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SIEGFRIED’S STORY

Mark Papworth, Per Forsberg, Rosa Scaffidi

Move Records MCD 597

Does anyone in the current generation – X, Y, Z squared – remember Leopold Stokowski? Not the talk-down-to-the-audience posturing figure in DIsney’s first Fantasia of 1940, but the important force in American music-making (and music) who suffered vilification from less-endowed colleagues and underlings, but who stayed the course and remained active almost until his death aged 95 in 1977. He comes irresistibly to mind when considering this idiosyncratic CD which reduces some of Wagner’s most powerful outpourings in the Ring cycle to a mixed trio’s compass: horn, tuba and piano. In doing so, the content covers a bit more ground than just that trodden by Siegfried, who only appears in the last two of the four operas. But, as everyone will tell you, the big tetralogy is nothing less than a monster family show, albeit one starting in primordial ooze and ending in an apocalypse.

Stokowski put his own mark on well-known chunks like the Liebstod, Magic Fire Music and Ride of the Valkyries. In fact, it was some years before I realized that this last-named had singing interpolated. He also put together what he labelled syntheses. Quite a few of both these formats introduced many of my peers and myself to Wagner, mainly because our chances of seeing any parts of the Ring cycle were next to none in this country. Lohengrin or Tannhauser, perhaps; Tristan, less likely; Mastersingers, on the outer rim of feasibility; Parsifal, an impossible dream. These orchestrations were, for their time, very impressive-sounding, especially the three extracts from Tristan: the Prelude, Liebesnacht and Liebstod. Stokowski also gave us more than a nodding acquaintance with the last act of Parsifal, including the Good Friday Spell, as it was known in less religiously correct times.

This Scaffidi/Papworth/Forsberg trio seem to have been driven to their enterprise by little more than Wagner love. Well, that’s certainly true of Papworth who constructed all twelve arrangements and persuaded his colleagues to enter the lists with him. Great to have a musician follow his ambitious path, following the Stokowski trail but scaling down rather than revelling in sumptuousness. Further, it’s admirable to have a player behind the exercise, rather than a well-meaning amateur who responds to the Ring for questionable reasons. For one thing, if you remove most of the tracks on this CD from the original corpus, you are left with hours of tedium in theatrical or dramatic terms. The same can’t be said of the music where many of us look for salvation, but Wotan’s (and others’) lengthy recapitulations can daze many a music-lover. regardless of any singer’s quality.

So, here we are at the opening to Das Rheingold, Wagner’s exercise in E flat Major if mainly its tonic triad. Both wind players have little to do here but sustain the tonic drone while also sounding out the endless chain of E flats, Gs and B flats that are the lot of the brass while Scaffidi copes with the semiquaver arpeggios that turn up in the bass (eventually) and then the woodwind, roaming around both dominant and tonic triads. The group plays a straight version of this famous opening before the first of he composer’s Kardashian precursors, Woglinde, opens her mouth and introduces us to Wagner’s mellifluous vocal line and onomatopoeiac rhyme patterns. No problems here, and the performance is fluid enough.

A more difficult excerpt to carry off follows. After the ‘Get up, you lazy sod’ colloquy between Fricka and Wotan, Fasolt and Fafner, having built Valhalla, show up for their payment. The extract starts at the giants’ entry – Sanft schloss Schlaf dein Aug’ – and their trio with Wotan is followed right up to the D Major cadence just before Donner threatens the giants with his hammer. Forsberg carries the vocal line brunt, Papworth taking over when the movement becomes more chromatic, while the piano is prominent in the galumphing leitmotif that brings to ear the brothers’ heftiness. The players do their best to cover all harmonic bases and, for the most part, the extract doesn’t sound threadbare, although I must confess to losing the vocal line when Freia starts carrying on about being carried off.

This set of three extracts ends with the Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla and it’s an impossible task to give even an inkling of the grandiose effect of these pages in a small-scale version. The trio begins at the spot where Donner tells everyone to come on up at Weise der Brucke den Weg!, omits the brooding of Wotan, his uneasy triumphalism countered with the distant Rhinemaidens bemoaning their loss, and takes up when the singing stops and the stately three-in-a-bar march takes over as the gods move into their new quarters. No way on earth can Scaffidi hope to cope with the divisi string work that goes on for page after page and the brass can only hint at the colossal grandeur of the massive brass choir. Still, the extract does show you how brilliant Wagner could be at fleshing out his bare-bones material through a mighty orchestral onslaught.

We are given four excerpts from Die Walkure: two from Act 1 and the concluding act’s Ride of the Valkyrie and Magic Fire Music, with nothing from the much-maligned middle act. The opera’s Prelude is handled well enough, lasting just up until curtain up and a bar before Siegmund comes into the hut. Both brass take on the minor scale motif while the piano keeps up a sustained chord pattern which doesn’t attempt to replicate the sextuplets in violins and violas; even so, the brass cannot hope to replicate the rushed quintuplets that feature so often on the first crotchet in the cellos’ and basses’ pattern work. Still, the dual impressions of storm and urgency come across efficiently enough and with very few errors, considering the pell-mell music and the considerable troubles with giving string music to low brass.

Towards the end of the first act comes Siegmund’s Wintersturme wichend dem Wonnemond aria. sticking out like a sore thumb in the middle of this menacing act. Our trio begins 8 bars before the singer and cuts out on the same bar as the aria’s final Lenz! Papworth takes the tune, Scaffidi gives us the mobile arpeggio-rich support, but Forsberg roves across the score with remarkable liberty, here following a bass clarinet part, there a horn, sometimes a violin or cello scrap. It all makes for a genial experience, in large part due to the horn’s smooth agility, especially when the aria moves out of its B flat comfort zone.

The hackneyed Ride of the Valkyries is played straight, without gimmicks, and proves to be a real workout for Scaffidi who has to handle all the athletic work that falls to strings and woodwind. Both brass players tend to reinforce each other, playing at the octave as the piece reaches its highpoint. It’s a bit heavy-handed, as Rides go, and you certainly miss the blazing energy when the brass go into canon with themselves. Scaffidi brings things to a halt at the spot just before Ortlinde sets the girls off on their dead hero body-count, suggestive of AFLW post-match locker room banter – enjoy it while you can, girls: Coach Wotan’s on his way. Then we hear part of Wotan’s Farewell, starting four bars before he summons Loge to install the fire hurdle, and moving to the end of the opera with some omissions to the god’s moving ruminations before he leaves his daughter to her doom. Again, the piano had all the flickering labour while the brass hefted out the pompous descending scales and that unforgettably moving Innocent Sleep motif.

I started to lose the plot with the first extract from Act 2 of Siegfried. I followed the real Forest Murmurs – obvious in the score, beginning at the Wachsendes Waldweben notification and the key change to E Major – but the preceding introduction seemed a Stokowski-style mashing of melodies and motifs from the preceding scene. After a while, of course, Siegfried starts singing and the brass outlined his part, but the process was fragmented and the extract ended in mid-flight, the piano giving us the clarinet solo that accompanies the hero’s picking up his horn prior to blasting at Fafner. This fragment of the opera came off very well, handled with an agreable fluidity, even if most of the effectiveness came from Scaffidi’s non-glutinous string substitution. Papworth gave an excellent reading of Siegfried’s Horn Call, one of Wagner’s rare solo passages – completely exposed, I mean, not just rising above the ruck. You’d go some way to find an equal to this player’s accelerando: immer schnell und schmetternder indeed.

The final extract from Siegfried was the Prelude and first scene of Act 3 where Wotan/Wanderer is loitering at the base of Brunnhilde’s rock. This is pretty dour Wagner with little to recommend it except as an informative harbinger of impending doom and a marvellous contrast with the splendid final duet to the opera. Or perhaps I just miss the orchestral ferment here more than in several other excerpts.

And finally, the trio reaches Gotterdammerung and two solid pieces of work, the longest on the CD: Siegfried’s Rhine Journey and his Funeral March. Everybody puts themselves to employment in the musical picture that shows Siegfried leaving the rock, Brunnhilde’s last glimpses of him, and the jaunty journey that our hero has on his luxury-less Scenic tour before the music sinks to depression. The players follow the score right through till the ambiguous chord that signifies the curtain going up on the Gibichung Hall. Much of this is horn-heavy in the original but the keyboard provides much of the movement’s thrust, doubling the brass’s handling of the main melody line for substantial lengths of time. Here, as in previous tracks, details have been omitted; admittedly, most of these are rapid and hard to incorporate into an arrangement, but it might have been worth leaving the brass to jockey with the melodic Hauptstimmen and given Scaffadi the opportunity to fill in the supporting gaps.

