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ISLES OF LIGHT

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Sunday June 14 2026

Lawrence Power

Guest artist for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, violist/violinist Lawrence Power took us on a sort of English-Irish voyage with a few references to music of our time, music of the 20th century, and a quick side trip to the country’s greatest composer, as well as one of his predecessors, and a senior Victorian/Edwardian composer who got a look-in because . . . well, like Scotland, he was there.

This last was Elgar who concluded Power’s opening gambit: a dog’s breakfast called English Mixtape in which the ACO, led by their guest on viola, wandered onstage to give a racy airing to a Curtain Tune by Purcell, written for a masque introduced to Shadwell’s version of Timon of Athens in 1695. In the original, the composer uses his ground bass about 40 times; I think we got through that many and possibly a few more by the time everyone moved on to Jonny Greenwood‘s 2005 Popcorn Superhet Receiver Part 2b where the invention level dropped a few feet for what sounded to me to be little more gripping than a bland pizzicato interlude.

Because the program later featured Vaughan Williams’ Tallis Fantasia, we then heard the Elizabethan composer’s original psalm tune, Why fum’th in sight (fight?) – first played by the ACO, then vocalised by them. I hope they were doing this because I couldn’t distinguish any words. Why no actual text? Perhaps people had a problem with the words of Psalm 2, seeing them as a denunciation of Trump or Charles III – and their supporters. Anyway, a push-through came to us via Kate Bush‘s The Man with the Child in his Eyes which seems to be giving vent to a placid dream/nightmare/delusion in calm pop language.

This was succeeded by Ivor Gurney’s Sleep, a 1912 setting of Fletcher’s melancholy poem by a composer friend of Herbert Howells, who also featured in this program’s second half. Power supplied the impetus for this odyssey which ended in Variation XI from the Enigma Variations of 1899, the one depicting the bulldog Dan falling into the River Wye. With strings only, this section sounded messy; you missed the powerful brass statements of the theme at Number 48 and five bars before Number 51 in the old Novello score; not to mention the woodwind timbre doubling the strings in chords and semiquaver runs throughout – so I won’t.

This short travelogue then stopped for a change of orchestral disposition as the expanded group (four guest violins, two extras in both violas and cellos, and another double bass) sat facing one side of the stage in what was probably a boat shape (this might have been more obvious from the circle or gallery). The reason for this came about because of the theme of a new viola concerto written for Power and co-commissioned (with two European organizations) by the ACO. The composer, Irish-born Garth Knox, uses Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as the basis for his score which is an expert display-piece for Power (Knox is a violist) who not only produced a hefty solo line but also treated us to scraps of the poem.

Yet, having said that, I’m at a loss to remember much of the score itself which illustrated vignettes from Coleridge’s story: the arrival and death of the albatross, the desolation of the Mariner alone, his observation of the sea snakes, the buoyant journey home. Knox’s vocabulary proved to be atmospherically apt, at its best in the work’s Prologue and Epilogue, the whole calling to mind some of Westlake’s film music in its fluency, although a few parts of it struck me as odd, like the near-tango that followed the death of the bird and Power’s breaking into a folk-type song on his path to redemption.

But the chief memories I have of this new work come through its theatrical touches, its look rather than its sound. Using the band as a neatly-arranged ship’s crew made for a clever scene-setting, with Maxime Bibeau and his bass at the centre, standing like a mainmast throughout. Having the whole corps doing a rocking motion to suggest wave motion didn’t seem to distract anyone in their playing. Using individuals to supply Power with his destructive arrow/bow, then hanging a violin aound his neck as a stand-in for the dead albatross worked better than expected.

As you’d expect, the main burden fell on Power who fell in with one of the interpretations of the poem: it’s a fabrication, told by the sailor when he stoppeth one of three. This comes about mainly because of the violist-actor’s insistent repetition of the opening to line 10 – ‘There was a ship’ – but, the more you hear it, the more individual musicians he confronts with this plaint, the less you believe – until the voice dies away and you are left with Keats’ last nightingale-inspired question. As the solitary protagonist, Power gave us a striking character, if one stripped to bare essentials by having only the poem’s bones to work with; no space for any metaphysical musings to do with spirits, angels, the Hermit and the ship’s final disappearance.

After this entertainment, the concert’s second half moved back onto tried-and-true paths. Even so, the afternoon was over-long, extended by a curiosity in Elizabeth Maconchy’s Symphony for Double String Orchestra from 1952-3. This productive English-born, Irish-bred composer had the good fortune to study in Prague, so she encountered a wider musical world than most of her peers. The Symphony has plenty of rhythmic irregularities and several instances of Bartok ‘snaps’; also, the melodic contours of both Lento movements have a consistent breadth that raises your expectations, best met in the work’s concluding Passacaglia which is a powerful set of pages, if a harmonically conservative one, considering the time it was being written.

