestral Manoeuvres and Maxima Artists, companies about which I’m completely ignorant.   Whatever the background, this group is here for a one-early-evening-stand, conducted by founder Peter Phillips.   The program begins with the eight-voice motet by Peter Phillips, Cecilia virgo, which is followed by two Tallis works and the eight-part Lamentations by Flemish 16th century writer, Dominique Phinot.   Then the rot sets in with some Arvo Part, his genealogical Which was the son of . . .    After interval, the contemporary takes continue with American youngish gun Nico Muhly’s Recordare, Domine, and Tavener’s As one who has slept.   Phillips and his singers (how many? The core of ten? Or more, to fill this large air-space?) return to the Renaissance with pieces by Clemens, Crecquillon and Byrd.   None of this is familiar to most of us, apart from the Tallis Lamentations 1; but there’d be plenty who would be delighted to hear this ensemble sing anything.

 

Tuesday November 8

SHEER NYLON

Selby & Friends

Deakin Edge at 7:30 pm

Finishing up for the year, Kathryn Selby hosts cellist Julian Smiles of the Goldner Quartet, Australia Ensemble and Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and violinist Daniel Dodds of the Festival Strings Lucerne.   The ‘big’ work will be the Brahms Piano Trio in B Major, that rolling heart-quickener.    Also, the musicians play Schubert’s Sonatensatz, the adolescent composer’s only prefiguring of the two great piano trios of 1827.   Tristia, the piano trio arrangement of La Vallee d’Obermann by Liszt, gets a rare outing and the stocking-suggestive title refers to Gerard Brophy’s 2000 Sheer Nylon Dances, a work that has been performed in various instrumental combinations but here appears in its violin/cello/fetishised piano format where window stoppers are inserted between the strings in a lukewarm imitation of Cage’s prepared keyboard  of 70 years ago.

 

Thursday November 10

EVERYONE’S SPACE

Syzygy Ensemble

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

Penderecki’s Clarinet Quartet of 1993 is followed by Mexican composer Gabriel Ortiz’s The Two-Headed Eagle,  American Richard Toensing’s Ciacona and Roger Smalley’s Poles Apart, all of which ask for the same basic quintet.of flute, clarinet and piano trio.   It’s never easy to work out who will be playing because the Syzygy personnel swap around; so you can’t tell what the level of performance is likely to be.   Still, this is a well-spread program geographically, although the compositional time-span involved is pretty tight.  It’s a contemporary music ensemble so you have to take a fair bit on trust.

 

Friday November 11

TCHAIKOVSKY, GINASTERA & STRAVINSKY

Australian National Academy of Music Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

The ANAM Orchestra will be directed by Ilyich Rivas,  a Venezuelan 23-year-old who seems to be going places after a brief American apprenticeship and some impressive appearances in Britain.   He is taking his equally young charges through Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite  –  as a demonstration of the Academy’s depth of instrumental colour, you’d suppose.   The organization’s long-time resident pianist, Timothy Young, is soloist in the Ginastera Concerto No. 1, which is quite a workout for all concerned but a work that involves you by its sheer force of personality.   The big finale is Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E minor; although the ANAM players often succumb to the temptation to over-indulge in such a big and impassioned score; there’s always the chance that Rivas will be able to rein them in.

 

Friday November 11

DVORAK CELLO CONCERTO

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

Have you ever heard a performance of this concerto that hasn’t satisfied?   Well, yes, you probably have, but let’s hope this one turns out to be acceptable.   Soloist is Alban Gerhardt, whom I’ve not heard before; he plays a 1710 Goffriller, so there’s a good chance we’ll hear all the notes.   American conductor Andrew Litton reappears after a long gap to lead the MSO in Reznicek’s Donna Diana Overture, a bon-bon that needs a light touch, and the Prokofiev Symphony No. 6 which requires the opposite: a wrenching threnody, for the most part, and a fierce commentary on the suffering inherent in the human condition, evoked in the composer by the aftermath of World War 2, although it stands as a valid commentary on today’s bloody Middle East conflict.

This program is repeated on Monday November 14 at 6:30 pm.

 

Saturday November 12

IL PARADISO

La Compania

Deakin Edge, Federation Square at 6 pm

With this Dantesque title, the early music band concludes its subscription series.  The proffered goods come from Italian composers ‘at the turn of the seventeenth century’; rather confusing to my limited intelligence because this could mean the turn into the 1600s or music on the cusp of the 1690s-1710s.   But it’s going to be the former, as the advertising material also refers to Monteverdi.  So, as well as that towering father-figure, we could be in for a night of Grandi, Priuli and Donati as well.  It will be an intriguing program mainly because I know very few instrumental works by Monteverdi; La Compania will doubtless have a vocalist guest or two – which can present an audibility problem when the cornetto and sackbuts with a rampant shawm or two are in full cry.

 

Saturday November 12

PIANO TRIO JEWELS

Wilma & Friends

Scotch College at 7:30 pm

Having set up base in Scotch College’s Ian Roach Hall, former concertmaster of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Wilma Smith has followed the path pioneered by Kathryn Selby (& Friends) by inviting guests for her series of recitals to collaborate in chamber music-making.   In July, along with other local musicians, she hosted David Griffiths to centre the Mozart and Brahms Clarinet Quintets.  Tonight, it’s the turn of Scotch old boy cellist Yelian He and pianist Yasmin Rowe to partner Smith’s violin in some unarguable gems: Mendelssohn in C minor with its grand Vor deinen Thron-quoting finale, the formidable Brahms No. 1 (four days after Selby and her guests play it at the Deakin Edge), and Haydn in C Hob XV: 27 with one of the composer’s most infectious Presto finales.   I’ve heard only one recital in this space – a choral one from the Concordis group – but it’s ideal for music of this genre with a roomy operating space and plenty of wood casing.

 

Sunday November 13

AH, VIENNA!

The Melbourne Musicians

St. John’s Southgate at 3 pm

Frank Pam and his string chamber orchestra will again be supplemented for this program with wind, mainly because the afternoon ends with Haydn’s Farewell Symphony No. 45 which asks for pairs of oboes and horns as well as a bassoon.   Flutes, clarinets and harps are needed for a full realization of the scheduled Meditation from Massenet’s opera Thais, the only work on the program I can see that will exercise the Musicians’ soloist, violinist Ksenia Belenko.   For the Viennese content, Pam and his musicians will perform waltzes and polkas by three of the Strauss family and one of the Marches militaires by Schubert. Alongside this European content sits a 1995 piece by George Dreyfus, Love your animal, a six-minute ballad for pairs of flutes and horns with strings.