And we come at last to the opera’s penultimate dramatic highpoint. Auden once said, ‘When my time is up, I’ll want Siegfried’s Funeral Music and not a dry eye in the house.’ Wishes are all very well, but the poet had a quieter send-off at the churchyard of Kirchstetten in 1973. It’s hard to think of anything to rival Wagner’s pages for shattering, sombre power and these musicians give a convincing musical depiction of this imposing scene, picking up in the bar where Siegfried dies and coming to a neat C Major conclusion (the original’s C sharp down to C) at the point where Gutrune comes on stage to reap the rewards of her household’s duplicity. This is a very hard ask without a conductor and you can hear some slightly discrepant entries, moments when the ensemble is just a tad imperfect. But the interpretation has a reduced grandeur and punch at those stirring moments of C and G Major repeated chords that, even on a small scale as here, take you into the tragedy of this saga’s final moments.

In the end, this CD is something of a curiosity, reducing the irreducible and clarifying where the original intent was often a fabric of rich agglomeration. What you must do is respect the exercise as a labour of love, fed by Papworth’s familiarity with and attachment to Wagner’s music. No, of course it’s no substitute for the original bleeding chunks that Stokowski carved out for us. It’s more like a digest of a digest: improbably diminished canvases, yet bearing enough distinctive lineaments to satisfy the sympathizer, if not the Bayreuth purist.

MUSIC FOR HOLY WEEK

Canticum Chamber Choir

Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Rosalie

Friday April 2, 2021

Canticum Chamber Choir

One of the few opportunities to hear some traditional Good Friday music arose from this event from one of Brisbane’s leading choral bodies. Given the state premier’s penchant for lockdowns, the planned initial presentation on March 31 had to be postponed for a week; luckily, conductor/director Emily Cox and her forces were able to get themselves together for this performance on the heels of the snap-lockdown’s lifting. The experience thereby gained an added frisson, as though events of this kind were lacunae in the normal life of this city – like early Christians getting a partial reprieve when a theologically indifferent Caesar came to power.

Emerging from our live-performance catacombs, Canticum gave us a mixed program, its material widespread in ambit but nearly all of it appropriate for the dour day itself. That familiar setting of Psalm 51 from the 1630s by Allegri with its exposed high Cs for solo soprano was written for Tenebrae services in Holy Week; O vos omnes is a responsory for Holy Saturday, here in the setting by Pablo Casals; presenting a Good Friday scene, although not written for that day’s observances, the Stabat mater dolorosa sequence has attracted many composers, including Domenico Scarlatti whose treatment I was hearing for the first time live.

O nata lux has its foundation in the Feast of the Transfiguration and, if not there, then Christmas, but I was happy to hear Canticum put their voices to another Lauridsen composition. Lotti’s 8-part Crucifixus deals with part of the Creed, but the part most pertinent to this day. And the Xhosa song Indodana is centred around the Son’s self-sacrifice which is the fundamental matter of Good Friday.

It’s a brave choir that opens its account with the Allegri score. For one thing, your force is split into three: the Gregorian set, the small group in the distance, and the main body. On the plus side, it’s repetitive and the change in timbre gives a necessary variety. Still, I must admit to a certain relief when the Benigne fac, Domine verse comes around and we’re on the home stretch.

Cox sent three male singers to stand under the church’s dome, from which they articulated the mono-linear chant, a line that got progressively slower as the work proceeded. But the trio stayed in tune, as did the main body Choir I who showed themselves well-prepared and expressively capable. With the four-line Choir II, matters got off to an unfortunate start, the soprano seemingly left high and dry in the first Amplius lava me intercession, the tenor and bass vanishing from view around the time of the top note on munda. Luckily, the group showed increased security in their next excursion and the negotiation of mihi proved much more secure.

As a whole, this performance was reverent, lacking in dynamic drama, although that’s understandable in a psalm that, more than most, rambles across a wide range of guilt. What it lacked more than anything, though, was a sense of urgency; these sinners were in no placatory hurry but admitted their iniquities at a measured pace. More trepidation would have helped the setting to carry more weight than this reading’s pleasure in its comfortable resonance.

As intra-choral interludes, cellist Louise King offered us two solo improvisations with a loop supporting her live performance. The first, Lament, opened with a long pizzicato passage before a solid bowed melody emerged. The language was diatonic, highly suggestive of Jewish music with what sounded like reminiscences of Bruch’s Kol Nidre setting along with a handful of Hasidic sobs. Nothing particularly startling here but an intriguing mix of sonorities and a richly expressive lyrical fluency.

The Casals motet began in the same key as the conclusion to King’s Lament – a nice piece of continuity. This O vos omnes is popular in Holy Week ceremonies, not least for its adoption by British choirs which find a reflection of their conservatism in its simple, concordant pages that reveal the cellist/composer’s happiness in a harmonic landscape that has barely progressed beyond Schumann but sets the text with impressive ardour for all that, particularly at the arresting climax on attendite. This showed a clarity of texture from the Canticums, especially across the sections where Casals almost divides his forces into 8 parts; the interpretation gave us a good taste of a choral body momentarily not under much pressure.

As with the Allegri, this evening’s performance of Scarlatti’s solid Stabat mater impressed more for its steady workmanship than for any suggestions of transcendence. For all that, the Canticums (or should that be Cantica?) enjoyed a continuo support throughout from Phillip Gearing’s chamber organ with King lending a subtle, welcome hand. In the first movement, the delivery proved reliable, apart from one of the soprano lines being happier at her work than the other in the brief canon at bars 5-6. The succeeding Cuius animam followed the same emotional bandwidth, although here you find some more intriguing harmonic structures as in the treatment of Et dolentem. Cox gave her forces some solo work at various stages across he score; fine as a change in surface tension although the ones employed in the centre of this movement tended to lag behind the pulse.

With Quis non posset, Scarlatti gives his interpreters a bit more chromatic creeping and a more lively pace at the Pro peccatis text. Even so, I think these pages could have been negotiated at a brisker pace because the sopranos and first tenors struggled with the downward motion between bars 69 to 72. A much more comfortable time they had of it in the balmy 2nds of Eia Mater, King’s surging colour prominent here for the first time. Also, the mix of soloists proved texturally intriguing and individual, while the movement came to a moving efflorescence in the closing bars with a finely judged tierce de Picardie. In this last respect, ditto for the Sancta Maria verses, moving from major to minor throughout before a concluding raised B flat. At this point, the soloists’ contribution, accurate in intonation though it was, lacked plosive bite, consonants disappearing with that freedom shown by Sutherland in her prime.

I’m fascinated by the setting styles of various writers in the Fac me tecum interlude. Scarlatti doesn’t disappoint with his major-key determination while the poet keeps giving the Mother of God more orders. The singers made a bold start on these pages but I sensed a slackening of determination at about bars 18 and 24 where the top sopranos have a short break. Some more surprises emerged in the Juxta crucem sequence. Every so often in this score, a note emerges that doesn’t exactly jar but rather points in a new harmonic direction, the composer here moving between D and D flat; not making a Gesualdo chromatic strike but sapping away at your expectations. Yet again, in these pages the soloists showed a tendency to pull against the conductor’s admittedly fluent metre, and the only unhealthy contribution heard across this score came in the soprano soloist’s last note.

A florid tenor/soprano solo alternation opened the Inflammatus, well carried off even if it might have gained from more exuberance and less self-consciousness. When they entered, the main body also played by the book and tamped down the potential for vigour, possible because of Scarlatti’s sudden plethora of minims. To their credit, the soloists’ second exposure proved more persuasive, almost exhilarating. I expect (not having counted the bars) that the Fac ut animae segment is the longest of this score and hard work for its interpreters as Scarlatti channels his inner Handel. Sadly, the melodic material stays unremarkable at a point where we need novelty but instead get blocks of vocal fabric that offer little variety. Full marks to the singers for soldiering through it.

The 3/8 Amen (even though we’d enjoyed an Amen during the previous movement) restored some vitality, even if the basses failed to make much of an impact at their first bar 11 entry. But the performance ended in fine style thanks to an excellent integration of solo lines into the full corps, completing the task with some welcome panache.

Canticum has recorded some Lauridsen and has clear sympathy with the American master’s style, including an ease with those added 2nds and 7ths. The singers treated O nata lux with devotion, putting their vocal backs (?!) into the task and carrying off a fine realization of the brief work’s recapitulation/coda at bar 35. To Cox’s credit, she kept her charges at a steady pace, without wallowing in the wash of choral colours and the occasional passage of very ripe chordal texture.