But Maconchy’s work came late in the day and might have fared better further back in the program. As it was, we had been treated to two searching works beforehand, beginning with Howells’ Elegy for Viola, String Quartet and String Orchestra of 1917, written in memory of a fellow Royal College of Music student who died at the Somme a year before. This score shows an influence or four from Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia (most palpably at the first triplet-heavy string quartet passage, starting at Number 4 in the Boosey & Hawkes score) although its colours are not as striking; but Howells’ use of this string quartet seems to me the more striking and his whole work is imbued with a stern grief.

Power’s account of the sombre viola solo showed us an example of masterly interpretation, his voice penetrating the supporting texture pretty well across the score’s length. Was he amplified, or has he just got a powerful right arm? Don’t know but he gave us a strong and moving account of this simply-framed, intense work which ended its C minor journey with a superbly welcome tierce; not particularly original but touchingly appropriate, for once.

Between Howells’ Elegy and the Maconchy Symphony came the Vaughan Williams 1910 Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis: the only familiar music of the afternoon and given a hearty reception, I suspect, because of that. If not the performance of your dreams, it came close. Power let ACO principal Stefanie Farrands take on solo viola duties while he moved to Richard Tognetti’s usual space heading the violins and revelling in the duet with Farrands that soared into existence with heart-filling grace a bar after Letter U in the 1921 Goodwin & Tabb edition.

Not too suprisingly, this interpretation favoured the inner voices, where a lot of the action takes place from five bars after Letter A when the Tallis tune gets a bowed exposure. Another welcome feature arrived with the restrained gravity of Orchestra II which sounded just strong enough to fulfill its Choir organ function and reflect those splendid chord sequences with which the composer peppers his score. Power is nowhere near as demonstrative a leader as Tognetti but the music didn’t suffer, maintaining its dynamic balance and surging along its animando path to reach a striking climax at the score’s largamente highpoint.

The achievement here was assuredly better than any previous live attempts I’ve heard in this country. But you’d expect that from this body which revels in its own dynamism and operational assertiveness, even infusing those extra (willing, I’m sure) bodies fleshing out its edges. This Fantasia made for a splendid climax to this ACO program celebrating the focal British isles; if only it had ended there.

THE FAIRY’S KISS

Musica Viva Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday July 7 at 7 pm

One of Stravinsky’s less popular works from the 1920s (like Oedipus Rex, which I’ve heard live once), The Fairy’s Kiss is based on (mainly) lesser-known pieces by Tchaikovsky. Originally a ballet, it never captured popular acclaim like the three early Paris scores for Diaghilev or even Jeu de cartes which you can come across once in a blue moon. Anyway, this Musica Viva Australia version is a four-movement Divertimento for violin and piano that the composer put together from his orchestral score for Samuel Dushkin in 1932. Tonight, we hear it from American-Canadian violinist Leila Josefowicz and plain American pianist John Novacek. It comes at the end of their endeavours, which begin with the Debussy Violin Sonata of 1917, the composer’s final major work and a remarkably buoyant one. In the middle come Szymanowski’s 1915 Mythes, three of them: The Fountain of Arethusa, Narcissus, and Dryads and Pan – this last famous as asking for quarter tones (well, he gets the violin to lower its D string, I think; the harmonics passages are far more intriguing). And the musicians give us a new commission (partly a Musica Viva effort) from British writer Charlotte Bray: Mriya, a four-movement tribute to the people of Ukraine and their current state of persecution. Tickets are $59 or $79; Under 40s pay $49; Under 18s are up for $20. There’s a $7 booking fee for the standard seats, which is a lot in these straitened times and when you consider what you’re paying for in terms of service.

UNDER THE CANOPY

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday July 9 at 7:30 pm

Guest for the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra in this exercise is accordionist James Crabb, familiar to many of us from his appearances with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. His main contribution to this program seems to be his own arrangement of C.P.E. Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in A Wq 29 of 1753 which I can’t find in any score collection, although there is a recording available. God knows there are a lot of such works by this composer; about 40, by my count. Anyway, this exercise will be preceded by Sophie Rowell leading her string forces in a Rameau Suite from Six concerts en Sextuor which I assume refers to the arrangements collated by Saint-Saens when he set about organizing his predecessor’s catalogue. That arrangement used winds; this one, constructed by Stanislaw Skrowaczeski in 1969, involves five movements for strings alone, ending with the well-known La poule. Australian writer Aaron Wyatt is also contributing an arrangement to this program in the concert’s title work, which was written to a MCO commission last year for string quartet and celebrates the temperate forests around this city and the composer’s Western Australian home. We have a substantial detour for Argentinian guitarist Tomas Gubitsch‘s In a tango state of mind concerto for accordion and strings of 2011; again, information is thin about this work. Finally, Crabb finishes us off with his arrangements of a selection of Scottish Traditional: I can smell the heather from here. Tickets range from $75 to $150; concession/senior discounts are $15/$20 less, depending on where you sit; Under 40s get mediocre-to-poor seats for $40; students and children can get seats anywhere for $30. Everybody has to front up with the Recital Centre’s Transaction Fee of between $4 and $8.50 per order online or by phone. Good luck with that.