 

Tuesday November 15

Trio Dali

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

Appearing again for Musica Viva, the Dali group finish their year’s work in this country. They follow their host organization’s model by performing an Australian work; in this case, it’s Roger Smalley’s Piano Trio of 1991, a piece composed as an obligatory hurdle for competitors in that year’s Melbourne International Chamber Competition.  In two parts with a pair of linked movements in each, it is based on a Chopin mazurka; here’s hoping that this time I can work out which one of the 59 it is.   The group also plays on this night Beethoven’s happy-tempered Op. 1 No. 1 and the 26-year-old Chausson’s  Op. 3 which, despite its many advocates, you rarely hear live.

The Dalis present their second program – Smalley again, Mendelssohn No. 2 in C minor (three days after Wilma & Friends play it at Scotch College), Schubert in B flat –  on Saturday November 19 at 7 pm.

 

Friday November 18

THE LONDON SKETCHBOOK

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Deakin Edge, Federation Square at 7:30 pm

The 40-plus sketches in question are by the youthful Mozart; small pieces for the most part, but original, if corrected by his watchful father.  There are a lot of them and several have been arranged in mini-suites, which is probably the case here where William Hennessy and his devoted ensemble will perform a sonata movement in G minor, a B flat Andante, a Rondo in C and Sicilianos in D minor – all originally written for piano, on this occasion arranged for string orchestra.   The afternoon’s guest is violinist Grace Clifford, last heard with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in Bruch’s G minor Concerto at an end-of-July pair of Prom concerts.  Today, she performs Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending rhapsody and the ever-welcome (George Bernard Shaw thought so) Mendelssohn E minor Concerto.    Furthering the English connection is Mendelssohn’s overture The Hebrides (close enough, I guess); Warlock’s Capriol Suite (sad Peter/Philip was born and died in the capital); yet another string orchestra arrangement, this one of Byrd’s Sing joyfully six-voice anthem; and the second movement World-War-Two-prefiguring  Threnody from John Ireland’s Concertino Pastorale.

The program will be repeated in the Melbourne Recital Centre on Sunday November 20 at 2:30 pm.

 

Sunday November 20

DAS LAND OHNE MUSIK

Trio Anima Mundi

Holy Trinity Anglican Church, East Melbourne at 3 pm

It’s an old line but a good one that the Germans of the 19th century applied to England – mainly out of chauvinistic superiority (and God knows they had a lot to feel top-doggish about) but equally applicable to several other countries at the time.   In any case, the Anima Mundis are out to scupper this libel with Malcolm Arnold’s 1956 Piano Trio Op. 54; you also have probably never heard it but the composer’s reputation for professional skill gives grounds for a welcoming anticipation.   As well, patrons will be treated to James Friskin’s Phantasie in E minor which shows by its title its relation to the Cobbett Phantasy Competiition (in which Friskin, a Scot who migrated to America, was one of the prize winners), and a piano trio from 1921 by Rebecca Clarke, Friskin’s under-rated wife.  As a side-path from this British emphasis, the recital will also feature the first performance of the winning entry in the Anima Mundi Trio’s chamber music competition for this year.

 

Monday November 21

BACH & THE NEW GENERATION

Latitude 37

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm.

The Latitudinarians host Melissa Farrow who will bring her flute to the mix in J.S. Bach’s Trio Sonata BWV 1038, to set the standard for what comes after   –  which looks like a family reunion with appropriate works by Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christoph Friedrich and Wilhelm Friedemann – the three Big Boys.   Carl is represented by a violin sonata and a gamba sonata with fortepiano; J.C. F. gives us a trio sonata with the same scoring as his father’s, as does Wilhelm.   You’d expect to hear how his sons improved on their father’s effort in the chamber music field; perhaps they did, especially in lyrical loquacity if not in linear construction and that inescapable sense of inevitability.   A valuable lesson here in inter-generational influences – or not.

 

Sunday November 27

BEETHOVEN’S FAVOURITE

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 2:30 pm

Violinist Lorenza Borrani, leader of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, is guest director for this penultimate ACO concert for the year.   She has charge of yet another string quartet arrangement for string orchestra: Beethoven’s Op. 131 in C sharp minor with its unusual seven movement structure.   Borrani also heads Schubert’s 5 Minuets and 6 Trios, part of the D. 89/90 compendium from the composer’s 16th year.    And she takes the solo in Schnittke’s Sonata for violin and chamber orchestra, which I understand to be a 1968 arrangement of the Violin Sonata No. 1, although it might just as easily be the 1987 arrangement of the composer’s Violin Sonata No. 2.   Will it matter?  Probably to Schnittke enthusiasts; as for the rest of us, . . .

This program is repeated on Monday November 28 at 7:30 pm.

 

Sunday November 27

TRIOS FOR HORN, VIOLIN AND PIANO

Team of Pianists

Glenfern, East St. Kilda at 3 pm

Rather doubtful how comfortable this setting is for a horn player.   The front room of the Glenfern mansion is a sterling place to hear solo pianists but Roman Pomonariov’s horn in full cry might be another thing.   With violinist Elizabeth Sellars and the Team’s Rohan Murray, he will perform the wonderfully weltering Horn Trio by Brahms; then couples it with Lennox Berkeley’s Op. 44 Trio from the 1950s, written for Dennis Brain.  The English composer rarely gets a hearing today, which is a pity as some works in his catalogue are well worth reviving.   For all that, this trio is one of Berkeley’s scores that has survived in the horn trio’s admittedly limited repertoire and Team patrons will certainly hear every note of this reading.

Sunday October 2

Melba Quartet plays Schubert and Dvorak

Melbourne Recital Centre at 11 am and 2 pm

Who are they, you may ask?   Why, they were the original members of the Australian String Quartet – William Hennessy, Elinor Lea, Keith Crellin and Janis Laurs.   Here reborn under a new name, these venerable musicians are joined by Adelaide pianist Lucinda Collins in two steady-as-she-goes stalwarts of the chamber music repertoire: the 16-year-old Schubert’s String Quartet No. 10 in E flat and the Dvorak Piano Quintet No. 2 in A – a really substantial piece, packed with nationalistic colour and fervour.   We’ve seen most of these performers continue in harness over the years but it will be a real ear-opener to hear them together again after a longer time than many of us would care to remember.

 

Tuesday October 4

Music of the Great Renaissance Chapels: The English Chapel Royal

Ensemble Gombert

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

Back in the Salon for the second of its two-part series, John O’Donnell and his singers have centred their activities – so to speak – on the late Tudors: Henry VIII and his daughters Mary and Elizabeth.   Well, not so much on them as on the composers who helped to lift their blood-drenched reigns out of the gutter.   Earliest of the contributors will be Robert Fayrfax, represented by one of his two Magnificat settings.   William Mundy’s antiphonal motet Vox Patris caelestis stands in for the Catholic reversion of Mary’s reign.   Robert  Parsons’ well-known Ave Maria,  the Lamentations of Tallis (the whole lot?) and three Byrd motets I’ve never heard flesh out the period and this slightly-over-an-hour-long recital which opens with an anonymous Salve radix setting.