King’s Dawn Light solo moved to the major and impressed for its felicitous character, enriched by some excellent integration of live and taped material. Were there some Sculthorpe-type bird imitations in the mix, or was that a serendipitous intrusion from outside the building? Whatever the case, this was a welcome instance of affirmative action, giving vent even more to the player’s appealing and resonant production abilities.

All of Canticum moved to stand under the Sacred Heart dome for Lotti’s Crucifixus. It’s unusual to clump your lines together like this in a work for 8 parts but the results were excellent, the mesh a glowing texture of impressive movement at sub Pontio Pilato.

If you’ve seen the University of Pretoria Camerata sing Indodana under arranger Michael Barrett (available on YouTube), you’ve heard this simple construct at its best. Which is no reason for not essaying such an atmospheric piece yourself. I liked the Canticum version, although it was necessarily more elegant than anticipated. Still, the linear complex proved faultless with some well-balanced sustained chords from tenors and basses, the latter an explosive force at the work’s Jehova! climax across bars 46-48. An uplifting conclusion to this event that, for me at least, put the day into its proper perspective.

ENOCH ARDEN

Brisbane Music Festival & Victorian Theatre Company

Bowen Studio, Bowen Hills

Sunday March 28, 2021

Matthew Connell

Richard Strauss’s setting of the well-known Tennyson poem is an uncomfortable fit for classification. The composer was quite sparing in his score, framing the work – sort of – but writing only a few extended passages for the piano alone. At the conclusion, you realize that attention has focused on the speaker/reciter throughout, even when the work moves into a duo format. So the star of this night was actor Matthew Connell, given the task of reading the Poet Laureate’s somewhat Victorian (to state the bleeding obvious) effusion on the nature of self-sacrifice ,a virtue that does no favours for the character who exercises it. By contrast, pianist Alex Raineri, the Brisbane Musical Festival’s director and factotum, had moments of activity but huge hiatuses as well. As for the Melbourne visual contribution/complement, that consisted of atmospheric slides of landscapes and clips of the sea in motion; none of this interfered with the performance and was not original enough to distract you.

Strauss already had a large amount of material under his 32/3-year-old belt by the time that he composed Enoch Arden: two symphonies, the Burleske, Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, Macbeth, Aus Italien, Death and Transfiguration, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote on the near horizon, and a wealth of lieder and chamber music. In this company, the duo melodrama looks and sounds a slight product: 24 pages of piano score that feature several leitmotifs, left hand G minor scales (the sea) being the most memorable. One of the most sustained and active segments for piano involves Annie’s dream of self-justification, the determination to accept Enoch’s death and marry long-suffering Philip. That has its second part counterpart in Enoch’s visit to the house of his one-time wife and best friend, an experience that prostrates him.

As far as I could hear, Strauss’s piano part presented Raineri with few challenges. For every surging billow suggestion, the score presented simple progressions, sustained chords, repeated patterns if the speaker needed time to catch up. As opposed to other works like the Sinfonia domestica or An Alpine Symphony, the composer kept his word- or scene-painting simple, eschewing opportunities to lay colour on thickly, as in the lush descriptions of Arden’s island. For all the freedom allowed, Raineri played correctly and precisely, keeping control of the arpeggiated chords and matching his speaker’s delivery with a responsive dynamic range.

As for Connell, he is a young artist and so was able to avoid the tone of sententiousness in certain moralizing passages, while entering completely into the histrionics embedded in the text during the early debate between Annie and Enoch, the over-ripe marriage declaration that ends Part 1, and the returned Arden’s despair. Not as important as his insightful delivery but most surprising as a matter of mechanics was Connell’s fidelity to the text which most reciters arrange to have cut substantially; I could find only a few places where some lines had been left out, For instance, in the description of Philip’s careful wooing, some lines disappeared after ‘By this the lazy gossips of the port’; and, further on, some more strophes disappeared during Enoch’s night-time walk to Annie’s old house (near the parenthetic ‘A bill of sale gleam’d thro’ the drizzle’).

In their combined passages, both speaker and pianist were able to keep pretty much in proper relation to each other. Were they at work in the same space? Or was Connell operating in Melbourne while Raineri performed from his own Bowen Street lair? Whatever the case, the partnership between text and music was noticeably out of synch at the end of that moving scene where Philip sees he has lost his chance at happiness, ‘and rose and past Bearing a lifelong hunger in his heart.’ But that was really the only severely discrepant point. Another unexpected twist came after Philip’s solicitous ‘Tired, Annie?’ when more of Tennyson’s lines than sit in the score were superimposed on this segment’s concluding 13 bars.

These minor points did little to disrupt the reading’s energy which persevered up to the final strangely prosaic line. Both artists seized those opportunities for emotional zeal that at some stages comes close to bathos and managed to display the work’s probity of character as its three protagonists find satisfaction and/or redemption after suffering. I doubt if many more performances of Enoch Arden will come my way. There was an old LP recording that used to be available in the Melbourne Conservatorium library, which is how I first came across it. And Ensemble Liaison presented an odd version of it almost seven years ago to the day in the Melbourne Recital Centre, with extra parts added in from the original score for clarinet and cello.

And the form itself is a cover-term for such a variety of compositions; a case has been made that opera is really melodrama. But Strauss’s effort comes from an era when the melodrama was a more circumscribed object, certainly more so in terms of subject matter which tended to the moralistic. Apart from Berlioz’s extravagant Lelio – which he calls a melologue – I don’t know any other melodramas apart from this one. That is, of course, to ignore the greatest melodrama of them all – Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire – which stands alone, unassailable and inimitable, thank God. But both the VTC and BMF can be satisfied with their interpretation of this Strauss/Tennyson composite, even if I’m not really sure that the visual stimulation added much to the experience.

AN EVENING WITH ORAVA QUARTET

Melbourne Digital Concert Hall

Townsville Civic Theatre

Saturday October 17, 2020

 

Using the resources of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music which is being celebrated, as usual, in Townsville, Adele Schonhardt and Chris Howlett inserted this popular Queensland ensemble into their strong Melbourne Digital Concert Hall series, yet again showing that lockdown means nothing to administrators with a will. Mind you, the program was a brief one, with only two scheduled works: Haydn’s Sunrise Op. 76 No. 4, and Erwin Schulhoff’s Quartet No. 1 of 1924. Lucky I hung around at the end because the group came back to play a filler in the third movement, Tres lent, of the Ravel String Quartet.

It turned into a bit of a lop-sided hour with the Schulhoff score gaining most from the Oravas’ attentions. As expected, the young men made much of the vehemence to be found in the odd-numbered movements, but they were able to present an attractively dawdling version of the problematic second movement Allegretto and surprised with a non-indulgent treatment of the final affecting Andante – not flawless but assuredly insightful, living up to the composer’s emotional addresses (and distresses, for that matter).

The quartet’s score begins with a forte sempre dynamic direction across the board; the Oravas were quite happy to intensify the one term and obey the other. You could not want for any enthusiasm here in a Presto that owes much to Bartok and a little less to Stravinsky, and the pace was pretty inflexible up to two bars after Number 11 in the Philharmonia/Universal Edition score when the pizzicati, au talon and arco melange halts and the four lines come together in a four-octave-wide unison stringendo before a ferocious reversion to taws.

It sounds like an onslaught and in some ways it was, but the players found room for a bit of tempo flexibility along with the pressing motor-rhythms, so much so that the effect was far from freneticism for its own sake. The ensemble was crisp and exact as the players set out the ordered clash between modal and dissonant writing that started in D and ended in C. The result was pacy and entertaining to hear as the machismo level in the Townsville theatre took an upward turn.

Violist Thomas Chawner dominated the following Allegretto, his partners giving him an unobstructed field for his Number 1 solo. And he did not disappoint, generating a malleable and accurate line that exemplified the malincolia grotesca that Schulhoff required. Not to be outdone, cellist Karol Kowalik took up the reins after the the Tempo I marking: a 17-bar lyric of remarkable variety. All players made the sudden sul ponticello Nachtmusik a startling motion-packed melange before Chawner returned for a brief, acerbic cadenza leading to the last lingering and opening-recollecting violin solo; the texture quietly restless until the fade to darkness with a final squiggle from the top line.

It’s an unusual set of pages, organized but whimsical, and packed with effects that, for the most part, don’t get in the way. What I carried away was an awareness of the executants’ respect for every note and its placement, especially in the passagework of communal demi-semiquavers in pianissimo parallel motion. A turn back to the muscular broke in with the Allegro giocoso, a highpoint emerging at Number 2 with some gripping duets in fourths and a burst of unison work – the kind of fierce action that suits this group to a T. Nevertheless, five bars after Number 4 where the dynamic of the potentially Slovak melody is blazoned out, the composer’s forte enjoyed an upgrade to fortissimo. No wonder: this jaunty, affirmative and tautly written genre of composition presents an irresistible temptation to overload on testosterone.