This program will be repeated on Sunday July 12 at 2 pm.

INNER LANDSCAPES

Omega Ensemble

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Monday July 13 at 7 pm

In another varied and searching program, the Omega Ensemble from Sydney graces the Recital Centre with a mixed bill of fare that aims to expose various composers’ mental states, two of the four works on display coming from that fountainhead of self-examination, the United States. First we hear John Corigliano‘s Soliloquy for clarinet and string quartet, extracted in 1995 from the composer’s Clarinet Concerto of 1977 and a meditation-of-sorts on his father’s death. Later, we hear Jessie Montgomery‘s Rounds from 2022 which is a sort of concerto/rondo for piano and strings, lasts about 15 minutes, and is here enjoying its first performance outside the American mainland, as far as I can see. For our local delectation, Omega artistic director David Rowden heads the premiere of a new clarinet concerto by David Stanhope. But the evening’s main example of introspection comes with Schubert’s Death and the Maiden String Quartet No. 14 of 1824, but in a transcription by Mahler begun in 1896 and left unfinished. As I understand it, Mahler’s projected expansion to string orchestra format was completed by British musicians Donald Mitchell and David Matthews and published in 1984. Whether in its original garb or vested in its new clothes, this score is a magnificently public manifestation of psychological stress under control. Entry cost for normals ranges from $54 to $139, concession $10 cheaper; Under 30s prices range from $39 to $114. Never forget that, if you order online or by phone, the Recital Centre charges a fee of somewhere between $4 and $8.50; I’d be tempted to show up on the night – with cash.

SPRINGS IN THE CITY – FOUR LAST SONGS

Stewart Kelly and Music by the Springs Festival

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday July 14 at 7 pm

This recital concludes with Richard Strauss’s melting reminiscence of Germany’s Late Romantic era splendour, even if it will lack the lustrous orchestral fabric that supports every soprano who undertakes the 1948 cycle as it was intended. Tonight, it’s a task for Kiandra Howarth who will be accompanied by pianist Stewart Kelly, Orchestra Victoria concertmaster violinist Sulki Yu, and her OV colleague, principal Andrew Young on horn, all taking part in a new arrangement by somebody. Yes, there’s a soaring violin solo in Beim Schlafengehen and an indispensible horn part through Im Abendrot, but Stewart will be hard pressed to fill in most of this richly-textured score. Howarth and Kelly also present Korngold’s 3 Lieder Op. 22, completed in 1929 and rarely heard in live performance despite their approachability. The recital’s first half moves a tad further back in time to Brahms, with Howarth working through some ‘Selected songs’ by Brahms in which I’d suggest only Kelly will be a present sustaining voice. And the singer can enjoy some rest time as the three instrumentalists take on the Horn Trio of 1865: the first significant work in this instrumental shape and still surpassing fair, despite many a competing contemporary voice. It will be interesting to see whether or not Young plays a natural horn, as the composer intended. But then, does anybody these days? Seats are $79, concession $69, student $30, as well as the MRC’s floating transaction fee of anywhere between $4 and $8.50 if booking by phone or online – pretty unavoidable, more’s the pity, because of the venue’s small space.

ANDREA LAM PLAYS TCHAIKOVSKY

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday July 16 at 7:30 pm

Well-known to ABC TV viewers (well, some of them) for her participation in The Piano series and coping womanfully with the multiplicity of distractions offered by host Amanda Keller, Andrea Lam appears here in a great warhorse of the repertoire: Tchaikovsky’s B flat minor Concerto No. 1 of 1875. It’s a hard ask of any pianist because it’s a technically taxing test still and because all of us have our own ideas of the perfect reading (mine is Van Cliburn with Kondrashin and the RCA Symphony in 1958; nobody has equalled his stunning double-octaves). Good luck to this talented performer in her endeavours because everyone will be listening closely. Conductor Tabita Berglund from Norway takes us a tad further east after interval for the Sibelius Symphony No. 2 from 1901-2. This is the composer’s most popular work in the form and it’s not hard to see why with its chain of successful melodies and a sweeping inexorability that leads to a spirit-lifting, exuberant finale. A little further west to Sweden and we’re in the land of tonight’s overture composer. Wilhelm Stenhammar wrote his Excelsior! in 1896 and it was almost immediately neglected; a pity as it stands as a fine instance of vigour in composition with (understandably) plenty of vaulting ambition. Here’s an excellent Russo-Nordic program, particularly welcome as the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra reaches into mid-winter. Ticket prices fall between $51 and $142; concession holders pay $5 less; children gain access for $20. And there’s also the $7 booking fee per order online or by phone; unfortunately unavoidable, I think, because it’s a popular program and could be sold out well before the date.

