Pratt takes the honours

cliveoconnell

LA SONNAMBULA

Victorian Opera

Hamer Hall, Victorian Arts Centre

Friday May 5, 2017

                                                                                     Jessica Pratt

Somehow I’ve missed the Victorian Opera’s previous concert versions of Bellini operas – Norma and I puritani.  A real pleasure, then, to come upon the latest enterprise, particularly as the performance worked very well, notable for a top-notch cast, a willing if distant chorus and a revitalised Orchestra Victoria, coping easily with this score and revealing a good deal more polish than had obtained during the previous night’s Carmen for Opera Australia.

Not that the opera has a large principal line-up.  The sleep-walking heroine Amina is a virtuoso role – well, it’s made so by the insertion of ornamentation to taste; Jessica Pratt proved more than equal to the task with admirable technical control and a fine characterization of open-hearted simplicity.  As her betrothed, Elvino, tenor Carlos Enrique Barcenas maintained a firm delivery throughout the night; if the high notes sounded strained, they were present and correct, although they would be more telling if the singer would treat them with greater relaxation of his physical equipment.   Paolo Pecchioli, a bass new to me, proved an exceptional Count Rudolfo, capable of responsible phrasing and varied delivery as evident from his first appearance where you immediately gained insight into a personality capable of command and sensitivity.

Another substantial contributor was Greta Bradman who, as Lisa, enjoyed two arias, including that which follows the opening chorus, Tutto e gioia, and the later one with chorus, De’ lieti auguri, where she thinks Elvino will marry her instead of the ‘unfaithful’ Amina.  The pyrotechnics came less thick and fast than in Pratt’s line but Bradman balanced her fellow principal soprano with a more solid timbre in production, and brought some welcome relief to the work’s sweetness and light with her barbed responses to her courting by Alessio.  This latter role brought bass Timothy Newton down from the chorus for the character’s contributions, although his role in ensembles often simply mirrored his upstage colleagues.

Mezzo Roxane Hislop sang Amina’s foster-mother, Teresa, with seasoned security, blotting her copybook only once with an early entry, almost cutting off the distant horns at  Ma . . . il sol tramonta, but quickly pounced on by conductor Richard Mills.  Tenor Tomas Dalton followed Newton’s lead, coming down from the choir for the Notary’s brief contribution when all things are going swimmingly at the betrothal scene.

Pecchioli had only two significant passages in which to shine.  The deceptively long Vi ravviso and its pendant Tu non sai is the more important in revealing something of the Count’s character as an informed, benevolent if somewhat secretive aristocrat with a splendid line in rolling reminiscence.   In Act 2, he attempts to explain (briefly and lucidly) to the village what a somnambulist is, V’han certuni che dormendo, before Elvino leads a chorus of denial.   As you’d hoped, the singer’s tone quality retained a carrying amplitude, not over-stressed in the part’s upper register and satisfyingly dark at the other end.

Barcenas made a favourable impression from his opening recitative, although the strain to get through the mordent to the upper B flat at rendesti il padre interrupted a well-controlled delivery.   But the following duet  Prendi: l’anel ti dono turned out to be one of the performance’s gems, the tenor gifted with the high road and keeping it.   Still, the four high Cs that turn up later in the scene would have gained from a less determined approach.   As shown better in Act 2, this tenor has an attractive authority across most of his compass, if not yet the floating elasticity of an ideal Elvino like Tagliavini.   A short burst of regret in Ah! Perche no posso odiarti gave us a telling insight into Barcenas’ talent at instant communication – address without complications, the lyric falling in the nutty kernel of his talent.

Pratt gave us an excellent Amina, from her first appearance to the happy (and quick) resolution of the opera’s action.   In the initial Come per me sereno cavatina, she demonstrated how to handle the composer’s thick fioriture, particularly in a throw-away piece of brilliance at non, non brillo (the sort of startling facility that typified Sutherland at her best). and again at a quicksilver non ha forza a sostener.   In fact, Pratt sustained her role beyond expectations at the crucial point where she is spurned by Elvino, maintaining our sympathy throughout the D’un pensiero quintet and the following Act 1 finale where again the character yields dynamic and range primacy to her ex-fiance –  whom any spirited girl outside opera would have now given up as a waste of space.