In late Mahler mode, Schulhoff reserves his slow movement for the quartet’s finale: an Andante molto sostenuto of grave introspection, doubly telling after the hefty folksiness of its precedent. The cello has all the running to begin with, the bar-3 high A sharp not enjoying the most secure of treatments. But the landscape of dejection enjoyed some expertly accomplished interventions, like the viola and cello harmonics punctuations following Daniel Kowalik’s brief cadenza straight after Number 2, even if these sounded over-emphatic under the first violin’s sweet, atonal solo line.

The players completed their task with a moving account of the death-watch beetle mutterings in the final segment after Number 4, although the strictissimo sempre in tempo of the preceding violin two-bar cadenza proved to be something of a moveable feast. But the group made telling work of the quartet’s final, twitching bars in which several commentators have found intimations of Schulhoff’s concentration camp death 18 years later; stretching their levels of prescience, I think, since the writer’s state of mind at the time of this composition was more likely shadowed by his in-the-field experiences of World War I. Whatever your opinion, this haunting passage concluded an interpretation that successfully balanced brio and placidity, often on consecutive pages.

Opening their debut MDCH appearance, the Oravas ran through their chosen Haydn with its inane title. First violin Daniel Kowalik surprised with his rubato approach to the first aspiring theme, and you were unable to pick out a steady pulse until the semiquavers kicked off in bar 22. Still, the ensemble showed its teeth at places like bar 54 with a few bars of upper-level orderly scurrying. And, to their credit, the group stayed consistent in their schizoid interpretation, changing to ambling pace whenever the ‘sunrise’ theme emerged.

Along with the interrupted impetus approach, you could be surprised by individual touches as well, like the ringing top A flat from Daniel Kowalik at bar 85, the well-judged prefatory ritenuto at bar 108, cellist Karol Kowalik’s attention-grabbing slight delay at bar 166, and the clarity at work in the players’ output during polyphonic interchanges like those beginning at bar 130. Not that the balance remained perfect throughout. In the second movement Adagio, a sudden rush of blood meant that the first violin’s G across bar 2 disappeared in the forceful subsidiary E flats from second violin David Dalseno and Karol Kowalik. Urgency wasn’t actually in play here but the pace chosen seemed to me to be on the quick side.

Countering the steady-pace regularity came odd spots like the pause before starting bar 27, the reason for which was hard to fathom unless the group considered that the first violin’s leap from a staff-top G to a low E pointed to a need for opening a new sentence. A slow-down move at bar 35 heralded a pace that sounded more like an adagio. Later, progress came to an arresting halt at bar 51 for the first violin’s quaver rest, possibly to highlight the main theme’s resuscitation en clair. Dalseno took his time over his exposed semiquavers in bar 60, but then I would have liked more time expended on the C minor fermata chord in bar 65.

I liked the hesitant start to the Menuetto‘s main theme, as it made a point of the determination invested in the following measures, but it might have been varied with profit further down the track; you didn’t have to utilise that tic all the time. Haydn’s enigmatic Trio enjoyed a welcome equivalence of speed, rather than being slowed down for its minor/chromatic suggestions; the result gave a fine drive to the whole section, although – again – I thought the fermata at bar 97 could have been sustained a tad longer.

Another idiosyncrasy appeared early in the Allegro finale where both violins inserted a slight comma after their last note in bar 3 – and repeated this quirk every time the pattern was repeated. Nevertheless, these pages passed along with plenty of sustained fluent action, the only question mark coming through at the Piu allegro of bar 110, after which the dovetailing of lines could/should have been smoother. Yet you had to admire without question the full-bodied unison octave work at bar 161, these musicians relishing a final welter and carrying it off with refreshing panache.

To cheer us up after the Schulhoff, the Oravas decided to play the Ravel movement, but I’m not sure if you could say they lightened the mood overmuch. Possibly the players see this piece as a benign nocturne, which is fair enough as a general view of its main body, with some superb interludes based on the first movement’s initial theme. More memorable than worrying about this choice of program extra, the reading included some splendid moments, like the viola’s richly pointed contribution at the key change at Number 1, and again at Number 2; and like the subtle pause at six bars after Number 2.

I missed out on the cello’s pedal E three bars after Number 5 – surprising, since the lowest line is marked piano while the other three parts are pitched at pianissimo; but then, perhaps it was my equipment at fault. Later, I missed the distinction in diminished dynamics in bars 6 and 7 after Number 8. But Chawner made a welcome, direct and expressively balanced reappearance at Number 9, taking his colleagues into a fine conclusion, especially a carefully calculated interpretation of the last seven bars. It made for a reassuringly ‘sweet’ ending to the night but a better result might have been achieved by outing Ravel’s second movement Assez vif, which melds rhythmic excitement with this some of this slow movement’s subtle shadings.

It was a well worthwhile exercise, in the end. These young musicians have been successful in forming a musical alliance that works exceptionally well, four voices distinguished from several other high-profile Australian ensembles for a practically flawless purity of intonation, and an equally reliable balance of output that is so good that you notice immediately those few places where it falters. And, of course, their program gave us a welcome reminder of what ‘normal’ life looks like in a state that is coming closer than most to cultural resurrection.

As I’ve relocated to the Gold Coast, the musical events outlined below (few as they are) relate to Brisbane and its environs.  Fortunately, some of the organizations and ensembles that perform in Melbourne also appear in Queensland’s capital – Musica Viva, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Australian String Quartet.  And there may be the chance to see what’s become of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in the 20 years since I last heard it live, as well as the possibility of getting to a Camerata performance at last, and perhaps opportunities to witness Queensland Opera grappling with Tristan and Aida.

 

Friday November 1

TCHAIKOVSKY AND BEETHOVEN

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre at 7:30 pm

Alondra de la Parra, chief conductor of the QSO,  introduces this program with a work that springs from her Mexican family’s heritage: the Sinfonia No. 2,  Las Antesalas del Sueno, by Federico Ibarra Groth.   Well, it’s arrestingly different to be invited to explore the antechambers of dream, whatever and wherever they are; all you can do is withhold judgement until the 10-minute score has reached its termination.   Matters become more predictable when Franco-Serbian violinist Nemanja Radulovic, fresh from a short recital tour (Hobart, Melbourne Sydney) with Ensemble Liaison, fronts the Tchaikovsky D Major Concerto.   De la Parra fills out the night pleasantly enough with the Beethoven Symphony No. 6 which will give the QSO woodwind ranks plenty of scope to exercise their bucolic talents.

 

Saturday November 2

MUSIC BY THE SEA

Orava Quartet

Town Hall, Sandgate at 7:30 pm

These players have enjoyed remarkable success, both in this country and in America and Europe.   I’ve heard them in the Melbourne Recital Centre, the Collins St. Baptist Church, and the South Melbourne Town Hall during their participation in the Asia Pacific Chamber Music Competition; now the occasion presents itself to watch them in their home town, although Sandgate is a tad off the beaten track.  More unnerving is that I can’t find out what will be played.  The group follows this appearance with two more in the Utzon Room and the Potter Salon later in November where they play Schubert’s Death and the Maiden String Quartet No. 14, than which they do not come more demanding, framed by two Renaissance motets: Victoria’s O magnum mysterium and Byrd’s Ave verum corpus.   Both are in four parts but don’t get your hopes up: the Oravas will probably play the lines, not sing them.   And I could be off the track altogether and the actual program will have a marine element to justify the night’s title.

 

Friday November 8

FRENCH REVELATIONS

Ensemble Trivium

Old Government House, Brisbane at 7 pm

On this occasion, the ensemble is a quintet: soprano Rachael Griffin, founder/flute Monika Koerner, viola Raquel Bastos, cello Eleanor Streatfeild, and pianist Brierley Cutting.  Koerner is a known quantity and a highly gifted artist; the other participants are new to me.  But their program features a fair cross-section of French masters: Devienne, Debussy, Roussel, Ravel, Poulenc, Durufle, and Messiaen.  The Devienne piece is a duo concertante for flute and viola; Debussy is represented by his exhilarating Cello Sonata;  Roussel’s Trio for flute, viola and cello ends the program.  But the rest of the evening moves into some unexplored byways.  The Chansons madecasses by Ravel are not left-field material but not suited to every voice; they will be a test of Griffin’s lower register.  Written for soprano and piano, Poulenc’s 1943 Metamorphoses is a very brief cycle of three poems that I’ve never heard.   Similarly, Durufle’s early Op. 3 Prelude, Recitatif et Variations for flute, viola and piano has never crossed my path.  To compensate, Messiaen’s Le merle noir is a highly popular fundamental of modern French writing for the flute-and-piano combination.