This program will be repeated on Friday July 17 in Costa Hall, Geelong at 7:30 pm. and in Hamer Hall on Saturday July 18 at 7:30 pm.

THA TAILOR OF TIME – 40 YEARS OF ELISION

Melbourne Recital Centre and ELISION

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday July 16 at 7:30 pm

For this celebratory concert, ELISION artistic director Daryl Buckley has assembled a large cast of musicians, most of them involved in a performance of the event’s title piece written by Liza Lim in 2023 for the Ensemble intercontemporain of Paris. To begin, however, some members perform Mexican-born veteran Julio Estrada‘s Yuunohui’ tlapoa’ nahui’ ehecatl, which is a part of the composer’s large cycle of works stretching from 1985 to 2012 that take their names from the springboard of the Yuunohui’ title; this one seems to be a nonet. We launch straight after into Welsh writer Richard Barrett‘s elsewhen, a 20-minute four-movement work that is part of a large-scale construct called PSYCHE which seems to have been written for Elision between 2018 and 2024 (and which I can’t find in the composer’s online catalogue); this also presents as a nonet, although one source describes it as an octet. Perth-born composer Kate Milligan is represented by her newly-written Great Dog! (as seen by the River) which is a quintet. Lim’s large-scale score involves oboe (Peter Veale) and harp (Marshall McGuire) as soloists with 28 other supporting musicians including flutes (Paula Rae, Eliza Shephard), oboe (Niamh Dell), clarinets (Richard Haynes), bassoons (Ben Roidl-Ward, James Aylward), horns (unknown), trumpets (Tristram Williams), trombones (Benjamin Marks, Cian Malikides), euphonium (Max Gregg), percussion (Peter Neville and/or Aditya Ryan Bhat and/or Rebecca Lloyd-Jones), piano (Alexander Waite), keyboard (Jacob Abela), violins (Austin Wulliman and/or Madeleine Jevons and/or Sola Hughes), viola (Phoebe Green), cello (Freya Schack-Arnott or Jack Ward), and contrabass (Rohan Dasika or Kathryn Schulmeister). I know: even allowing for them all to be taking part, that still doesn’t add up to 28, but what can you do? Others participating elsewhere in the program are recorder(s) Ryan Williams, saxophone Joshua Hyde, and uilleann pipes Matthew Horsley. Where necessary, Clement Power conducts. Entry is a flat $55 and the Transaction Fee charged for online or phone booking is $7. On current showing, you can risk turning up on the night, preferably with an annoying pocketful of coins.

RACHMANINOFF WITH PIERS LANE AND KRISTIAN CHONG

Melbourne Recital Centre and Kristian Chong

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday July 18 at 7 pm

It’s a short program with the Russian composer’s Symphonic Dances the main work. He wrote this version for two pianos at the same time (1940) as he worked on the orchestral score, the last major work he completed before his death in 1943. Its three movements are vivid in their orchestral format and the outer segments revel in emphatic rhythmic interplay. I’m not saying that Piers Lane and Kristian Chong are flamboyant performers, but you wouldn’t call them shrinking violets, either. Both have engaging personalities, well-suited to this happy score. As an introduction, they perform 6 Pieces in the form of Canons by Schumann (not Schubert, as stated in the Recital Centre bumpf), written in 1845 for a pedal piano but here presented in an arrangement for two pianos that Debussy engineered in 1891. Well, that’s going to prove a nice experience for everyone, if a bit recherche; it will give the performers a chance to brush up on their integration skills, I suppose, but you’d be hard pressed to find any common ground with the Dances. Standard entry costs $55, concession $45, students $20 and the transaction fee is an ungracious $7 if you book online or by phone.