But it’s Ah non credea mirarti that crowns the opera – a surprisingly non-flamboyant peak, but you can expect only a few flashes of brilliance from a sleepwalking heroine (unless you happen to be watching Lady Macbeth or Lucia).   Pratt mirrored her opening aria’s happiness with a moving depiction of a credulous soul finding consolation in her dreams. But the pretty-well packed hall was waiting for the fireworks of Ah! non giunge, and Pratt didn’t disappoint, although the top E flat in her final solo bar was a close thing.

Without claiming to have made a concerted study of the scores, I find it hard to recall an opera of this type that requires so much chorus work.   Looking through the music afterwards, I was taken aback by the number of principal solos, duets and other ensembles that featured support, in this case from the near-omnipresent villagers.  On this night, the VO Chorus carried out their work with diligence, even if you might have wanted more power from the 32 singers involved.   Mind you, the body operated from behind Mills and his orchestra, who were nothing if not lively.  But their contribution assisted considerably in raising the work’s involvement level.

Another oddity that struck me after this performance was Bellini’s delight in his own triplet-rich, meandering melodies; his operating principle appeared to be that, if something was worth saying twice, it was probably worth repeating once more.   This can take its toll in Act 1 where the lovers’ idyllic satisfaction goes on for a patience-wearing stretch of time. However, the absence of staging, costumes, and scenery meant that the performance centred solely on the music – a real concert, in other words, and so an experience to be treasured for giving all executants, both vocal and instrumental, a blank field to work in, and handing to an audience the inestimable gift of witnessing music-making without theatrical distractions, in an arena where the performers stand purely on their own abilities.   After this, I’m more than a little regretful that I missed the company’s previous Bellini expeditions.

You can take the girl out of Seville . . .

cliveoconnell

CARMEN

Opera Australia

State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 4, 2017

                                                                                 Stacey Alleaume

You’re pressed to put your finger on significant faults in the national company’s opening salvo for the Melbourne Autumn season, yet the net result doesn’t satisfy as much as you’d want it to do.  The Carmen, Rinat Shaham, is gifted with a full-bodied mezzo ran\ge and she plays her role well enough, if not distinctively.   Her Jose, Dmytro Popov, gets all the notes and is an assertive enough figure, even in that drawn-out final duet.   Shane Lowrencev is a competent Escamillo, his big number ringingly confident.  Our heroine’s gypsy/smuggler cohorts – Jane Ede (Frasquita), Sian Pendry (Mercedes), Luke Gabbedy (Dancairo), Benjamin Rasheed (Remendado) –  handle the middle act ensembles with gusto and reliability.   Even the principal soldiers – Christopher Hillier as Morales, Adrian Tamburini playing Zuniga – work through their parts with unswerving directness.

But the only time you felt that something exceptional was taking place occurred during that difficult Act 3 aria, Je dis que rien ne m’epouvante when the night’s Micaela, Stacey Alleaume, gave a flawless interpretation that clearly woke up a house that till that point was polite but not off its collective face with enthusiasm.   Yes, you could quibble with some of Alleaume’s breathing decisions but the careful construction of the lyric and her treatment of its melodic arches were not only memorable, but as good as I’ve heard live.

The opera’s last real solo made as good a high-point as any for the night, although its usual reception is often to be under-rated; after all, Micaela is the only decent character in the whole work and she can cast a pallid shadow in the middle of so much passion and nationalistic colour.   But Alleaume’s success was obvious, especially at curtain-call time when her appearance was greeted by the closest thing a first-night Melbourne audience comes to a roar of approbation.

Shaham’s Carmen follows the usual path.  She’s physically attractive, dominates the Habanera scene very well, handles her duets with Popov successfully enough, although there seemed to be a hesitant moment when a cue was dropped at the point in Act IV when Don Jose gives up the wimping appeals and turns violent.   Her fault?   His fault?   I wasn’t quick enough to pick it up.   But the best part of Shaham’s reading came early; her L’amour est un oiseau rebelle made deft work of an all-too-familiar aria, but her Seguidilla proved to be vocally distinctive and well-pitched – I don’t mean just the notes’ placement but the nice mix of sultriness and pseudo-innocence that constitutes Carmen’s quick-moving seduction of Don Jose.