 

Tuesday October 4

Speak Less Than You Know

Tinalley String Quartet

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

With an updated quote from Lear’s Fool as its title, this program from the Tinalley ensemble has the country’s most noted Shakespearean actor as guest.  The recital opens with Mendelssohn in A minor, Op. 13, but that’s not the chief course at this feast.   Bell will be reading from Beethoven’s letters, escorted on his way with extracts from the Op. 18, the Harp, and Op. 131, 132 and 135 quartets.   It’s a neat conjunction of two fine talents. Yet, for all his overpowering musical genius, Beethoven never impressed me as much of a verbal communicator; not even through the Heiligenstadt Testament which will, I fear, get plenty of attention on this night.   Still, Bell is a glory to hear, as shown recently by his end-of-program Sir Thomas More recitation for the Q&A on Shakespeare  –  the ideal response to Hanson and her home-grown basket of deplorables.   And these days the Tinalleys are working together with formidable strength.

 

Wednesday October 5

Amadeus

Australian Piano Quartet

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

I know three of this group’s members – violin Rebecca Chan, piano Daniel de Borah, viola James Wannan – but the APQ founder/director, cellist Thomas Rann, remains an unknown quantity, despite his having studied here at the Australian National Academy of Music. Given their program’s title, Mozart’s influence is heavy: the Piano Quartet in G minor K. 478 and an arrangement of the Quintet for piano and winds K. 452, presumably the one done by Freystadtler.   Not that you have much to choose from: Mozart wrote only two works for this combination.    Horizons are expanded for a piano quartet by Lachlan Skipworth, premiered last May in Sydney.   The composer has not experienced much live play-time here, although he has had works played at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Metropolis series and also I seem to recall a performance of his light rain for shakuhachi/flute and string quartet at fortyfivedownstairs some years ago fronted by Lina Andonovska.

 

Friday October 7

La belle et la bete

Philip Glass Ensemble

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

From the look of it, this year’s Melbourne Festival is going to be, once again, light on serious music but stacked with an abundance of forgettable trivialities.   Here is a hybrid event at which Cocteau’s film gains a new sound-track,  Auric’s original score superseded by Philip Glass who has made an opera-of-sorts by having the film play straight through, accompanying it with a small instrumental group (six, I believe) and four singers lip-syncing their recitative lines with the film’s actors.   Why bother doing this?   No answer, except that Glass has carried out a similar exercise with other films.   All you can do is have a look at it on YouTube where the results are probably unfair to Glass; even so, the endlessly whirling orchestration is distracting and the dialogue suggests Massenet more than anything else.   Mind you, the composer won’t be here to talk about his revamping exercise as he isn’t coming here for this presentation, which enjoys three airings – this Friday night,  a 2 pm matinee and another 7 pm evening screening on Saturday October 8.

 

Saturday October 8

Star Trek

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Myer Music Bowl at 7 pm

We’re promised 50 years of Star Trek‘s musical achievements in this show where the MSO will provide the backdrop for what I suppose will be extracts from the series and its spin-off film extravaganzas.   Yet another music element in the Melbourne Festival’s meagre line-up, this event brings outdoors what the MSO has been doing for some time at the Plenary in the Exhibition Centre complex at the start of the year: Dr. Who extravaganzas, Wallace and Gromit, etc.   Last year, the January spectacular was J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek film; this is a sort of amplification of the same principle, one with which the orchestra has enjoyed popular success: the audience gets to see the big-screen spectacle while the musicians play the soundtracks in real time.   It could be entertaining but I have to say that the sheen is wearing off the exercise for me.

 

Saturday October 8

Ballet Mecanique

Australian National Academy of Music

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7 pm

Some esoteric music-making distinguishes this night.   Soprano Justine Anderson, percussionists Tim White, Gary France and Peter Neville, and pianist Timothy Young – along with the ANAM percussionists and pianists – present three works of great interest. That one-time Angry Young Composer George Antheil produced his best work early, his most famous score the Ballet Mecanique which began with extensive sound-source requirements and was revised down in later performances; this, I suspect, will be the form adopted here – percussion, four pianos, and an airplane engine (recorded, presumably). Ginastera’s Cantata para America Magica asks for a soprano, 13 percussionists and two pianos; unlike the familiar ballet scores and the sparkling Variaciones concertantes, this piece uses 12-tone methodology.  Young has made his own arrangement of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring ballet for two pianos (the composer did that himself) and percussion (that’s a new idea).   A program with plenty of hits and, one hopes, not many misses.

 

Sunday October 9

Schubert Quintet

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 2:30 pm

Always a pleasure to hear the moving C Major Quintet, one of chamber music’s summits. The players are drawn from William Hennessy’s Australian Octet who also busy themselves with Dvorak’s String Sextet, a work that gets left behind in the wake of Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Schoenberg  –  unfairly so.  The ensemble also offers a world premiere: Graeme Koehne’s Nevermore – also an octet and maybe indebted to Poe’s poem . . . but who can tell?    I’ve not heard the octet play, although the members must be MCO regulars; given that background,  you’d have to expect a pretty high standard.   This is the only Melbourne performance of the program.

 

Tuesday October 11

Cyborg Pianist

Zubin Kanga

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

The Melbourne Festival is giving the London-based Australian pianist two programs in its schedule.   For this one, he is working in association with Benjamin Carey who will provide live electronics – are there any other kinds?   The program available is light on details, although one piece that is named  –  Patrick Nunn’s 2014 Morphosis for piano, sensors (attached to the pianist’s hands) and (naturally) live electronics  –  has been recently recorded by Kanga with the composer’s collaboration.   The Festival blurb promises a wealth of physical experience – drones and horror-films in the mix.  The reassuring factor is that Kanga is a fine exponent of the unfathomably modern.

 

Wednesday October 12

Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes

Zubin Kanga

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

Tonight, Kanga goes all classical, taking us into the prepared piano universe of America’s timeless apostle of musical freedom.  The collection of 16 sonatas and 4 interludes remains one of Cage’s most striking constructs 70 years after he began putting the work together. It offered a strikingly original sound-world to my generation; the audacity of turning the piano into a gamelan – and an unpredictable one at that – impressed mightily, particularly if you heard a solid, non-flamboyant performance.   At the time, Cage was interested in Indian music and its philosophical basis, but the actual sound and movement of this cycle suggests Indonesia – a locale with more inbuilt colour and temporal stasis, and a good deal less sonic brilliance and physical excitement in execution.   It was the perfect music for its time and place; these days, an extended exercise in nostalgia.