KEYS TO LIFE: JAYSON GILLHAM AND IYAD SUGHAYER

Jayson Gillham

Elisaberth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Sunday July 19 at 5 pm

Here comes another two-piano recital following straight on from the Lane/Chong one yesterday. Featuring Queensland’s own Jayson Gillham and Jordanian-Palestinian Iyad Sughayer, this evening’s program involves works which were pretty much all composed (or personally authorized) for the two-piano combination, although not the players’ opener: Debussy’s limpid four-movement Petite Suite, written between 1886 to 1889, has both performers seated at the one keyboard. A pinnacle of the repertoire arrives with Mozart’s Sonata in D K. 448, one of those masterful works that brim with affability and contentment. The 1905 Introduction and Allegro by Ravel has always existed for me as a harp, flute, clarinet and string quartet construct but the composer himself put together a two-piano version which Durand published in 1906. In 1944, Khachaturian produced his Three Pieces for Two Pianos (Ostinato, Romance, Valse fantastique) which are new to me but painless, this compendium lasting about ten minutes only. Arensky wrote four suites for two pianos and we hear his first, the Suite Op. 15 which also has three movements (Romance, Valse, Polonaise) of which I know only the gentle middle one. The pianists end with Chabrier’s Espana, the work which brought the compooser fame in 1883; again, I was surprised to find that Chabrier himself set up a two-piano version in 1884. As well, there’s a contemporary voice heard along this recital’s path: senior Lebanese composer Houtaf Khoury‘s new work, here enjoying a world premiere. Your normal adult tickets sit between $79 and $119, concession holders paying $20 to $15 less in the two top brackets of three; Under 28s pay $99 for good seats, $54 for not-so-good; Under 16s cough up $54 anywhere in the hall. The Recital Centre’s Transaction Fee of between $4 and $8.50 obtains if you order online or by phone. While the Murdoch space’s circle and wings aren’t available, the stalls still have about 180 seats available. It’s tempting to try fronting up on the night to avoid any financial brutalization.

FROM ROMANCE TO RECKONING

Selby & Friends

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday July 22 at 2 pm

The first bit is easy. Kathryn Selby and her Selby & Friends colleagues for this tour, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Natalie Chee and University of Melbourne Conservatorium of Music’s Head of Cello Richard Narroway, are playing a double dose of Schumann and the big Mendelssohn Piano Trio No. 2: two of the fundamental names from the Romantic era in European musical history. The reckoning is a more local affair and involves a plethora of local composers, all women. This hybrid is called Fire Dances Suite and it dates from 2020. Unlike Stravinsky’s happy ballet, this commemorates the spate of bushfires that have swept across the nation in recent (?) years to deadly and devastating effect, each of the writers treating a particular aspect of these scourges, from initial smoke to evaluations after the disaster has passed. The voices involved are Nat Bartsch, Olivia Bettina Davies, Natalie Williams, Maria Grenfell, Hilary Kleinig, Elena Kats-Chernin, Cathy Applegate and Isabella Gerometta. The only complete performance I can find comes in at 17 minutes, so the movements are all brief. Our two Schumanns are, first, the Three Romances of 1849 which the composer expressly forbade his publishers from arranging for anything else, insisting on the original’s oboe and piano format, but here we are with a cello/piano version; and then the A minor Violin Sonata of 1851 which didn’t please the composer but which has found plenty of favour since, if only for its highly appealing middle Allegretto. As for the Mendelssohn in C minor of 1845, this work has enjoyed expoosures aplenty, thanks to Melbourne’s chamber music competitions where the temptation to power through its rhetoric is irresistible to many a young ensemble, all of them delighting in the Old Hundredth peroration that crowns the score. Standard entry costs $89, student and concession $69, Seniors $87, children under 12 free. You also have the Recital Centre’s fee-gouge of between $4 and $8.50 if booking online or by phone – hard to avoid when the event is in the Salon which holds only 140.

This program will be repeated at 7 pm.

OLD IDEAS, NEW STORIES

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday July 25 at 4:30 pm

This small-scale recital begins with American writer Bryce Dessner‘s Murder Ballades of 2013, famous for its initial performances by the ensemble eighth blackbird. This work takes its fons et origo from American folk music, albeit melodies and lyrics with a particularly gruesome theme, and it calls for flute/alto flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, percussion, piano, violin and cello, lasts about 20 minutes and can be played by a very versatile two instrumentalists or (more commonly, you’d think) five or six. For this reading, I’m guessing the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra members participating will be flute Wendy Clarke, clarinet David Thomas, percussion John Arcaro, piano Louisa Breen, violin Tiffany Cheng (this program’s curator) or Anna Skalova, and cello Caleb Wong. The MSO’s composer in residence, Joe Chindamo, presents his String Quartet No.1, Tempesta, a four-movement (Tempesta, Lament/Seduction, Frenzy, Flight) score from 2014. This will involve, Cheng, Skalova, viola Jenny Khafagi, and Wong. A further blast from America comes in Copland’s 1937 Sextet for Clarinet, String Quartet and Piano, arranged from his Short Symphony of 1932-3 which was thought to be too difficult to play. This will be followed by Holly Harrison‘s celebration of (part of) Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece, The Mad-Hatter’s Tea Party written in 2018 which will involve Clarke, Thomas, Cheng or Skalova, Wong and Arcaro with a narrator/reciter in the shape of Nick Kuiper. Probably because of this last piece, the performance will be a ‘relaxed’ one, so your usual all-quiet rules won’t necessarily apply. Standard and concession tickets cost $35, children get in for $15. Also, the MSO’s $7 Transaction Fee applies if you book online or by phone. The event isn’t sold out – yet (June 8).