Later, the brilliantly atmospheric opening to Act 2, Les tringles des sistres tintaient, worked to fine effect vocally, while the staging and choreography walked a distracting uninspired path.    Even Carmen’s sudden change of character into a freedom-fighter came over without generating too much scepticism.    But the Act 3 card scene, where Carmen takes over for the solo En vain pour eviter, the pace slowed to an improbable adagio, sucking out the music’s fluency and this section’s tragic resignation to the inevitable.   Shaham gave excellent work in the vituperation of the last act’s closing stages where the semi-erotic posturing of the previous three acts has no place, but the same can be said of many another Carmen that the company has given us.

Popov impressed in Act 1 for his straightforward delivery, even if he faced the same problem as every Don Jose in making his rapid fall from grace an occasion of general disbelief suspension.   His tenor is solid, stentorian rather than elegant, as evident in his Act 1 duet with Micaela, Ma mere, je la vois, where Alleaume turned into an emphatic second fiddle.   His La fleur que tu m’avais jetee had everything but suppleness; even the climactic top note wasn’t the usual bellow you get from many another singer.   But the duel scene with Escamillo held little suggestion of danger from either singer and Popov, while convincing in his communication of despair at the end, missed out on communicating the fierce brutality of murdering Carmen; equipped vocally to invest this duet with force and energy, the tenor failed to impress as deranged and heartbroken at what he has done.

One of the night’s successes emerged in the delicious Nous avons en tete une affaire quintet where the vocal combination came across as precise and well-judged, Jane Ede’s soprano occasionally riding without unnecessary force above the others.   Lowrencev’s big Votre toast number worked well enough; its refrain is difficult to freshen up but this bass-baritone refrained from bellowing.   The trouble with his characterization was its lack of spark; the invitation in Act 3 to his upcoming corrida sounded perfunctory, even when he got specific with Carmen.

Brian Castles-Onion conducted Orchestra Victoria and, the louder the forces involved, the better the score sounded.  To general gratification, the ensemble’s horns acquitted themselves very creditably in exposed passages, but every so often a fault marred the good work: a missed flute note in one of the entr’actes, an off-kilter upper string phrase, some heavy vibrato from the cellos, an over-egged percussion during choruses.

Teresa Negroponte‘s costumes concentrated on unsubtle bubble-gum colours: pink, orange, greens of various shades, purple.   Both adult and children’s choruses were dressed in a contemporary fashion, the latter looking as though they could have stepped off any street corner in Melbourne.   These bodies’ singing was solid in delivery, the males tending to hog the limelight, but then they are the force that sets the opera’s tone right from the opening scene.

Michael Scott Mitchell has constructed a touring set, a three-wall frame that could fit anywhere and doesn’t change throughout the opera.   A truck features in three acts – Lillas Pastia’s easily transportable tavern, then the contraband conveyance, finally the triumphal dais at the entrance of Escamillo and Carmen for their four lines of love declaration. Mitchell’s stage is on two planes with some connecting stairs along the stage’s length; this only proved a problem at one point in the last act where things were in danger of coming adrift between singers on the upper level and the pit.

Director John Bell has re-situated the opera’s locale to ‘somewhere resembling today’s Havana’.   As it’s only a semblance, he can gloss over references to Seville in the libretto.   Why Havana?   Because he knows it and he enjoys ‘the audience’s shock of recognition’ (of Havana, that much visited city?) and ‘the dramatic tension between a contemporary vision and an older text’  –  which is fine if difficult to achieve when dealing with a work so much wedded to its original place in both words and music.

Bell also wanted to avoid the ‘traditional . . .  flamenco dancers, gypsies and toreadors’.   Sadly, a lot of these remain, although I have to admit the dancers have been replaced  –  by four couples who specialize in a New York-style 50s latter- day jitterbug, co-existing with stretches of languorous leg movements, stylized sexual gestures reminiscent of a camped-up tango club, and some aimless gesturing from the non-dancing chorus.   More Havanian relevance comes to Bell with the findings that ‘it’s hot, it’s Spanish, it’s sexy, and right now seems to be flavour of the month’.   Much the same –  hot, sexy, Spanish – could be said about Mexico and the Philippines, but flavour of the month?   It was heading that way with the recent relaxation of  restrictions but any recovery from its Castro-era greyness (or jungle greenness} will be a long while coming.    As, I suspect, will a meaningful influx of tourists.