 

Saturday November 16

TIMELESS

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre at 7:30 pm

This night’s operations roughly parallel the QSO’s program on November 1.  De la Parra works her players pretty hard with Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole as a warm-up.  Admittedly the first three movements are not over-taxing but the Feria finale asks for brilliance from each part of the orchestra.   I heard the estimable Paul Lewis perform Beethoven’s C minor Concerto in mid-September with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra – an honest, original take on a very familiar masterpiece.  Tonight, he takes to Grieg’s Piano Concerto and will probably bring an equal level of insight to its four-square lyricism.  To close proceedings, de la Parra takes on Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 where melancholy and lacerating vitality combine in a remarkable construct that falters only in the final pompous pages.

 

Sunday November 17

HANDEL ISRAEL IN EGYPT

Brisbane Chorale, Canticum Chamber Choir, Camerata

City Hall, Brisbane at 3 pm

Perhaps it depends on where you live but I’ve heard this oratorio exactly once; like Belshazzar and Mendelssohn’s St Paul.   Yet, at one time, Israel in Egypt was well-known, if nowhere near as popular to the point of universality, as Messiah, probably because of its multiplicity of choruses.   Anyway, here it comes as a welcome novelty, on a par with Saul, Alexander’s Feast and Solomon and the approximately 20 other compositions in this genre that are familiar only in excerpt form.   Graham Abbott conducts and the work features six soloists: sopranos Sarah Crane and Emily Turner, mezzo Jessica Low, tenor Nick Kirkup, and baritones Shaun Brown and Daniel Smerdon.  I don’t know anything about the City Hall’s acoustics but, going on this country’s tendency to duplicate itself in this regard – e.g., Sydney Town Hall, Melbourne Town Hall and Adelaide Town Hall, which I have experienced – you’d be expecting something booming and with a generous echo.

 

Monday November 18

BRAHMS & DVORAK

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Queensland Performing Arts Centre at 7 pm

Two splendid works from the great composers but the ACO would be the last to toe the party line by playing only the very familiar.  The Brahms is his Double Concerto for violin and cello, while the Dvorak is that composer’s penultimate symphony in G Major which, after a long interval, I last heard at the start of September from the MSO under James Gaffigan.   An optimistic piece, this Dvorak muffles its rustic roots to some extent and the melodic output has less immediate appeal than its successor in the composer’s oeuvre.   But it contrives an impressive union of craft and lyricism.   In similar vein, the Brahms score has suffered by comparison with the composer’s mighty solo violin concerto and the equally strong two piano concertos.   But you’d be crazy to miss the chance of hearing Richard Tognetti and Timo-Veikko Valve launch themselves across its broad canvas.  For preludial material, some ACO ring-ins play Andrew Ford‘s 3 minute-long Jouissance for two trumpets and vibraphone which the organization premiered in 1993.   Then we hear American writer Andrew Norman‘s Gran Turismo for 8 virtuoso violinists that finds a link between the Baroque concerto grosso, Italian Futurist art (specifically Giacomo Balla),and a race car video game; good luck with that.

 

Sunday November 24

COMPELLING THEMES

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio at 3 pm

This program brings to mind the Sunday morning recitals from Melbourne Symphony Orchestra personnel in the Iwaki Auditorium which are always packed out.  What strikes you as different is the variety of participants – or perhaps that’s just due to the demands of this particular program.   The afternoon begins with a Michael Haydn Divertimento for oboe (Sarah Meagher), viola (Charlotte Burbrook de Vere), and double bass (Justin Bullock) substituting for the original violone; not a particularly original piece but an amiable sequence of four movements.   Beethoven’s String Quintet in C uses a quartet – violinists Shane Chen and Helen Travers, viola Graham Simpson, cellist Andre Duthoit – and an extra viola in Nicole Greentree.   It’s the composer’s only original quintet, not a reworking or arrangement of other material.   Finally comes the chance to experience Martinu’s String Sextet, composed in one 1932 week.   Here, the executants are violins Chen and Katie Betts, violas Greentree and Bernard Hoey, cellos Matthew Kinmont and Hyung Suk Bae.

 

Thursday November 28

WHEN THE WORLD WAS WIDE

Camerata

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre at 7 pm

The fifth collaboration between Camerata and director/actor/writer Tama Matheson, this exercise investigates the relationship between Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson through a melding of music, narrative and acting.   Well, the excerpts from the two poets’ writings will be very welcome in this age when their reputations grow dim.  As for the music, Camerata have outlined what they intend, beginning with May Brahe’s Bless This House song from 1927 which certainly suggests the between-wars period and a facet of its emotional atmosphere.  Two Lawson settings follow, both by John Horn and coming from his 2015 song cycle Looking for Lawson: The Shame of Going Back and Faces in the Street – one a plaint on failure in life, the second a warning of social revolution.   Peter Sculthorpe‘s Port Essington recalls the attempts to found a Northern Territory settlement.   It compares and contrasts the out-of-place world of the garrison and settlers with the Aboriginal culture that eventually reclaimed the landscape.   John Tavener’s Eternal Memory for cello and strings follows: like Port Essington, an Australian Chamber Orchestra commission.  Back with the people concerned most in this evening, Camerata resurrects Miriam Hyde‘s Fantasia on Waltzing Matilda in, I assume, the 1943 version. The finale comprises Brisbane film composer Cameron Patrick‘s Impressions of Erin, which is drawing a long bow if it refers to the background of either poet.  But it matches the program’s opening in its musical summation of an era.

 

Friday November 29

GIANNI SCHICCHI

Opera Gold Coast

Helensvale Library Community and Cultural Centre at 7:30 pm

One third of Il Trittico – the only decent one of the set – is to be presented by a group that is new to me.   The opera’s humour is broad, the action completely improbable, the characters straight out of a commedia dell’arte copy-book.   But there are two passages of melting Puccini magnificence in Rinuccio’s Firenze e come un albero fiorito and O mio babbino caro sung by the titular character’s daughter, Lauretta.  Most of the productions I’ve seen (3? 4?) have been directed poorly so that Buoso’s grieving relatives have no personality while Schicchi usually has too much because the temptation to over-act is not resisted.   But it’s a quick piece – less than an hour – and this presentation boasts a ‘live orchestra’, although conductor and singers remain anonymous.  The temptation to see what’s happening just up the road is near irresistible; God knows, I’ve wasted my time at many higher profile operatic essays.

This opera will be repeated on Saturday November 30 at 2 pm and 7:30 pm.

 

Saturday November 30

CINEMATIC

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre at  2 pm

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, or its administration, fell in love with film scores some years ago and is presenting heftier swags of them as the years roll by.   Some of these have been enchanting experiences, especially if the film dialogue is subtitled since the orchestral fabric can drown out the words.   This concert is less ambitious in that it comprises music from great and not-so-great films, but without pictures.   Nicholas Buc conducts, a veteran in this music despite his youth (for a conductor: he can’t be 40 yet).  As you’d expect, John Williams scores well: the main theme from Star Wars, selections from the Harry Potter films, Rey’s theme from  Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  Nigel Westlake‘s output is whittled down to some scraps from Babe; Jerry Goldsmith is also shrunk to the end credits for Star Trek: First Contact.   Alan Silvestri‘s Back to the Future music appears – hopefully, not all of it – and his Avengers Theme.  Michael Giacchino is represented by his score to The Incredibles and a Star Trek: Into Darkness suite.  Another suite has been assembled from Howard Shore‘s The Lord of the Rings scores.  A swag of singles I don’t know or don’t recall fleshes out the material: James Horner‘s main title for Apollo 13,  an excerpt from the How to Train Your Dragon by John Powell, two segments from Austin Wintory’s sound-track for the game Journey – Nascence and Apotheosis, and the brief Time from Hans Zimmer‘s score for Inception.   Younger ears will doubtless enjoy much of this: the more senior among us will silently lament Korngold and Steiner.

This program will be repeated on Saturday November 30 at 7:30 pm.

 

 

 

Due to some confusion in communications, I think it’s necessary to state somewhere that I’ve resigned from writing music criticism for The Age.  A message went out to all on my email address book, but clearly that move didn’t spread the information far enough.