This program will be repeated on Sunday July 26 at 11 am in the Iwaki Auditorium, Southbank. This is not relaxed but also not necessarily tense; still, ticket prices are more expensive.

DIVINE BOHEMIANS

Australian Haydn Ensemble

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday July 29 at 7 pm

I might have encountered Sydney’s Australian Haydn Ensemble during our COVID years when we all depended on the Australian Digital Concert Hall to hear anything in live performance. If so, nothing remains in the memory. Which is not to say that their first Melbourne performance tonight might not be worthwhile. The ensemble is, in fact, operating as a string quartet: violins Skye McIntosh and Matthew Greco, viola Rafael Font, cello Daniel Yeadon. They are proposing a diet of ‘Bohemian’ music which begins with the Austrian Haydn’s Op. 77 No. 1, his second-last in the form written in 1799. To end, we hear from the German-born Beethoven through his Op. 18 No. 3 in D of 1798-1800. In between come a single movement, Larghetto, from a real Bohemian (well, he was called ‘Il Boemo’ in Italy) Myslivecek’s Op. 3 No. 6 (presumably, the one in C Major); the complete Op. 5 No. 5b in G minor by Richter who was born in Moravia and so sort-of qualifies as a Bohemian, here producing a taut four-movement construct that concludes with a minuet and trio; and another Moravian, Paul Wranitzky’s Op. 49 in D minor which could well have been his last in the form. Any of them divine? You be the judge. Entry costs $60, concession $45, Senior $55, plus the anywhere-between-$4-and-$8.50 Transaction Fee that the Recital Centre slugs every patron with when you order online or by phone. At time of writing (June 8), there is still ‘moderate availability’.

2026 WINTER GALA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday July 30 at 7:30 pm

The draw-card for this concert is Melbourne-born soprano Danielle de Niese who we hope will be generating much-needed warmth on this cold night with several as-yet unspecified selections from musicals by Bernstein, Gershwin, ‘and more’. You’re spoiled for choice with Gershwin whose melodic facility is, in this sphere, beyond compare. As for Bernstein, you’ve got On the Town, West Side Story and about six other musicals that nobody knows much about in this country. Searching for de Niese’s experience with either composer, I can’t find any trace; still, perhaps she’ll be more familiar than we are with the ‘and more’ component. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra‘s chief conductor Jaime Martin directs the soprano and also takes his instrumentalists through the nine-part Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, arranged in 1960 by Bernstein and orchestrators Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal. Of more interest (well, to me) is a long-time favourite: Ginastera’s Variaciones concertantes of 1953 which I once had on an exceptionally lucid LP from Dorati and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. This work still strikes me as a more colourful, less studied showpiece than Britten’s Guide, especially for its finale: a brilliant malambo in 3/4+6/8 brimming with rhythmic energy and a spiky sequence of timbres that encapsulate the appeal of Latin American classical music. For a standard seat, you’ll pay between $81 and $139; concessions are a munificent $5 cheaper. The MSO applies its $7 Transaction Fee if you incommode its money-counters by ordering online or by phone. Currently, the balcony is not being used and the booking site claims that there are 100+ seats still available in the stalls and the circle-and-choir respectively.

This program will be repeated on Saturday August 1 at 2 pm.

SCHUBERT’S FANTASY & OCTET

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Sunday May 24 2026

For this segment of the organization’s national tour, the Australian Chamber Orchestra hit with vigour the second term in its title, utilizing only eight players in a program that featured two works only: Schubert’s late Fantasy of 1827 for violin and piano, and the Octet of 1824. Thanks to artistic director and lead violin for this recital, Richrd Tognetti, the Fantasy was transcribed for the same number of musicians as takes part in the longer work, which meant a good deal of work for the ensemble’s clarinet, David Griffiths, on a break from the University of Melbourne’s Conservatorium. But then, you wouldn’t want to give all that right hand filigree work to another violin (in this case, Helena Rathbone), thereby setting up a continuous timbral duality with yourself.