But these are all accidents of performance, attempts to set a scene and sustain it.   You’d have to work hard to find Cuba in this production; you might just as well look to Buenos Aires or Bogota for a locale positioning.   Sadly, to my mind, the city that came to mind most was Miami – clashing colours piled on and juxtaposed, old-time honky-tonk eroticism, rank depression in this nether-world behind a Mar-a-Largo facade.

But what you don’t get is any sense of urgent menace and, without that, the opera suffers considerably.

As for what the principals and chorus actually do, you won’t find much difference here to any other Carmen.  There’s an absence of crowds to populate the opening scene’s plaza; the official parade of the last act is not on-stage but in the audience, the chorus looking out at us as a poor substitute for the spectacle they’re observing.   But it’s in the principals’ activity that you look for some freshness of approach and I, for one, found not much.   Bell has not caused any chance of a frisson of outrage or excitement to interfere with his production; by its underlying staidness, it is probably for some a reassurance, for others a disappointment.

The work will be performed at 7:30 pm on May 6, 11, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26 and at 1 pm on May 13.   As far as I can see, the cast remains unchanged.

Greatest of Centuries?

cliveoconnell

IN HONOUR OF LIFE: 20TH CENTURY SELECTIONS

Ensemble Gombert

Xavier College Chapel

Saturday April 29, 2017

Frank Martin

                                                                                      Frank Martin

James J. Walsh, safe in the pre-World Wars harbour of 1907 New York, believed that the Thirteenth was the Greatest of Centuries, and he wrote a lengthy appraisal to prove it.   He may still be right but, considering music, there’s a case for placing the Twentieth as the most significant period in that art’s development.   It’s not just that populations exploded and so did the numbers of musicians; after all, a huge number of them became involved in the post-1950 popular music industry, turning their backs on the development of their art to bog themselves down in endless repetition and debasement to the point where the music itself became secondary to peripherals – costumes, lighting, dry ice –  and where the great world of possibilities released in the field of electronic music was reduced to an endless array of incompetents and non-musicians recycling the trite and the cliched, reducing rhythm to a sub-primal jog-trot, avoiding any harmonic progress beyond Brahms, refusing to employ any material for melody outside a diatonic scale.

Counterbalancing this descent to the gutter, the century enjoyed incredible liberation across every musical parameter, sustaining remarkable leaps in aesthetic theory and virtuosity of performance.   The consoling fact for some of us is that musical craft marches on, despite frequent lurches sideways into mediocrities so that, while the popular bent is to hallow Prince or David Bowie or Jimi Hendrix – none of whom I would have trusted with singing a line in a Palestrina mass – the massive figures of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern and Boulez continue to shine lights onto the compositional practices of our more adventurous (and musically educated) contemporaries.

On Saturday, John O’Donnell and his uncompromising Ensemble Gombert veered once again away from their habitual Renaissance stamping-ground into near-contemporary regions, their program’s chief work being the oldest.   The singers opened their night with in time of, a well-known piece originally produced in 1995 by composer/conductor Stephen Sametz.   This e. e. cummings setting is a representative sample of the Ethereal American, which has some similarities with the pseudo-mysticism of John Tavener and the slew of Baltic composers who favour slender immobility.   Sametz’s work sets the five stanzas in cummings’ botanically referential lyric in straight-through fashion before returning to earlier sections and confounding the text in a striking exhibition of verbal polyphony.   Sametz uses high soprano textures like many of his peers but the music has a dynamic fervour that separates it from the ruck. Unlike several US performances of this piece, the Gombert version gained clarity from the Xavier Chapel acoustic which exposed the vocal interplay to better effect than the heavy echoes favoured by choirs from across the Pacific.

John McCabe‘s Motet from 1979 sets a poem by James Clarence Mangan which sounds like a fusion of Swinburne and Christopher Smart.   The music’s most obviously striking feature comes at the start of each of its nine stanzas on the words Solomon! where is thy throne, and Babylon! where is thy might; wide common chords provide an arresting contrast with the score’s main body with is satisfyingly complicated, a test for the double choir involved.   Like the Sametz preceding it, McCabe’s work sustains a consistent atmosphere, arresting and idiosyncratic.