My first review appeared on March 20, 1978, the last on October 22 this year; quite long enough, I think.   All those luminaries on the paper who brightened my reviewing life – Kenneth Hince, Neil Jillett, Leonard Radic, Michael Shmith, Ray Gill, Gina McColl, Robin Usher – have passed on in one way or another and I can tell you emphatically that there’s no joy or triumph in being the last man of my generation still standing.

I intend to keep this blog running, not least because it allows more spatial freedom than the inexorable 250-word limit imposed by the paper, but also because – as intended from the start three years ago – it’s a means of celebrating and encouraging musicians and composers who get precious little attention elsewhere.

Sunday October 1

EMMANUEL PAHUD

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 2:30 pm

Getting themselves into shape, the ACO begins with the Ricercar a 6 from Bach’s A Musical Offering; I doubt that it will be the enthralling Webern orchestration – just a bland, everyday transcription for strings.  Pahud, here billed as ‘the world’s greatest living flautist’, will then play the C.P.E. Bach A minor Sonata, hopefully unaccompanied.  The orchestra’s outing wouldn’t be complete without a string quartet transmogrified for their forces, and here comes defenceless Ravel in F.  Another unaccompanied stand-by in Debussy’s Syrinx and Pahud finally joins up with the ACO in Franck’s Sonata for Flute and Strings, which is a misnomer: the composer wrote nothing for flute solo.  This work is for violin and piano, one of the great duos and not that suited to the flute, even Pahud’s; but then, I didn’t think much of the Galway/Agerich recording, either. Tognetti has organised the piano part for strings which should provide a barrel of laughs for anyone who’s played the work in its original form.

This program will be repeated on Tuesday October 3 at 7:30 pm.

 

Sunday October 1

MENDELSSOHN’S OCTET

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 2:30 pm

The MCO has its own octet; not hard to achieve, considering the wealth of willing talent available.  This afternoon, the title work is surrounded by the buoyant B flat Major Sextet by Brahms and a new octet by Douglas Weiland, the British composer, founding member of the Australian String Quartet, and a favourite voice of the ACO’s artistic director, William Hennessy who shared those early ASQ days with Weiland.  The new work is called Winterreise, which sets up all sorts of expectations.  The work comprises six movements, lasts about 14 minutes and was commissioned by Hennessy in 2015, was completed in August that year and is finally getting an airing here.  It’s very welcome, of course, but the pairing of the Mendelssohn and Brahms scores was an inspired move: both youthful, glowing works but what a world of difference!

 

Tuesday October 3

WILLIAM WINNANT

Australian National Academy of Music

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

Continuing the Academy’s percussion festival, the California-based senior citizen of contemporary music-making leads three works by Lou Harrison, the centenary of whose birth is the fulcrum on which this series of concerts and recitals turns.  First is Tributes to Charon from 1982 for three percussionists and alarm clocks, which Winnant requested from the composer for a 65th birthday concert; then, the 1987 five-movement Varied Trio for violin, piano and percussion; finally, the earlier (1973) Concerto for organ with percussion orchestra – about a dozen players –  in five movements which will present some logistical problems, mainly in siting the solo instrument.  As light relief come Henry Cowell’s Ostinato Pianissimo for Percussion octet, a pioneering piece from 1934 that lasts about 3 minutes – don’t blink; and John Cage’s Four6 from 1992, one of the great master’s late works and originally written for an unspecified (naturally) quartet.  Like pretty well everything in these American Triptych events, the content is significant and still challenging.

 

 

Friday October 6

GLORIES OF THE FRENCH BAROQUE

Brenda Rae and the Australian National Academy of Music Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30

While the Academy’s percussionists are being happily engaged in their US-inspired orgy, the organisation’s other instrumentalists will be working under conductor Benjamin Bayl to support the American soprano in this night of music by Rameau.  I know nothing about Rae who is appearing here for the first time in Australia and tonight has the honour of launching the serious  music side of this year’s Melbourne Festival.  She will sing seven arias, which will be surrounded by overtures, dances and scene-setting interludes from the French composer’s operas, none of which we see today unless you’re lucky enough to live in Sydney: Les Paladins, Castor et Pollux (produced by Pinchgut Opera five years ago), Platee, Zoroastre, and two works from which you might have heard extracts: Les Boreades, and Les Indes galantes.   Other Pinchgut Rameaux include Dardanus in 2005, then Anacreon and Pigmalion on a triple bill earlier this year.  It’s a specialized field but just the sort of material that should be mounted at a festival because you’re unlikely to hear anything this concentrated very often.  The musicologists among us will be happy; let’s hope the singer is able.

 

Saturday October 7

JAN WILLIAMS

Australian National Academy of Music

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

Finishing up the American Triptych celebrating the wealth of the Republic’s composers for percussion comes another senior figure in the field and long-time presence at the University of Buffalo.  Williams leads four works by Lou Harrison, with a solitary stranger in the middle: Morton Feldman’s Instruments 3 for flute, oboe and percussion – 20 minutes of atypical activity.  But the night opens with Song of Quetzalcoatl, a 1941 composition for four percussionists with an understandable emphasis on Mexican instruments.   The brief 1939 Concerto No. 1 for Flute follows: also a trio, the woodwind solo is supported by two percussionists, although I’ve seen it played with only one handling the accompaniment. Like Debussy’s Rhapsodie, the ‘No. 1’ seems superfluous: I can’t find another.  Post-Feldman, Williams takes charge of the Canticle No. 1, also from 1939 and a percussion quintet lasting about 4 or 5 minutes; don’t blink.  The last Harrison work is the 1941 Labyrinth No. 3 for 11 percussion players and a relatively large-scale work, not just in the number of its executants but also in its four-movement length.

 

Saturday October 7

TURNING POINT

Australian String Quartet

Collingwood Arts Precinct at 8 pm

A further bullet in the Melbourne Festival’s gun-belt, this recital begins with a non-string quartet: Scarlatti’s Piece in 4 voices.  Well, I say it’s not a string quartet but I could be wrong; the work might not be by Alessandro or Domenico but by some other member of the family.  Or it could just be a keyboard sonata arranged for the ASQ instruments.   Anyway, there’s no doubting the provenance of Bartok’s First String Quartet or the first Beethoven Razumovsky which sustain the bulk of this event.  Also enjoying an outing is Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 3, Mishima: a six-movement work and part of the composer’s score for Paul Schrader’s film based on the Japanese author’s last day.  The recital’s venue is a new one to me; from the directions given on the Festival website, it seems to be part of the old NMIT complex on the corner of Wellington and Johnston Streets.

This program will be repeated on Sunday October 8 at 6 pm, and on Monday October 8 at 7 pm.

 

Sunday October 8

MORE TELEMANN

The Melbourne Musicians

St. John’s Southgate at 3 pm

Finishing up for the year, Frank Pam and his chamber orchestra give Bach’s voluble contemporary a fair hearing, starting with his Canary Cantata, a compendium of four arias and recitatives on the death of a well-loved pet to be sung by soprano Tania de Jong. Pam himself takes the solo line in Telemann’s solitary and popular Viola Concerto in G Major, followed by Mark Fitzpatrick coping with the composer’s even-more popular, brief D Major Trumpet Concerto.  As makeweights, de Jong will sing Handel’s Ombra mai fu – the only aria anyone knows from the opera Serse – and the afternoon concludes with the first two symphonies by Johann Stamitz, so-called Mannheim Symphonies the first of which is a questionable attribution to this fertile composer who had an impact on Haydn and Mozart.

 

Thursday October 12

MSO PLAYS BEETHOVEN 8

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 8 pm

They will eventually get around to playing the unassuming F Major symphony, but only after an odd collection of pieces, beginning with Dvorak’s Serenade for Winds.  Written for pairs of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, with three horns, an ad lib line for contrabassoon and cello and double bass parts supplied to supplement the bass line if you can’t find a contra, this work belongs more to the MSO’s Sunday morning Iwaki Auditorium recital programs.  Still, guest conductor Michael Collins will doubtless control proceedings from the first clarinet desk.  The night’s other soloist will be Lloyd Van’t Hoff sharing the honours in Mendelssohn’s Konzertstuck on his basset horn while Collins takes the clarinet line; I just don’t know which one of the two that the composer wrote is to be played   –  the F minor or the D minor.   And you’d assume they will use the orchestrated accompaniment instead of the composer’s clearer piano support.  Elena Kats-Chernin’s Ornamental Air from 2007, a solid three-movement concerto for basset clarinet and chamber orchestra, could find either of the two Mendelssohn soloists under the spotlight.

This program will be repeated in the Robert Blackwood Hall, Monash University on Friday October 13 at 8 pm.