The arranger had two other wind players to temper his usual corps. Carla Blackwood, also from the Melbourne Conservatorium, produced a reliable (and that’s saying a lot) line that remained in equilibrium with her colleagues for the most part. A bass line to complement long-time ACO underpinning member Maxime Bibeau and cellist Johannes Rostamo (on holiday from the Stockholm Philharmonic) came from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s principal bassoon, Todd Gibson-Cornish. Fleshing out the string quintet was the ACO’s head viola, Stephanie Farrands.

That’s an impressive body of musicians and this afternoon’s work made for a very satisfying experience. As you’d expect, the Fantasy arrangement taxed the players on occasion, Blackwood having to handle an awkward set of semiquavers early on, but finding compensation in a rich texture-filling partnership with Gibson-Cornish. Tognetti shared the load evenly when the group arrived at the Sei mir gegrusst variations, the accompaniment/piano part unsurprising in its new task allocation but rich in colour-variety, thanks to the three wind visitors.

For all that, the Fantasy in this format centred on Tognetti who met his line’s challenges with assurance. During the initial Andante, he gave himself room to breathe with several rubato-like lingerings. But the ensemble followed these small breathing-points with informed ease; as you’d expect, in this seventh performance in a run of twelve. Not too surprisingly, Tognetti maintained a restraiint of address, not breaking out of a pretty placid dynamic range until the C Major Allegro march, the work’s antepenultimate segment that somehow brings to mind a carefreee branch of the old Davidsbundler.

In this muted approach, he was well-matched by Griffiths who sailed perilously close to inaudibility at certain stages where he worked in mirroring or doubling the violin solo’s material. To his credit, the clarinettist’s piano/pianissimo passages made a vital element in the sound-world of this interpretation. Still, I missed the robust definition that comes with the original, the two instruments complementary and focused on the composer’s display of melodic richness.

As you might have expected, the Octet‘s opening brought us into a musical landscape more fluent and easier to imbibe. Also, the players sounded driven and involved across the first movement Allegro with a taut and clever weighting in play. Blackwood managed cleanly those exposed two-octave horn leaps seven and seventeen bars after Letter C in my old Breitkopf & Hartel score. As well, it was a welcome pleasure to hear solos from both bassoon and viola ringing with some prominence rather than submerged in the secondary matter from higher voices. As far as I can remember, the players didn’t repeat this movement’s exposition; yes, it makes the work longer by some minutes but I think it repays the effort, even in a big canvas score like this one.

A finely poised passage came with the clarinet/violin duet thirteen bars after the start of the following Adagio. Later, Rostamo generated a firm hauptstimme at Letter E, giving the main melody a suddenly more forward-sounding projection in a movement that passed without much drama, best typified by Griffiths’ dangerously soft coda top line fourteen bars from the comforting conclusion.

Then, a welcome dose of buoyancy in the fourth bar of the Allegro vivace which bounded past with infectious vim and dynamic contrasts in the usual strophe/antistrophe pattern. I’ve not heard this style before (I think) but the non-vibrato viol approach to the first phrases in the Trio from Tognetti made for a fine differentiation between the outer and middle segments of this movement.

The following seven variations on the composer’s Freunde von Salamanka tune are a rather predictable set and, for me, wear out their welcome pretty soon. That’s even more the case when all the repeats are observed, which I think they were in this performance, although the horn’s Variation III seemed to me to be underweight. But the one immediately following, which highlit Rostamo, enjoyed full length and made for one of the finer displays of full-bodied production in these pages.

The remaining two segments gave us more deftly measured playing, notably a well-concerted sotto voce ending to the coda after the horn’s introductory solo, and a gripping version of the final movement’s Andante molto thanks to everybody’s curt delivery of those initial semiquavers before fulcrum chords in these sixteen-and-three-quarter bars. I’d have preferred a more vital outlining of those virtuosic triplet bursts of bonhomie from Griffiths and Tognetti which can exhilarate the listener even more than the emsemble in full flight does across the several deliveries of a bounding main tune that somehow always strikes me as imbalanced – possibly because of the trill-rich nature of its first half being set alongside the simpler insistence of the second eight-bar sequence.

Both elerments in this program gave us a fine exposure to Schubert’s splendid melodic richness and, in the Octet, a rare experience of hearing live one of his major chamber music constructs outside the string quartet/quintet format. What proved most impressive to me was the unfaltering mode of attack and model interweaving of textures from a body that, apart from the strings, was gathered ad hoc – for these specific works only: a fortuitous collection of highly competent, responsive talents.

A WINTER’S JOURNEY

Musica Viva Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Monday February 16, 2026

Allan Clayton

Here we are again with an updated Winterreise. British tenor Allan Clayton is collaborating with pianist Kate Golla on a Musica Viva Australia tour of Schubert’s song-cycle that started in Perth and moves to Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Adelaide over the coming fortnight after its two-night stint here. This version has been semi-staged by director Lindy Hume, with a background of Fred Williams’ paintings/drawings screened on a large pair of walls by David Bergman‘s video design, the whole lit by Matthew Marshall.