From 1976 come Mervyn Burtch‘s Three Sonnets of John Donne; no recherche surprises here with Oh my blacke Soule!, Batter my heart and Death be not proud.   The first presents on the whole as a contrast between monody and a sparing harmony, both alternating between the lines; in the most famous of the sonnets, Burtch uses unison more sparingly although the vocabulary he employs is chorally congenial with only a few points to cause some eyebrow-lifting – the attack on Yet dearely sounded clumsy, while the magnificent last line begins in monody before branching into parts for the last four words which seem tame for their content; while the last of the trio delighted for the rich treatment of Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie, and the clever alternation of forces in the final couplet.   The Welsh composer wrote these settings for simple SATB choir and the Gomberts  – in slightly amplified form with five each of altos, tenors and basses, and seven sopranos –  invested each sonnet with firm eloquence and some splendid soft chord-work.

Antonin Tucapsky‘s In honorem vitae, five Horace settings, also requires only four vocal lines.  The composer has selected the opening stanzas to odes from Book 1 – Nos. 2 (with an extra two words) and 37; the first stanza of Odes II, 14 with the address that rings across the centuries  –  Eheu, fugaces, Postume; the initial stanza of Carmen 9 from Odes IV; and the complete Odes I, 11.

Written in 1975, this composition opens with appropriate vigour for Ne forte credas, before moving into a more severe strain for the second set of verses.   Iam satis terris, in ternary shape, employed a dynamically reduced plane.   For Nunc est bibendum, bubbly enough, Tucapsky seemed engrossed by the suggestive clause, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus, which eventually took over the setting; the address to Postumus made little impression; the last line of the Tu ne quaesieris octet surprised for its employment of fugato – a touch dry after the investment of ardent emphasis on isolated phrases and words like quem mihi, quem tibi, or Ut melius, or sapias.   Still, the composer contrived an intriguing composition with loads of variety in texture as he worked through what he called ‘madrigals’.

It was a source of enjoyment to hear the singers present Frank Martin‘s Mass for Double Choir, one of those choral masterworks that for many years lived an existence outside of performance, given a reputation as un-singable.  These days, its difficulties seem manageable and its alleged fearsomeness is belied by interpretations like this one which shine with facility and consoling humanity.   As with the opening Sametz work, the Xavier chapel proved a gift for this score, despite the carpet that covers most of the building’s floor; the choir enjoyed plenty of resonance, much preferable to a definition-softening echo.

The Christe eleison in the first movement demonstrated very ably how to construct an impressive ecstatic outpouring without losing dynamic control.   Ditto for the racing energy of the Cum Sancto Spiritu of the Gloria, during which Martin gives the basses a hefty presence for the first time in the Domine Deus segment.  You realized the advantages of having this work sung by female voices during the imaginatively mobile Credo.   The gain in expressiveness is remarkable, even when compared with the last time I heard this work – from the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge in July last year; a fine reading, certainly, but the Gomberts gave you a more telling vision of the composer’s passionate humanism.

The Sanctus got off to a clumsy start from the Choir I sopranos but both Osanna segments were among the night’s high-points for their bright, light-filled bravura.   The Agnus Dei has Choir Two maintaining a slow march-like tread as it outlines the text while the other force delivers a fluid, near-Gregorian melody in unison, before both bodies combine for the final dona nobis pacem.   At certain stages, the various lines split into two: a device which does not trouble larger choirs.   But the Ensemble rarely sounded attenuated – partly because of their innate musicianship, partly because of Martin’s excellent distribution and allocation of labour.

This Mass capped off a night where the Gomberts showed their ability to turn their combined talents to unexpected enterprises and come through the trials of 20th century compositions with high success.

Once were giants

cliveoconnell

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

Duo Chamber Melange

Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday April 27, 2017

Duo Chamber Melange

                                                                             Duo Chamber Melange

On one of those Indeterminacy discs that John Cage put out more than half a century ago, he told a story about his then-cobber Stockhausen.   The famous electronic music master pronounced, ‘I ask two things from a composer: invention, and that he astonish me.’   Which possibly goes some way to explaining the intellectual isolation of the German composer’s last years.   At pretty much every concert or recital I get to, I’d be happy in being met with one of his two criteria in operation.   But it’s the kind of apophthegm  that’s hard to forget, once you’ve heard it,  because it usually applies to those phenomenal works that dominate our musical landscape in the world of Western art.

