BEETHOVEN’S SEPTET
Ensemble Liaison & Friends
Hanson Dyer Hall, Ian Potter Southbank Centre
Monday September 22, 2025
Ensemble Liaison (L to R) David Griffiths, Svetlana Bogosavljevic, Timothy Young
Naturally enough, the Ensemble Liaison relied on quite a few friends to mount its attack on Beethoven’s most celebrated work – well, very much so in the composer’s lifetime, and lasting quite a few years after that. For one thing, the Ensemble personnel was cut by a third for this work; see you later, pianist Timothy Young. The remaining members – clarinet David Griffiths and cello Svetlana Bogosavljevic – were assisted by some well-known professionals – horn Carla Blackwood, violin Dale Barltrop, bassoon Lyndon Watts – and a pair of ‘students’ quickly pursuing solid careers in Australian National Academy of Music participant Hanna Wallace on viola, and double bass Rowan Swarbrick who is finishing his Master’s degree at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music in whose freshly fabricated halls this recital was held.
Not that Young was totally neglected. Indeed, the night’s program was dominated throughout its first rather brief half by Young as both composer and soloist. The evening opened with his relatively new work, Distant Waters of 2024, written for the Liaison forces and based on a simple four-note motif; not really a melody, as outlined by Griffiths pre-performance address. You could distinguish this mini-theme as it was subjected to a kind of free variation treatment that proved charmingly melodious in its amplifications, even if some of these sounded like contrapuntal exercises at their openings.
Young here deals in a harmonic language that might be described as post-Romantic as it was firmly rooted in traditional garb with some mildly adventurous modulation but nothing irregular in its rhythmic structure and an instrumental complex that favoured doubling of lines; not that there’s anything wrong with that – the greats did it, although having the cello and piano play the same bass line isn’t something you hear much of in contemporary compositions. But that’s just it: Young is writing in a style that harks back to less fraught times, devoid of striving dissonance and appealing in its optimism.
However, not much remains in the memory about the performance’s progress apart from its quiescence. Further, Distant Waters was close to submerged by what followed: Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit suite of 1908, a fine vehicle for Young’s powerful virtuosity. His account of the first movement, Ondine, offered a subtlety eschewed by many another interpreter who expend a thunderous energy at the fortissimo climax of bar 66, which usually strikes me as out of proportion with the aqueous humour of the poetic narrative and a sudden tsunami in the middle of a rash of oblique colours.
As well, you could relish Young’s quiet insistence on the pervading melodic line cutting through the lavishly applied froth, culminating in the single-line address across bars 84 to 87 where (I’m guessing) the human says to the nymph: No dice, sweetie. Then the final page eclat of bitonal arpeggiating burst into play with maximum effectiveness as the last four bars mirrored the piece’s opening frissons in a demonstration of interpretative subtlety.
I can’t be the only listener who focuses attention on the B flat/A sharp mid-works pedal that Ravel sustains throughout Le gibet, so that the chordal web that is meant to distract from it takes second place to working out how the composer welds the two strata together. Certainly, you get involved in the drear and gloom illustrating Bertrand’s speculative poem that only settles into reality in nits final paragraph. Much as the monotone obsessed, my attention eventually turned to Young’s extraordinary hand-span which negotiated many chords flat-on, particularly some that most of us have to arpeggiate, like the 9th constructs at the piece’s opening and the falling figure that comes about in bars 20, 23, 40 and 43.
But, if you know this score, you’re really waiting for the impossible in Scarbo which Young accomplished with enough atmospheric touches to satisfy this listener, mining the movement for its acerbities, overt and muffled. You can’t say it was all plain sailing but each note seemed to be there as well as meeting the composer’s demands for rapid articulation, as in repeated demi-semiquavers that start at bar 2 and recur at bat 396. and in a set of full shoulder powerhouse explosions that finally burst out at bar 366, and again at bar 563 to the immense satisfaction of all concerned; it’s been a long time coming and the intimations nerve-wracking.
Young’s realization of the restless gnome’s activity lacked the vicious sparkle of other interpreters, possibly because he didn’t go in for a dry staccato attack. Yet his sense of the central character’s restlessness, sudden leaps into the foreground and retreats to the shadows, were finely realised across the breadth of this improbably long canvas.