 

Friday October 14

The Secret Noise

Ensemble Offspring

Arts House, North Melbourne at 7:30 pm

It’s a catchy name that this group owns but what they actually do remains a closed book to me.   Spearheaded by Damien Ricketson for this Melbourne Festival program, the 20-year-old Sydney ensemble is promising ‘sacrosanct sounds’; whether this is Festival bumf or the ensemble’s own self-evaluation, the adjective seems at odds with the projected entertainment into oddities, explored through a ‘catacomb’.  You get the feeling that the words don’t matter, that talking-up the project is the name of the game.  Still, there’s no telling where the Masonic/Opus Dei connotations of the event’s title will lead audiences. Music, performance, installation: that’s what you get for your money.   The program is repeated twice on Saturday October 15 – at 2 pm and 7:3o pm

 

Saturday October 15

Musical Maverick

Melbourne Conservatorium of Music

Melba Hall at 2 pm

Here beginneth a series of recitals spread across two weekends and dealing with Percy Grainger.   Performances start today at 2 pom with the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music Percussion ensemble performing some of the Free Music, as well as other works not listed; God knows they have a wide repertoire to choose from.   At 4 pm today, soprano Cleo Lee-McGowen and tenor Michael Diminovski, with the Vocal Company,  go for the folk-song component, amplified by some Dvorak and Bartok.   Sunday October 16 has three events: at mid-day, 2 six-hands pianos play The Warriors ballet; 2 pm sees the MCM guitar ensemble play Random Round alongside new works by Ethan McAlister and Jacob Donohue; at 4 pm the MCM Wind Symphony plays some of those works that at one time seemed to be the Eastman Rochester’s preserve.   Saturday/Sunday October 22/23 shuffle these five programs into a different order.  Maybe this strikes you as old-hat, compared to Zubin Kanga’s Cyborg adventures, but Grainger’s sheer prodigality remains a singular marvel of this country’s musical accomplishment, all the better demonstrated by enthusiastic students from the Conservatorium and National Academy rather than jadedly slick professionals.

 

Saturday October 15

Baroque Brilliance

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

Young soprano Julia Lezhneva, last heard here in 2014, is back with Richard Tognetti and his excellent orchestra to sing works you probably haven’t heard; well, I haven’t. Porpora’s florid motet In caelo stelle clare appears to have been resuscitated by Lezhneva, who has recorded it to many plaudits.  Vivaldi’s opera Ottone in Villa holds the aria Leggi almeno; the soprano has also contributed to a full recording of the opera.   Alongside these are two Handel brackets: the three-movement Salve Regina and excerpts from the opera Alessandro, a 2012 Decca recording of which – you’ll be happy to know – had Lezhneva as a participant.   She is contributing four arias from this opera to the evening which caps a great effort from a vocal soloist – seven ornate pieces in total  –  while the ACO will have a relatively placid time working through Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 1 and a Handel B flat Sonata a 5.

 

Wednesday October 19

Serenade

Ensemble Liaison

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

Well, you can’t say fairer than that: Serenade is the recital’s name and it kicks off with one. Danish composer Emil Hartmann’s Op 24 in A from 1877 is tailor-made for the Ensemble’s personnel – David Griffiths’ clarinet, Svetlana Bogosavljevic’s cello, Timothy Young’s piano – . and its three movements are as agreeable a Romantic era work as you could want with its echoes of ruminating Brahms and all-join-hands Dvorak.   Young gets to play actual Brahms with some extracts from the intermezzi, romance and ballade that make up the Op. 117 and 118 collections.   Guest Fiona Campbell sings the ineffably fine Brahms Op. 91, two songs for voice, viola (Griffiths’ clarinet?) and piano.  Campbell also contributes Mahler’s Ruckert-Lieder, either accompanied only by Young or by what must be a remarkable arrangement involving the four instrumentalists available here.   Ingolf Dahl is rarely encountered in chamber music programs these days.   The American composer had a varied life which took in quite a few musical occupations.   His 1947 Concerto a tre employs the unusual combination of clarinet (Benny Goodman at its premiere), violin and cello, its three sections forming a unified whole.

 

Thursday October 20

A Voice for the Silenced

Australian National Academy of Music

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7 pm

The subtitle of this event is Composers lost to the Terezin & Sobibor Camps.  Despite a revival of interest in Jewish composers who perished in the Holocaust, you rarely come across a full program of their music; at least, rarely in this country.   Two of the writers are familiar: the Czechoslovakian Erwin Schulhoff and his countryman Pavel Haas.   The former is represented by his oboe+clarinet+bassoon Divertissement, a spiky collation complete with a Charleston alongside a theme with variations plus fugato.   Haas’ Wind Quintet of 1929 contains a Prayer and a Ballo Eccentrico at the core of its four movements of Janacek-influenced optimism.   Gideon Klein’s Divertimento for eight wind instruments was written in 1940, a year before he was deported to Terezin.    Leo Smit, a luminary between the wars of the Dutch musical world, wrote his jazzy, wrong-note Sextet for wind quintet and piano in 1932 and it brims with the spirit of France at the time of Les Six.  The brunt of the work in these performances will fall to flute Silvia Careddu, clarinet Paul Dean, oboe Nick Deutsch, bassoon Matthew Wilkie, and french horn Johannes Hinterholzer with some ANAM musicians’ help in the Smit and Klein scores.

 

Thursday October 20

A German Songbook

Christiane Oelze

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

One of the MRC’s Great Performers, the gifted soprano is accompanied on this occasion by Eric Schneider, with whom she has enjoyed a solid association at European and American festivals and in the recording studio (Strauss lieder, Forbidden Songs).  Tonight, the artists work through five brackets: Schubert (including  Auf dem Wasser zu singen, Du bist die Ruh and Rastlose Liebe), excerpts from Mahler’s Ruckert-Lieder (but the program lists all five of them!),  selections from Eisler’s Hollywood Songbook (Schneider has recorded all 46 in the set with baritone Matthias Goerne), five extracts from Schumann’s Liederkreis Op. 39 (a bit less than half the cycle), and four solos by Weill, including the inevitable Alabama Song.   A nice spread of German art-songs moving from the sentimental to the ironic: a field of endeavour that Oelze has made her arena of specialization.