As I suspect, for the rest of us mortals outside the rarefied realm of Donaueschingen, one or the other could be enough, even if the days of astonishment come less and less frequently as the years wear on.   Sadly, the first work on this latest program from Duo Chamber Melange – violin Ivana Tomaskova, pianist Tamara Smolyar – satisfied neither benchmark, under-flying the inventiveness quality by many feet.   Alla Pavlova, born in Ukraine, has resided in New York since 1990 and has provided our duo with other pieces that I’ve not heard.   The six-part orchestral Suite from her ballet Sulamith, completed in 2005, has been recorded several times; she has abstracted from this suite a set of three movements for violin and piano which seem to come from the ballet suite’s first half: Introduction, Ritual dance and Love duet.

After a pretty lengthy opening statement from Smolyar, Tomaskova took over the running with some soaring melodic work, the atmosphere altering for the dance movement, then moving back to lyrical apostrophes for the finale.   Nothing wrong about the performance, even if the violinist urged out her high passages with a touch too much emphasis; the music passed over with no signs of stress.   But its vocabulary proved to be early Romantic, without even the harmonic grinding of Brahms or the chromatic interest of Chopin.   Every so often, the duet reminded me of a particularly fleshy Song Without Words, spiced up by some rhythmic energy in the middle movement which bore a trace of Khatchaturian-style folksy charm from over the Black Sea.   But inventive?   Not much.   Perhaps it all works better as ballet music in that dancers would find it easy to follow.   As for colours suggesting the world of King Solomon (whose love for the serving girl of the title provides the action), they escaped this listener.

Shchedrin‘s In the style of Albeniz is a slight encore piece, originally for piano solo but arranged to employ violin, trumpet or cello in a duo format.   After the Pavlova piece, this came as a welcome bagatelle of modernity.   Written in 1952, the pages offer something like a parody of the Spanish composer’s Espana but their flourishes and semi-moody languishings cleverly summon up the intended atmosphere, here delineated with plenty of firm directness of speech by both executants.

Smolyar then took a solo: an arrangement of the finale to Rachmaninov’s D minor Trio elegiaque No. 2.   This was constructed by the pianist and Anthony Halliday.   I don’t know the piece, although the score shows that it is piano-heavy.   Sadly, little of it remains in the memory apart from a gaucheness in its piling-up of episodes and a surprising lack of sophistication in the piece’s language; but then, Rachmaninov was only 20 when he wrote the work as a memento mori of the recently-departed Tchaikovsky.

The evening’s main work was Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in F minor which is rarely presented by any duo, glossed over in favour of the No. 2 in D Major, a re-working of the composer’s splendid Flute Sonata.  The collaboration throughout this score proved exemplary, if again inclined to stress the inbuilt polemics.   More impressive as an achievement was the whispering-winds-through-a-graveyard passage in both the outer movements, handled with discipline and muted confidence.   The Allegro brusco lived up to its title; the temptation here is to do a Shostakovich and remain on the one taut and loud level for too long.   The succeeding Andante proved masterly, a full-bodied elegy articulated clearly and in excellent dynamic balance, succeeded by a full-frontal, determined Allegrissimo.

What the players seemed to be pursuing in this interpretation was Prokofiev’s clear anti-war message, although, even in the brusco, he doesn’t venture far into the brutal but lightens the texture with something approaching satire.  The emotional atmosphere, despite occasional breaks, remains morose but not depressing.  To the credit of both musicians, we were taken faithfully on a dark journey, one whose ending the composer realized was not going to be achieved by the armistice of May 8, 1945.   Nothing astonishing here, but this sonata is brim-full with inventiveness and it gave a welcome depth to the duo’s presentation.

May Diary

cliveoconnell

Thursday May 4

BETWEEN STRINGS

Katapult

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

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

 

Thursday May 4

Metropolis 1

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

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

 

Thursday May 4

Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

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

 

Friday May 5

LA SONNAMBULA

Victorian Opera

Hamer Hall at 7:30 pm

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

 

Saturday May 6

THE THINGS THAT BIND US

Latitude 37

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

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

 

Saturday May 6

METROPOLIS 2

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

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

 

Saturday May 6

FRAGMENTS

Alicia Crossley

Melbourne Recital Centre at 10 pm

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

 

Sunday May 7

ACO SOLOISTS

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 2:30 pm

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

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

 