 

Friday October 13

BANGSOKOL – A REQUIEM FOR CAMBODIA

Rithy Panh, Him Sophy

Hamer Hall at 7:30 pm

Another Melbourne Festival offering, this is the result of a collaboration between film-maker Rithy Panh and composer Him Sophy.  They have assembled a group of singers and instrumentalists to perform a hybrid lament for the agony of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.  The hour-long piece combines the Buddhist Bangsokol ritual and the Christian requiem in a fusion of dance, film, song and speech.  As the world now knows, there is a lot to grieve for; it strikes you even four decades on, principally the loss of two million lives as well as the near-annihilation of a culture = all made possible by a continuing wilful ignorance in the West.  This collaboration is receiving its world premiere here before it is taken to New York and Paris.

The program will be repeated on Saturday October 14 at 7:30 pm.

 

Saturday October 14

Joep Beving

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

Beving is an amateur pianist from the Netherlands who has made a splash with two CDs and is appearing under the aegis of the Melbourne Festival. I’ve listened to about ten tracks from these and the best that can be said is that it constitutes fairly harmless musical doodling.   The titles of his works might be different but Beving’s music is tediously similar, an aimless meander around the keyboard that betrays a harmonic gaucheness and melodic stasis.   It makes you long for the going-nowhere-quickly ambience of the American minimalists.  This recital is scheduled to last 75 minutes; for some of us, that’s over an hour too long.

 

Tuesday October 17

DOUBLE MANUAL

Peter de Jager

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

Another pianist on the Melbourne Festival roster is this remarkable musician who is mounting a one-night stand featuring only music by Iannis Xenakis, the Romanian/Greek/French composer whose immersion of composition in mathematics set challenges – some of them impossible to surmount – for even the most willing and adventurous musicians.  De Jager plays three of the major piano pieces – Herma (1961), Evryali (1973) and Mists (1980), which was written for Roger Woodward.  For variety, he will also play the composer’s only two solo harpsichord works: Khoai (1976) and Naama (1984). The performance of one Xenakis keyboard work is a rarity because preparation requires a very long time . . . but five?  Unless you attend with scores in your hand, there’s no way you can testify to de Jager’s precision, especially in the earlier piano works which show what wimps Stockhausen and Boulez turned out to be.  But for some of us, this 70-minute stretch could turn out to be one of this year’s high-water marks.

 

Thursday October 19

‘ROUND MIDNIGHT

Emanuele Arciuli

Melbourne Recital Centre at 8 pm

Third of our Festival’s three solo pianists is the Italian-born expert in contemporary American composition for his instrument.  Making his Australian debut, Arciuli goes all the way, beginning with China Gates by John Adams, a brief bagatelle from 1977.  Then he plays Judd Greenstein’s First Ballade, a jump of thirty years in chronological time but a retrograde step in modernity; the piece stays in the same harmonic loop for most of its duration and you can see why he gave it this title.  Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik: Ruminations on ‘Round Midnight by Thelonious Monk by George Crumb requires an amplified piano and is a nine-section construct commissioned by Arciuli himself 16 years ago.  Sound Gone was written in 1967 by Stephen Alexander Chambers before he converted to Sufism and changed his name to Talib Rasul Hakim.  Arciuli winds up his hour with Rzewski’s pounding Constructivist revival, Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues.

Arciuli presents a second program at the Deakin Edge, Federation Square on Friday October 20.  Works include Cage’s In a Landscape, Louis Ballard’s Four American Indian Piano Preludes, the ‘Round Midnight Suite variations on a Thelonious Monk theme by Rzewski, Babbitt, Torke, Harbison and Daugherty, and  Phrygian Gates by John Adams.

 

Friday October 20

HOWARD PENNY: FROM THE CELLO

Australian National Academy of Music

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

Head of Strings at ANAM, Penny takes control of the organization’s strings in a breezy night’s work that begins with Two Pieces for String Octet by Shostakovich, a prelude and scherzo dating from the composer’s student years and written concurrently with the startling Symphony No. 1.   The forces reduce a tad for the warm, aspiring Brahms Sextet No. 2 in G Major; you can go years without hearing either of the composer’s works in this form, then they both turn up within weeks of each other (see above, Sunday October 1). Quite a few more players will be needed for Bartok’s Divertimento of 1939; in fact, 22 is the prescribed minimum, the composer having a keen eye for the weight needed when he divides the players which happens regularly, although he’s more happy to play off principals from each section against the main body in the best concerto grosso manner; always an exhilarating journey, if a brief one.

 

Friday October 20

PATH OF MIRACLES

Tenebrae

St. John’s Anglican Church, Malvern East at 7:30 pm

A 15-year-old British choir making its debut in the Melbourne Festival, Tenebrae is presenting a single program at two different venues.  The works to be given are Owain Park’s Footsteps and Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles, both of them recently recorded together by these singers.  Which makes you wonder why they’d bother bringing them so far and making them the only offerings available.  Talbot’s four-movement work, for 17-part a cappella choir with a few crotales thrown in for atmosphere, follows a pilgrim’s route from Roncesvalles, through Burgos and Leon to Santiago and the shrine of St. James; it lasts a little over an hour and is a Tenebrae specialty because the director Nigel Short commissioned it.   But then, so he did for Park’s work that presents images of a tiring traveller in a little over fifteen minutes.  All well and good and the few performance extracts provided sound effective, but again: why come all this way to sing a record?

The program will be repeated  in the Melbourne Recital Centre at 8 pm on Saturday October 21.

 

Saturday October 21

SOUND TEXT

Charles Gaines

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

This recital concludes an exhibition, The Score,  which runs from August 1 to November 5, and a series of seminars held throughout the Melbourne Festival at the Ian Potter Museum.  The recital is a combination of art and music put together by American conceptual artist Charles Gaines with music supplied by Opera Povera’s Sean Griffin.  The musical content ranges from Reconstruction-era spirituals (were there any?) to French Revolutionary ballads.  The art itself seems to revolve around musical scores that lurch out into visual and linguistic areas; something like the stuff we were all writing back in the 1960s, except that this has intimations of holding more of an emphasis on politics.  It all sounds promising and there’s some hope, as it’s Festival time, that the occasion could be confrontational.

 

Tuesday October 24

THE END OF TIME

Ensemble Liaison

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

As soon as you see this night’s title, you immediately think of Messiaen, don’t you?  And you’re spot-on: the climax of this recital is the famous quartet with guest Dene Olding coming in for the work’s violin line.  Before that long sequence of visions spiritual and a leetle bit temporal comes Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro Op. 70 which could feature either Olding or Svetlana Bogosavljevic’s cello, but certainly Timothy Young’s piano, and certainly not the original score’s horn.  As well, the group presents the premiere of Australian writer Samantha Wolf’s Splinter for an as-yet unspecified instrumental combination; and, to begin, Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale in the composer’s own version for violin, clarinet (David Griffiths, on this night) and piano.  We are promised a lighting design from Paul Jackson, so the night’s colours won’t be only instrumental.

 

Wednesday October 25

SOUVENIR DE FLORENCE

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

Once again, a real chamber recital from the ACO and exclusively for Melbourne, it would seem.   As well as Tchaikovsky’s athletic string sextet to bring down the curtain, the visiting ACO personnel will also indulge us in Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – hopefully for just the original four strings – and Shostakovich’s Two Pieces for String Octet, performed just five days previously by Howard Penny and his ANAM forces (see above, Friday October 20). Carrying the torch for frequent collaborator Olli Mustonen, Tognetti and his colleagues will play the Finnish pianist’s eight-movement Nonet No. 2 from 2000 for two string quartets and double bass: a work that the ACO hastened to present in the following year and of which I can’t recall any trace.

 

Friday October 27

MSO PLAYS SCHUBERT 9

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

Back in the old routine, this event shows the MSO back in the well-worn saddle.  Finishing off the program, the strings will suffer from an extended bout of RSI with the Schubert Symphony No. 9 which is Great, as its nickname claims, but draining for the performers who endure page after page of scrubbing.  British conductor/musicologist Andrew Manze starts off with Beethoven as well – the dour Coriolan Overture – and Isabelle van Keulen is soloist in Prokofiev’s rapidly accomplished (20 minutes or so) Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major.   Van Keulen was the Eurovision Young Musician of the Year in 1984 but has been much more than a flash-in-the-pan popular success; the pity is that it has taken her so long to get to these shores.

This program will be repeated at 8 pm on Saturday October 28 and Monday October 30 at 6:30 pm.