 

Friday October 21

Melvyn Tan

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

For serious music-seekers, here is the last gasp from this year’s musically anorexic Melbourne Festival.  Tan has been a successful visitor here in recent times, although most of my sightings have been of concerto performances.   This recital begins with Beethoven Op. 109, the E Major Sonata No. 30 with its unforgettable sequence of theme-and-variations at the end.  Tan also performs Chopin’s 24 Preludes.  That’s about 50 minutes’ worth and incontestably fine music, although why Tan should have chosen either is a mystery; they’re not what you’d call festival fare.   More interesting is the ‘international premiere’ (does that mean first time in Australia?) of British composer Jonathan Dove’s Catching Fire, written for Tan and premiered three months ago at the Cheltenham Music Festival.   As far as I can see, this is Dove’s first work for solo piano – a change from his better-known canvas of opera; as well, this is what you expect to hear in a festival context; recycling the over-familiar is an easy-programming way out.

 

 

Friday October 21

Holst’s The Planets

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

Benjamin Northey, everyone’s favourite Proms conductor, fronts the MSO for this night of classic hits – of a sort.   We begin with Vaughan Williams’ The Wasps Overture, a sprightly sample of British jocundity with a Chestertonian walking theme (if the author could in fact walk that quickly) as its main matter and a contrasting melody that summons up wide-arching vistas of the English countryside – worlds away from Aristophanes’ bickering about the law and filial duty.   Australian pianist Andrea Lam plays the solo in Chopin’s Concerto No. 2 (like Beethoven, this second is really the first); here’s hoping she can cut through the cloying pseudo-scholarship surrounding interpretations of this composer and find a Perahia-like directness.   The MSO Chorus – females only –  join in for the Holst astrological round-up which begins with the most gripping depiction of war in music and ends with the wordless chorus fading away in a remarkably prescient vision of the timelessness of space.

 

Monday October 24

Metamorphoses

Australian String Quartet

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

This fine ensemble plays a straight program of Mozart, Ligeti and Ravel.  Of course, the title refers to the middle work, the Hungarian composer’s String Quartet No. 1, Metamorphoses nocturnes, written in 1953-4 during the years of Soviet occupation and not heard until the composer left his homeland for Vienna.   It’s about 20 minutes in length, divided into 17 sections – which means that it is singularly mobile; the night changes are as active as Bartok’s.  The ASQ’s Mozart is K 590 in F, his last in the form and invested with a prominent cello part for its intended dedicatee, Frederick William II of Prussia.   Ravel’s 1903 quartet is an early work but an always welcome experience, unusually warm in its emotional content and less self-observant than some of the composer’s later chamber music.

 

Thursday October 27

Space Jump

Sutherland Trio

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6:30 pm

I know many people admired Felix Baumgartner, the man who jumped from the stratosphere 39 kilometres back to Earth in 2012 – a great physical feat, they say.   Such a pity,though, that the man opens his mouth.   One fan is Fazil Say, the Turkish musician whose piano trio gives this recital its title.   It begins with deceptive folksy charm, like Shostakovich on a day off, but moves about a third of the way through into more gravitationally hurtling territory.   The ensemble – violin Elizabeth Sellars, cello Molly Kadarauch, piano Caroline Almonte – land back on their feet with the Brahms Trio in B Major – emotionally if not physically transporting – and Beethoven’s Trio No. 9; an E flat Major manuscript found only after the composer’s death, this short three-movement work has a dominant piano part.   Filling out the hour comes a world premiere from Mary Finsterer, presumably suited to the available personnel but currently still labouring under the all-purpose title new work – or perhaps that’s its real name.

 

Friday October 28

The Giants in Music

Duo Chamber Melange

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6:30 pm

No complications here.   The duo – violin Ivana Tomaskova and piano Tamara Smolyar – are performing Mozart’s two-movement G Major Sonata K. 301, the second of the mature-age series.   The duo finishes their work with the Strauss E Flat Sonata, both exuberant and controlled with an intriguing middle Improvisation: Andante cantabile which erupts into a maelstrom of piano activity in its centre and where, despite the promising title, everything is written down – improvisatory in mood, not in reality.   Noel Fidge, who celebrated his 80th birthday last month, is a retired Australian biochemist who also studied music at Julliard.    Between the Mozart and Strauss, he is to enjoy the premiere of his violin-and-piano Fantasy.

 

Saturday October 29

Clarinet Heaven

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Linden New Art at 4:15 & 6 pm

One of the MCO’s smaller-scale events, this pair of recitals brings to an end a roving program that began in Mount Beauty, moved to Pyramid Hill, Bendigo, Elmore and Heathcote before winding up here in St. Kilda at the same time as the Linden gallery’s Postcard Show.   Violins William Hennessy and Caroline Hopson, viola Merewyn Bramble and cello Josephine Vains collaborate with the clarinet of Lloyd Van’t Hoff in a quick-change sequence.   Beethoven’s String Trio in C minor is the last of the composer’s five works for that combination, gifted with an excellent Adagio.   Weber, the clarinet composer par excellence, is represented – briefly – by the 6-minute last movement of his Clarinet Quintet.    Australian writer Nicholas Buc, an MCO favourite, is presenting a new score; no details so far.   Then there’s the focal work: Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet.  This is one of those masterpieces best experienced at close quarters, like in the Linden gallery, and with absolute trust in the performers to live up to its inbuilt limpid beauty.

 

Sunday October 30

Beethoven and Britten

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Iwaki Auditorium Southgate at 11 am

A day after the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra’s revival of the Beethoven C minor String Trio, here it comes again, this time from the MSO musicians.  The personnel involved are all principals: Dale Barltrop and Matthew Tomkins leading the two violins corps, Christopher Moore who heads the violas, and long-time cello first-desk David Berlin.  As well as the Beethoven, all four will present Britten’s String Quartet No. 1, a product of his American years and commissioned by that lavish arts patron, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Both works last about 25 minutes which means patrons are getting a well-focused two bouts of entertainment.   Still, you have to wonder why the authorities are insisting on inserting an interval.  Custom?  Aesthetic relief?  Time-filling?

 

Sunday October 30

Slava, Rodrigo, Beethoven VII

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall at at 2:30 pm

Yes, it’s that poor bloody Concierto de Aranjuez once again.  Slava Grigoryan, now as familiar to Australian audiences as John Williams used to be, is fronting this venerable piece yet again.   But we should be happy that at least here’s one guitarist who can play the thing.   Richard Tognetti will lead another Beethoven symphony, No 7 in A – although I can’t help thinking that we’ve heard this work before from the ACO.   Even so, it’s always a gripping 40 minutes of muscle-flexing to experience, particularly if the Allegretto is treated properly and not as a funeral march.  Melbourne audiences get to hear a world premiere of So dream thy sails by Gordon Kerry, taking its inspiration from a Hart Crane fragment, The Phantom Bark.  This is formally a violin concerto and will feature Helena Rathbone, one of the ACO’s principal violins, as its soloist.