All right: that takes care of the credits. As for the experience itself, you were left with no little admiration for the singer’s embrace of the required theatrical action and the manner in which he tailored his output to the 24 situations that Schubert’s manic wanderer enjoys/endures. You could find little fault with Golla’s realization of the accompaniments, although that term is something of a diminution of the pianist’s responsibilities in this score.

With the Williams’ art, I’m not really convinced by the stated aim of finding common ground between three geniuses – poet, composer, painter. Not that the background distracted from the cycle’s progress; indeed, Williams’ work presented as a sober complement to some of the songs, even if there was one unexpectedly vehement painting exemplifying the later Romantic musical direction of sturmisch bewegt that I couldn’t trace in the supplied list of the artist’s works employed on this occasion. But while you could accept the Kosciusko depictions from the mid-1970s as mildly credible support for Gute nacht, the later landscape dots of vegetation looked centuries remote from anything in Muller’s poems.

Hume made an excellent start and ending to this enterprise, having Clayton isolated on left-stage, from which he moved into the central raised section holding Golla’s piano and the two walls around her, V-shaped towards the audience, with the Williams images imposed on them. This was the position he eventually re-occupied when left alone (so to speak) with the Leiermann at this work’s bitter end. In between, he raced around the raised platform, coming to rest and curling up about the Auf dem Flusse point, then finding another resting place somewhere near Der Wegweiser.

Fortunately, Clayton steered clear of too much pantomime, although he did use his long-coat, I seem to recall, to mimic Die Krahe. But you were spared the full mimesis for lieder that could – and have – been physically illustrated by the singer. I still have memories, fortunately fading, of Simon Keenlyside presenting a choreographed reading of this cycle in the State Theatre at the Melbourne International Arts Festival of 2004; on that occasion, too many textual cues were seized upon to ram the verbal messages down our communal throat.

My reaction was not shared by a gaggle of fellow critics who found inexplicable merit in this exhibition and bestowed that Winterreise with a critics’ award on odd grounds that had nothing to do with Schubert, and little connection to Muller although one of the plaudits came from an accompanying husband who found the singer’s German to be ‘very good’. Recalling this whole situation still leaves me thinking: Was it for this the clay grew tall?

Another reading of this cycle that proved more pleasing, although generating no little confusion in some of the songs, came from soprano Louisa Hunter-Bradley and pianist Brian Chapman who recorded this work on the Move label in 2006. Having the work’s central character change gender requires a good deal of interpretative latitude on the listener’s part but at least the score was given straight, without deviations from a normal recital format . . . insofar as you can have such a thing on CD.

Isn’t that enough, though? Why is it necessary to dress up a work which was intended to communicate directly with the listener, without any distractions? One of the reasons given for providing supporting illustrative matter is that audiences don’t understand the words; not everyone is familiar with the texts, let alone with German. Yes, but surely that deficiency can be covered by surtitles? They were employed on this night; even if we didn’t get a full translation of each line, sufficient was provided to communicate the songs’ emotional gist.

What you can do is, of course, close your eyes, as I did for a good deal of the time. Many of us have an admiration for Williams’ work, egged on by the 1980 hagiography produced by Patrick McCaughey which brought the artist into the mainstream, sponsored by the country’s most well-known art curator/academic/historian. But even this measure had its problems as, if you looked at the stage between songs, some striking scenes were on show, some of them with little input as to what we’d just heard.

In the end, Clayton and Golla enjoyed a rapturous reception which they deserved despite the visual salad behind them. The pianist demonstrated a fine responsiveness to Schubert’s piano writing, my only query a soft right-hand output during Mut, e.g. the piano’s muffled commentary in bars 9-10 coming straight after Clayton’s clear account of the melodic contour. But then you encountered Golla’s intensely moving account of the following Die Nebensonnen, with a lucid reading of that song’s bass-heavy accompaniment.

And you could find similar examples of subtlety across the work’s spread, Clayton’s dynamic palette a continuing source of delight in lesser-known pieces like Letzte Hoffnung as well as the all-too-familiar extracts like Der Lindenbaum. In fact, the hallmark of this interpretation came through its attention to shadings from both musicians, Golla establishing a scene with admirable directness and following Clayton’s line with excellent fidelity. Next time, we could do without the visual input, OK?

After five-and-a-half years on the Gold Coast, we have decided to move back to Melbourne. Unlike our arrival in Queensland, we have no definite address to which we’re headed back ‘home’.

So there will be a delay of some weeks before this site publishes new material.

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.