 

Saturday October 28

JACOBEAN COMPOSERS IN THE LOW COUNTRIES

Ensemble Gombert

Xavier College Chapel at 8 pm

John O’Donnell begins this journey into another historical byway with an organ work by John Bull, Prelude on Laet ons met herten reijne; probably written while the composer saw out his exile in Antwerp after having to escape from the law in England for the unmusical talents of fornication and adultery.  The Gombert singers come on to the scene with selections from Peter Philips’ Cantiones sacrae, apparently picking material from both sets for five and eight voices;  this composer had a more high-flown reason for living in the Netherlands and Belgium as he was a Catholic.  The main part of the program will probably be consumed by Richard Dering’s first book of Cantiones sacrae quinque vocum; here was another Catholic who nevertheless managed to get back to England when  appointed organist to that crazy, resentful royal, Queen Henrietta Maria.  A last chance to hear this excellent choir before its final-for-the-year Christmas celebration in the same venue on Saturday December 9.

 

 

 

 

 

 

WORKS FOR PERCUSSION AND RECORDER

Duo Blockstix

Move Records MCD 581

Despite the best intentions of its practitioners, the recorder doesn’t lend itself to contemporary sounds; that is, if you treat it fairly and don’t over-amplify it to a ludicrous degree.   Not only does it have a limited projection power, but also its mechanics make it hors de combat when considering harmonically complex instrumental fabric.   So it’s only to be expected that this CD doesn’t contain anything confrontational or challenging; indeed, a fair number of its twelve tracks make for very easy listening.   Even though the results sound pleasant enough, you come across a few patches where a sterner editorial hand might have been of service – moments where the fluency falters; not by much, but just enough to disturb a listener’s expectations.

Duo Blockstix comprises recorder player Alicia Crossley and percussionist Joshua Hill.  Both are Sydney musicians and, as far as I can tell, have not had much contact with Melbourne, except that Hill is a member of the Synergy Percussion group, so I must have seen him somewhere down the track.   Both are promoters of modern music but what they present on this CD is very comfortable listening and, it seems, just as comfortable playing.  The disc contains works by seven composers, most of whom are unfamiliar names to me. Daniel Rojas rings some tango-connected bells but nothing memorable.   I’ve looked at the catalogue of Peter McNamara‘s works and nothing springs out.   Julian Day is a well-known personality from ABC radio but his Five Easy Pieces are the first of his compositions that I’ve heard; very strange for a Bendigo-born writer with an impressive back-log of national and international appearances.

Damien Barbeler has made some glancing appearances here but is, like all composers mentioned so far, a Sydney resident.   Mark Oliveiro, educated in Sydney, now appears to be resident in America.   Tim Hansen has also enjoyed similar associations with the United States but his main area of activity seems to be New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory.  Tasmanian-born Paul Cutlan doesn’t fit the rest of the CD contributors’ mould in his origins but, like all of them, his career path has been – to put it mildly – adventurous.

The players open with  .  .  .  of magic and realism by Rojas.   The composer’s notes refer to Llosa and Marquez, as the title would suggest, and the piece itself is intended to reflect an occasional junction of the everyday and the supernatural.   To my regret, I found nothing of the kind in experiencing this track.  It sets up a Latin beat which rouses in this listener’s mind the unexpected but ever-welcome shade of Arthur Benjamin and his Jamaican Rumba; it stays with the same pulse and the recorder and marimba ring changes on an amiable sequence of motives.   In the piece’s second half, a bit after the 4 minute mark, the players show slight signs of uncertainty – not with each other, but the progress of their individual parts.   Still, the 7 minutes’ duration passes by agreeably enough with plenty of colourful tinctures.

McNamara’s Duo Generere requires a bass recorder, marimba (both struck and bowed) and suspended cymbal.   The composer begins with a sequence of soft low-lying textures, then moves into a quiet development of his initial material; the instrumental interplay impresses as pretty simple and any rhythmic novelties that arise hold no difficulties. In spite of its modestly inventive opening, the work is heavy on ostinati and the overlapping ascending scales leading to the muted final notes, even with some plosive recorder punctuation, wear out their welcome.

With Day’s pieces, we are taken into a world that is reassuringly contemporary and involved with sound manipulation. The first gives slow-moving single notes and repeated-note patterns to both recorder and marimba; this pattern obtains for most of the other sections as well, with an occasional overblow or semi-tonal wavering to spice up the sparse Webernian atmosphere.   Like some of the master’s products, the dynamic level rarely rises above piano and the five elements take five minutes to negotiate.   Day’s creation presents as ultra-controlled, emotionally calm and –  as the title has it  – easy.

Hill’s marimba is rested for Barbeler’s Resonant Voice, but plenty of other percussion instruments are employed – gongs and cymbals  – and this complex follows a similar path to that of Crossley’s bass recorder.  The composer has given a poem (intentionally unidentified) to the performers to ‘read’; their interpretation constitutes the score, as far as I can tell.   The recorder line suggests folk-tunes; the percussion spends some time mirroring the wind instrument but enjoys an exposed cadenza near the performance’s ending.

Some of the writers comment on the odd combination they are working with but the general solution is to give the recorder prime position.   Barbeler restrains his percussion part – or Hill does – so that this sudden solo strikes you as remarkably aggressive, coming after Day’s pastel shades and – up to this point – courteous support for the recorder.

Oliveiro also employs the bass recorder/marimba combination for his Auto Dafe Suite.   The composer has produced four movements that call on various traditions or influences: medieval European modes, Malaysian kompang rhythms, Japanese sho clusters.   The title’s reference to Inquisition torments and the impact of Catholic missionaries and military forces on older civilizations is deliberate.   Sesquialtera Ritual summons up images of an organ rank although the actual sound is more primitive than European.   Rentak Silat Ritual refers to rhythm and martial arts, possibly Malay, and the effects are occasionally suggestive of a gamelan.   Iteration Ritual follows a repeated pattern, of course: a rising third, followed by two staccato explosions; Oliveiro offers variants but the basic path follows these two elements with a keen sense of suspense.   Finally, Reflection Ritual sets up a repeated note ostinato, then recorder and marimba follow the same melodic path under that relentless treble pecking.  The pattern is broken just at the end.

It’s an intriguing experiment and the combination of cultures works well enough.   One thing I missed was the composer’s reference to the ‘violent effect’ of Europe on Asian culture.   If anything, this piece sounded as though those cultures were doing quite well.   But it is heartening to see that the fascination of Eastern music still finds a response in at least one young Australian composer, all these years after Dreyfus, Meale and Sculthorpe were writing seminal scores – Clouds now and then, From within, looking out, Sun Music III – that revealed a welcome preoccupation with our place in Asia.

Three Pencils is Hansen’s suite for recorder and marimba where the spirit of Les Six is alive and well, as well as the Nino Rota of Fellini film scores.   The Cartoon Philosopher refers to Michael Leunig and is a very appropriate jaunt, quietly syncopated but as innocent as a landscape populated by Mr Curly, Vasco Pyjama and a multiplicity of ducks.   Five Year Arrival celebrates Shaun Tan’s famous book that occupied the artist for five years; a long-note melody curves over a continuous odd-notes arpeggio marimba figure, the result a fusion of action and musing.   Finally, Self Portrait in HB is a slow bluesy amble that suggests a personality along the lines of C J. Dennis’s Sentimental Bloke.

The Duo leave the longest work to the final track.   Cutlan’s Affirmations, originally written for amplified bass recorder, cello with electronic effects and didjeridu, starts placidly with a phrase-sentence for bass recorder and forward motion gathers speed as the marimba enters.   Then everything stops for a flute cadenza which circles around the same notes. The marimba returns and you become conscious of Cutlan’s plan of opening his main theme by degrees, as the marimba performs a cadenza also.

When the two musicians are working in tandem, the rhythmic patterns are regular, but the work’s interest comes in these interstitial solos.   With the concerted passages – even in the final melody revelation – the writing is unexceptional, despite some supple syncopations and the surprise of the recorder’s last gesture.   For a good deal of time, you have the impression of note-spinning: the duo could go on for quite a long time manipulating a limited suitcase of notes without necessarily getting anywhere new..

For sure, this duo combination is an exceptional one in its composition and the confidence of its members.   Crossley and Hill are to be applauded for their enterprise in working closely with pretty well all of the seven composers and getting music out of them.   Four of these works come from this current year – Rojas, Day, Oliveiro, Barbeler – while the other three date from 2014.    All works were premiered (Cutlan’s piece in this format) during a recital by Duo Blockstix on June 15 this year at the Wesley Music Centre, Canberra.    If you are after about 52 minutes of generally soothing, breathy music that makes no demands but just nibbles at your consciousness, this CD fits the bill.