The program will be repeated on Monday October 31 at 7:30 pm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday September 1

Wood, Metal & Vibrating Air

Tamara Smolyar

Robert Blackwood Hall, Monash University at 7:30 pm

This has been an ongoing cycle featuring several well-known pianists performing under the heading ‘The piano – up close and personal’.   Which is apparently what it says; while the performances are held in the large Blackwood Hall, the audience is grouped on-stage around the soloist – so far, the participants have included Caroline Almonte, Stefan Cassomenos, Andrea Keller, Simon Tedeschi, Lisa Moore.   Tamara Smolyar is last in this series of recitals.  She is performing a new work by her colleague in Monash University’s Music Faculty, Kenji Fujimura, the Australian premiere of Anatoly Documentov’s Mood 2: Preludes, another world premiere in Livia Teodorescu-Ciocanea’s Briseis, yet another first hearing in Anthony Halliday’s Introduction and Fugue for Tamara,  Jane Hammond’s There is a solitude enjoying its first outing, and an arrangement for duo pianists by Halliday and Smolyar of Rachmaninov’s Trio Elegiaque in D minor.   A night packed with novelty and exploration.

 

Thursday September 1

Hrusa Conducts Suk’s Asrael Symphony

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

This is a huge gamble; as far as I can see, solely based on the attraction of having conductor Jakob Hrusa direct another big tract of Czech music, if not as varied in content as his complete Ma Vlast with the MSO in 2014.   The long symphony that Suk wrote in memory of Dvorak, his father-in-law, then reformed from a celebration to something darker when his wife died the following year, is a complete unknown to me.   Hrusa took it to the London Proms two years ago and the work has enjoyed the attention of several enthusiastic promoters in Britain.  Tonight, it is allied with Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 in G minor – the one that enjoyed a lot of exposure (well, its opening bars did) in the film Amadeus.

The program will be repeated on Friday September 2 in Robert Blackwood Hall, Monash University at 8 pm.

 

Friday September 3

Elision

Australian National Academy of Music at 7 pm

I’ve been an Elision follower for many years – that is, before the group shifted base and went international.   Still, admiration has to be kept within bounds and this night’s trick speaks of a superhuman talent to be in two places at once.  According to the ANAM calendar of events, the group is collaborating with musicians from ANAM at the South Melbourne Town Hall in German composer Enno Poppe’s (apparently) challenging Speicher – which could mean granary, an attic storage room, or computer memory.   Whatever the case, the players are also down to perform the work in the Capital Theatre, Bendigo as part of that city’s Festival of Exploratory Music.   Look, they could be doing both: the South Melbourne performance is at 7 pm, Bendigo’s is scheduled for 9 pm.  But then, the work lasts about 75 minutes so it would be close-run thing that would involve the sort of driving that shouldn’t be encouraged on the Calder.    Or perhaps the participants will be split in half.   Either way, you’d want to check exactly what’s going on before the date.

 

Saturday September 3

Three Twentieth-Century Masterpieces

Ensemble Gombert

Xavier College, Kew at 5:30 pm

And they are Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G minor and two scores unknown to me: Hugo Distler’s Totentanz and Petr Eben’s Horka hlina.  The German composer is a celebrated force in his country’s choral tradition and, in his comparatively short life, he wrote a great deal of music for choirs.  This Dance of Death has many sections, some of them spoken.   Bitter Earth, Eben’s cantata, requires a baritone solo, choir and piano.   As for whether these are masterpieces, the proof is yet to come, although you can be sure that the Gomberts will give each work their best efforts.   Let’s hope they’re persuasive.

 

Sunday September 4

Leonskaja Mozart

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 2:30 pm

Hard to tell who takes pride of place at this event – the Soviet/Austrian pianist or the plain Austrian composer.  Both have a hand in the central work, the Jeunehomme Concerto in E flat: the only one you hear regularly of the first 13 or 14 in the catalogue.  On either side is a string work: the lavishly opulent Sextet from Strauss’s Capriccio, and Beethoven’s  E flat Major Quartet, the later Op. 127 one,  arranged for string orchestra by . . . well, it could be the absent Richard Tognetti, but there are plenty of other takers.   Leonskaja, by the way, is not taking on leader duties; these are the responsibility of Roman Simovic, one of the two  London Symphony Orchestra concertmasters, who is guest director.

The program is repeated in Hamer Hall on Monday September 5 at 7: 30 pm.

 

Sunday September 4

Classical Romanticism

Trio Anima Mundi

Holy Trinity Anglican Church, East Melbourne at 3 pm.

Second in the ensemble’s subscription series, this begins and ends with works by two friends.  Sterndale Bennett’s Chamber Trio in A, an early work, has three movements only and is not over-taxing but will make an intriguing contrast with the last piece on the program by his cobber Mendelssohn: the ubiquitous Piano Trio in D minor.   In between come two small-scale bagatelles by Theodore Dubois, whose name is known to me solely as an organ composer.   But here is his Canon for piano trio, two pages in which the imitative work is confined to the string instruments at the 2nd.   Dubois’ Promenade sentimentale in A flat is more substantial but really a show-case for violin and cello with the keyboard doing arpeggio support duty for most of the time.   The group’s move to East Melbourne took me by surprise; intending to attend the first recital this year, I drove round for some time without finding a parking space free that accommodates you for more than an hour.   I’d suggest taking the tram, or adventuring on the train to Jolimont.

 

Wednesday September 7

Beethoven Festival  –  Piano Concerto No. 1

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 7 pm

Paul Lewis will be soloist in this celebration of the complete piano concertos.   Conducting is Douglas Boyd, whose complete Beethoven symphonies cycle at the Town Hall five years ago was a remarkable success.   It’s quite a challenge, this C Major score, gifted with a chirpy finale but preceded by two substantial essays that test a pianist’s capacity for variety of touch, as well as the power to sustain some lengthy paragraphs.   As preludes come Haydn’s Symphony No.102, contemporary with the evening’s concerto, and Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1   –  no, I don’t understand how this fits in, either. You’d presume that the MSO will play the composer’s orchestral arrangement of 1935 rather than the original format for 15 instrumentalists.   But it still makes a challenging aural experience, even 110 years after its production.

 

Saturday September 10

Sato and the Romantics

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

A guest new to me – and the Brandenburgers, I think – Shunske Sato is an American-based Baroque violinist.   Which makes it all the more interesting that he is playing the Paganini Concerto No. 4, although he has recorded all of the Caprices on a period instrument.  Still, there’s nothing like upping the ante and handicapping yourself even further than just handling the technical demands; throwing in gut strings will make a big difference to Sato’s ease of negotiation    Also to be heard is Grieg’s Holberg Suite – the poet lived in the Baroque era but this music is just as unusual fare for this orchestra as is the concerto – and Mendelssohn’s String Symphony No. 2 in D: 10 minutes’ worth of early adolescent skilfulness but not much there to sink your teeth into.  There must be more on the program but I can’t find out what; perhaps we’re in for an early mark.