After a brief break, we gathered for the Beethoven Septet of 1800 which is still a real pleasure to experience live, not least for the immediacy of its simple gaiety and open-heartedness. Each of the six movements is a delight to hear, even given my indifference to slow introductions and this work has two at either end. Barltrop and Griffiths established themselves as masters of the performance’s destiny, the former more overtly because of the ornate violin line in bars 3, 5, and 12-15 of the initial Adagio to Movement 1. But the ensemble work that followed in the Allegro was well focused and persuasive in its attack.
In fact, the only flaw that struck me in these pages is that odd hesitation that seems to be interpolated in most readings. It’s a sort of adjustment pause in bar 83 of the exposition where the violin soars up to a high G, then has to leap down to the first E on the D string. Is it that hard a jump that everybody has to wait for the adjustment? It might be harder when the figure returns at bar 218 and the jump is from a top C to the first A on the G string, but the imposed hiatus makes for an obstruction in the movement’s easy flow.
Moving on, the cantabile was finely achieved in the solos for Griffiths and Barltrop that outline the main melody to the Adagio, with some welcome exposure for Watts in a pendant phrase at bar 21: the first bassoon solo so far, I believe, complemented by a slightly longer one for Blackwood beginning at bar 68. Here was playing with a gentle bloom to its character of placid calm, the clarinet and violin in gentle call and response across the final section starting at bar 80’s recapitulation.
No complaints about the bouncy minuet, recycled from the Piano Sonata No. 20 in G Major. This is a point of delivery for the string quartet, mainly the violin but also Bogosavljevic who enjoys sudden exposure in bar 20’s main tune restatement. Beethoven’s equally happy Trio is memorable for the horn E flat arpeggios that punctuate the main melody; Blackwood articulated nearly all of these, only encountering a problem at the top of the mark in her repetition of this segment’s second half at bar 42.
A mildly propulsive attack on the following Tema found Barltrop and Wallace in excellent partnership which continued through the first variation, Bogosavljevic making a resonant contribution through her syncopations in bars 31 and 47. The violinist gave unassertive accounts of the rapid figure-work in Variation 2 and Griffiths and Watts combined to telling effect in the clarinet/bassoon top-and-tail to Variation 3. Blackwood came to the fore again – momentarily – in introducing and ending the B flat minor Variation 4 with unforced penetration.
And the coda came over with simple eloquence as the composer restructures/segments his theme in simple terms setting the clarinet/bassoon duo in antiphonal format against Barltrop/Wallace across the calando final bars. Again, the ensemble relished those deft solo and duet passages inn the Scherzo, especially Bogosavljevic’s long stretch of comfortable outlining in the Trio, until Barltrop entered to double her path at bar 113 for the final thematic restatement.
I can’t think of a happier moment in this work than the violin/cello duet that outlines the prime melodic matter for the Presto finish. This is Beethoven combining enthusiasm and pleasure in one hit of almost eight bars before others enter, and its impetus is infectious, setting a pattern/scene for the most jocund of finales. Once again, we encounter that hiatus as the violin negotiates a leap from a high B flat to the instrument’s lowest F sharp at bars 54-5, and again at bars 177-8 from a slightly lower E flat to B natural below the stave. But what do you expect? By now, it’s common practice, like Trump decrying climate change or the perniciousness of wind farms – well, not as stupid, but just as inevitable.
But the moment that catches my breath every time is the sudden chorale for the three wind that comes out of nowhere at bar 316: both a transformation and an illumination of the vital action that has sustained the movement so far and which leads gently into the violin’s cadenza that Barltrop outlined so precisely and deliberately (the same thing?) that the insertion didn’t jar. Then the rush home with the violinist having the last word with three exposed bars of E flat arpeggios before a climactic E flat in alt.
While the performance might have lacked the gloss of some European recorded readings, you would have enjoyed the brisk immediacy of this one from the Ensemble and friends. At times, the balance was over-favourable to the wind trio, but the string group has so much more meat in its parts, especially the two upper lines that natter endlessly across the score. As well, these players demonstrated an individuality in their work, particularly Griffiths (as you’d expect), Wallace and Bogosavljevic, all of whom displayed an energy and eloquence that supported the emotional involvement of the whole ensemble with an appreciative audience in this acoustically lively space.
O'Connell the Music 