This program will be repeated on Monday September 11 at 5 pm.

 

Saturday September 10

Beethoven Festival  –  Piano Concertos Nos. 2 & 3

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 7 pm

Back with Paul Lewis as soloist in the only occasion during this festival where you hear two concertos.  The C minor work is well-known but you have to wait quite a few years before you come across the B flat (originally, the first composed of the lot).   It’s a fair test of the pianist as the two works couldn’t be more temperamentally opposed.   For reasons that defy any sort of logic, the concertos are separated by Webern’s Five Movements for String Orchestra, which I assume is an arrangement of the well-travelled Five Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5.   They’ll do good service as a complete change of pace but, in this context, it’s hard to see the point.   Maybe it will all come clear on the night; or maybe it will just remain an inexplicable programming anomaly.

 

Monday September 12

Rare Gems

Quartz

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

The gems begin with Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix’s well-beloved sister.  Her String Quartet in E flat has only been extant for a little over 25 years and, alongside the composer’s multiple songs and piano pieces, is a true rarity.   Frank Bridge’s Three Idylls are forever associated with the composer’s student, Benjamin Britten, who rifled the middle one for his striking Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, but the idylls themselves make for genially astringent listening experiences.   Ervin Schulhoff died in the Wulzburg concentration camp but his first string quartet has gained more performances than most of his music, if CD recordings are any indication.  But Quartz has it right by classifying this score as rare; whether it’s a gem remains to be seen.

 

Wednesday September 14

Beethoven Festival  –  Piano Concerto No. 4

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 7 pm

Lewis takes on the most languid and contemplative of the five concertos.  Haydn’s Drumroll Symphony No. 103 sets the night’s tone – somehow.  The two works are separated by about a decade in terms of composition.  And the finale is Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, that romantic effusion for strings that comes to one of Western music’s most luminous conclusions in a wash of harmonics.  The program sort of balances the first one in this series, so, along with Boyd’s trustworthy interpretation and Lewis’ facility, we should be grateful to hear works by two composers who are often strangers to live performance  –  and I don’t mean Beethoven.

 

Thursday September 15

Beyond all this . . .

Israel Camerata Jerusalem Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

Founded in 1983, this ensemble is fortunate enough to have retained its original director and conductor –  Avner Biron.   Tonight, the ICJO makes its Australian debut with guest Zvi Plesser, whom I last heard in this venue nearly seven years ago collaborating with the Jerusalem Quartet (see directly below).  The Camerata and soloist are rolling out the big guns with Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, a lengthy piece that never gets stale.  To keep it company comes Haydn’s Symphony No. 85, La Reine – so-called because Marie Antoinette liked it; not exactly a ringing guarantee of quality but the symphony survives with flying colours.   And also flying, the nationalistic banner is hoisted by way of the respected Ukrainian/Israeli composer Mark Kopytman’s earnest and spikily-scored work that gives this night its title.

The orchestra plays again on Monday September 19.  Kopytman puts in another appearance,  with another of his works that the ICJO has recorded: Kaddish, which can have either a viola or cello soloist; obviously, on this night, Plesser will do the honours.  He also fronts the popular Haydn Concerto in C.    Book-ending these are Bartok’s Divertimento for strings and the feather-light Symphony No. 5 by Schubert.

 

Saturday September 17

Jerusalem Quartet

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

Appearing for Music Viva, as usual, this well-known group is offering two programs, both containing a piece of Australian craft: the String Quartet No. 3, Summer Dances, by Ross Edwards.   In five movements, this work is four years old and I think it must have been played here at some stage; if so, the memory has not lingered.  Tonight, the surrounding elements are Beethoven in B flat – the last of the Op. 16 set – and Dvorak No. 13, reflecting the composer’s delight at being out of the United States and back home.   In all, it’s a happy-tempered night’s work

The Jerusalem musicians will return for a second program on Tuesday September 27.  With the Ross Edwards, they will play the first Razumovsky of Beethoven and Haydn’s Lark, Op. 64, No. 5.   Again, this promises contentment rather than musical angst.

 

Saturday September 17

Beethoven Festival  –  Piano Concerto No. 5

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 7 pm

The festival ends with Paul Lewis mounting an assault on the Emperor: an always majestically confronting experience with a circuitous first movement that has momentarily befuddled several pianists in live performance over the years.   Completing a Haydn trifecta, the MSO under Douglas Boyd plays the Symphony No. 104, the London and last of the composer’s mighty output in this form.   As for the de rigueur Second Viennese School offering at these events, tonight it’s the turn of Alban Berg; nothing so simple as the Three Orchestral Pieces but a transcription for orchestra by Julian Yu of the defenceless Piano Sonata.   Yes, some of us are grateful that Schoenberg and his close colleagues/students have not been completely forgotten but how they fit in with Haydn and Beethoven in any terms but national – and that’s a doubtful quantity – is one of the year’s programming mysteries

 

Sunday September 18

Tricolore: Three Italian Maestri

The Melbourne Musicians

St. John’s Southgate at 3 pm

Back in their usual habitat after an excursion to MLC for a Beethoven+Mozart feast in July, the Musicians take on three well-known Italian scores.   Two similar works are  Albinoni’s Oboe Concerto – well, one of the eight; probably the D minor from Op. 9 – and Marcello’s Oboe Concerto, also in D minor.    Both will feature Musicians’ regular Anne Gilby as soloist.   Completing the trio of offerings is Pergolesi’s Stabat mater with soprano Tania de Jong and counter-tenor Hamish Gould.  The organization has enjoyed success with this work in previous years, although my experience of it has usually involved two female voices – which is a pretty good indication of how little I get around.   Still, the components make for a congenial afternoon’s listening with nothing too tension-inducing, except for the soloists.

 

Tuesday September 20

The Wanderer

Seraphim Trio

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

Now here’s a night for Schubert enthusiasts.   The Seraphims – violin Helen Ayres, cello Timothy Nankervis, piano Anna Goldsworthy – will play both the trios in one sitting. Actually, there’ll be an interval, so it’s a double sitting.   Not an impossible undertaking but it is an ordeal to test the players’ concentration.   No, they won’t have trouble with the notes but there are some big canvases in these eight movements and maintaining your focus throughout can be daunting.   That’s the joy and terror of chamber music: there’s no place to hide, least of all in the MRC’s Salon.  The trio members have been buoyed by audience responses to their Beethoven trios cycle last year – hence this year’s move to his admirer-from-afar.   The title has me puzzled, though.  Is it the song?  A reference to Schubert’s love of hiking?  Or does it pertain to his amiable meandering round the key spectrum?   Let’s hope the game is worth the candle and the interpretations can improve on those thrown up by outfits like the Beaux Arts.

 

Wednesday September 21

Shakespeare in Love

Songmakers Australia

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

This offers a vast range of repertoire, everything from Schumann (Der Dichter spricht? A piano solo?), Berlioz mourning the death of Ophelia in Legouve’s take on Gertrude’s description of the tragedy,  Brahms giving actual voice to Ophelia, through Korngold and Grainger’s melancholy voicing of Desdemona’s song, some side-tracks to the poet’s fellow-countrymen Quilter and Finzi, a sonnet setting by Kabalevsky as a side-dish, and Australian Alison Bauld’s vision of somnambulistic Lady Macbeth doing the rampart rounds.   Andrea Katz will accompany Songmakers regulars soprano Merlyn Quaife, mezzo Sally-Anne Russell and bass-baritone Nicholas Dinopoulos.   A pretty well-focused hour’s entertainment delivered by reliable musicians.

 

Wednesday September 21

Basically Beethoven #3

Selby & Friends

Deakin Edge, Federation Square at 7:30 pm

Not just basic: nothing but Beethoven here.   The night opens and closes with piano trios, as expected: Op. 1 No. 2 in G Major, while the Ghost in D Major brings up the rear.  Kathryn Selby’s guests tonight are the top and bottom ends of the Goldner Quartet: violinist Dene Olding putting in a rare Melbourne appearance, and cellist Julian Smiles who is participating also in the last of this subscription series on November 8.   Olding will also perform the Sonata No. 8 in G, while Smiles plays the first of the Op. 102 in C Major, a sternly compressed two-movement structure that in parts has the same emotional breadth as the last piano sonatas.   Selby and her associates invariably produce interpretations of remarkable depth and control, object-lessons for any aspiring chamber music tyro and for devotees of the craft.

 

Friday September 23

Sara Macliver, Paul Wright & The Italian Baroque

ANAM Orchestra

Australian National Academy of Music at 7 pm

A program that could have been filched wholesale from the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra.   Considering its contents, it suddenly struck me how little Baroque music I’ve heard the Academy musicians play; well, they’re making up for it tonight.   Soprano Sara Macliver sings Caldara’s slow-stepping In lagrime stemprato from the oratorio Magdalene at the feet of Christ, and later Perseus’s aria Sovente il sole from Vivaldi’s serenata Andromeda liberata with the night’s director, Paul Wright, supplying the violin obbligato line.   In fact, Vivaldi scores well here with the Il Riposo Violin Concerto, a Christmas celebration, the La Folia variations, and the Sinfonia in D for strings RV 125.   Starting the night is Boccherini’s Night Music of the Streets of Madrid with its clever guitar imitations and atmospheric crescendo and diminuendo effects; Gregori’s Concerto Grosso No. 1 in C from the Opus 2 set follows.   Later on, we are treated to an arrangement by Joe Chindamo of a Scarlatti Sonata in G Major – which admits of a pretty large field of possibilities.

 

Monday September 26

Intimate Beethoven

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

The ACO comes to town out of its subscription series; well, part of it is coming.  This program comprises two works only: Mozart’s String Quintet in G minor, and Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor.  The personnel are all core ACO personnel:  violins Helena Rathbone and Linda Palladini, violas Alexandru-Mihai Bota and Nicole Divall, and cello Timo-Veikko Valve who is the ensemble member of whom we have seen most in a chamber music role at Selby & Friends recitals.   As for the music they have prepared, Mozart doesn’t come much more sombre than this quintet which, oddly enough, has a happy ending tacked on, presumably to nullify the minor-tonality gravity that overpowers much of the score.    As for the Beethoven, this is the five-movement work with a long central Hymn of Thanksgiving which often sounds like anything but.   It’s great to see that the players are not fobbing us off with mere entertainment but are heading straight for the tragic heartland of both composers.

 

Thursday September 29

The Offering

Flinders Quartet

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

Guest with the popular quartet will be pianist Benjamin Martin who will assist in winding up the program with the Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor, puzzlingly listed as Op. 34a which I assume is meant to differentiate this original scoring from the Op 34b arrangement for two pianos.  Martin will also take part in the world premiere of Elena Kats-Chernin’s Piano Quintet No. 1 which gives the evening its title.  The Flinders players are themselves performing another world premiere: Stuart Greenbaum’s String Quartet No. 7 with the cummings-style name 4 before (and after) 5.  To flesh out the night, the quartet will also essay Shostakovich No. 5, the first one with the movements joined by attacca directions.  Plenty of novelty here alongside two superb repertoire staples.

 

Friday September 30

Four Saints in Three Acts

Victorian Opera

Merlyn Theatre, Coopers Malthouse at 7:30 pm

An opera by Virgil Thomson with a libretto by Gertrude Stein, this work has fascinated many musicians for years.   For some, its delights are wrapped in a deliberate maze of oblique suggestions and intentional obscurities but, to get the best out of it, you probably have to adopt an old-fashioned abnegation of rationality and run with whatever happens. The cast is drawn from the company’s Youth Opera personnel; the pit will be peopled by the organization’s Youth Orchestra conducted by Fabian Russell.  Director is Nancy Black and the production will involve 3D imagery, as we have experienced with the company’s previous The Flying Dutchman performances at St. Kilda’s Palais.  St. Ignatius Loyola, two St. Theresas of Avila and a panoply of other canonized characters sing whatever action there is and, at the end, the company is hosting a (separately ticketed) dinner inspired by Alice B. Toklas’ notebook, at which the hosts will be soprano Merlyn Quaife as Toklas herself and Robyn Archer will appear as Gertrude Stein.  Hath earth anything to show more fair?

A further performance of this work will be given on Saturday October 1 at 7:30 pm.

 

Friday September 30

Respighi’s Fountains of Rome

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

A travelogue to satisfy any devotee of the once-Eternal City, the MSO performs Respighi’s Fountains of Rome (an all-day tour involving the Valle Giulia, the Triton, the Trevi and the Villa Medici) and then the Pines of Rome (at the Villa Borghese, near a catacomb, up the Janiculum, along the Appian Way).   In sequence, the works present an orgy of orchestration, the effects brilliantly conceived and irresistible.   Guest pianist Nelson Freire, one of Brazil’s finest musicians, takes the solo part in Schumann’s modestly flamboyant Piano Concerto, and Brazilian-born conductor Marcelo Lehninger, who toured South America with Freire eight years ago, begins the event with the Concert Overture in E Major by Szymanowski – an early work that matches the lushness of the Respighi extravaganzas at night’s end.

This program will be repeated on Saturday October 1 at 2 pm, and on Monday October 3 at 6:30 pm.