Thursday May 11

BENJAMIN NORTHEY CONDUCTS SIBELIUS 2

Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

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

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

 

Saturday May 13

BAROQUE JOINS THE CIRCUS 2

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra/Circa

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

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

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

 

Saturday May 13

TOGNETTI: PENDERECKI & BRAHMS

Australian National Academy of Music

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

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

 

Tuesday May 16

Angela Hewitt

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7 pm

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

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

 

Saturday May 20

MSO + JAMES MORRISON

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall at 7:30 pm

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

 

Sunday May 21

SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE

Team of Pianists

Rippon Lea at 6:30 pm

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

 

Thursday May 25

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

Melba Quartet

Melbourne Recital Centre at 6 pm

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

 

Thursday May 25

MSO PLAYS PETRUSHKA

Hamer Hall at 8 pm

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

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

 

Saturday May 27

STEFAN DOHR: FANFARE & FANTASIES

Australian National Academy of Music

South Melbourne Town Hall at 7:30 pm

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

 

Monday May 29

Nikolai Demidenko

Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

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

 

 

 

No better way to spend Good Friday

cliveoconnell

ST. JOHN PASSION

Melbourne Bach Choir and Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday April 14, 2017

andrew-goodwin

                                                                                 Andrew Goodwin

After last year’s sterling performance of the St. Matthew Passion, conductor/artistic director Rick Prakhoff elected this Easter to take his Bach singers and instrumentalists into the St. John score, using pretty much the same soloists as in 2016 (their ranks cut a tad because there’s less work to go round).   With the orchestral and choral forces, I can’t comment on any continuity because the program for that event has gone the way of most print.

But the reading was comparable with its predecessor in general security and consistency.   Prakhoff pointed out in a program note that he had no intention to present a total period interpretation, complete with gut strings, lute, and oboes di caccia ; rather, he utilised what he found practical in performance methodology and, if it sounded well-rounded or even orotund, the aim was to propose one way to interpret this moving work.   Fair enough, I say; better to have a comfortable sound, even if it suggests 19th century practice, rather than witness players struggle with unreliable instruments or trebles jog-trotting through page after ornate page without a clue of what they’re doing.

The Bach Choir is a large body which packed quite a punch in this hall.    After a suitably restless orchestral ritornello, the opening chorus’s Herr ejaculation came as an abrupt explosion; gripping in effect and setting up the operating ambience for the rest of the night with the instrumental fabric falling into the background, even in power-attenuating polyphonic complexes.   But the sheer mass of singers acted as a kind of brake so that, even as early as the semiquaver-heavy unser Herrscher passage, the action was being pulled back; a traction that re-appeared later on in turba segments like Lasset uns den nicht zerteilen and Ware dieser nicht ein Ubeltater.   Still, the chorales impressed uniformly, particularly the spot-on attack on the unprepared Part Two opening Christus , der uns selig macht.  The only flaw in these singers’ work was the tentative sound produced by the tenors; for a body that can boast 20 of them, you’d expect a more resonant presence, particularly in fugato entries.

Prakhoff’s orchestra was fortunate in its bass elements, including a willing double bass pair and Matthew Angus‘ bassoon.   I couldn’t see much of the band’s interstices but gamba Laura Vaughan apparently offered her skills to the complex obbligato for Es ist vollbracht!; Jasper Ly and Nicole Misiurak alternated oboes with cor anglais for the da caccia appearances late in the score;  flutes Jennifer Timmins and Alyse Faith made a clean sweep of Ich folge dir gleichfalls, leader Susan Pierotti led a safe string corps and generated a driving top line in the Betrachte/Erwage double.

If you had to typify this performance succinctly, you’d call it forthright.   None of the soloists showed any sign of lingering over his/her work and the standard of production veered towards clear-cut definition with little space for sentiment or supple elisions.   Once again, Warwick Fyfe sang the Christus role but with an adamantine firmness; this was no figure of pathos but an activist, speaking with directness to everyone from the apostles to Pilate.   For those of us brought up on the tradition of Christ’s words being encased in a nimbus of sustained string chords, Fyfe’s interpretation represents a novel approach where the text’s drama is dominant and the impetus towards death is unabated.

Also continuing from 2016, Andrew Goodwin sang the Evangelist with, if possible, even more distinction.  This tenor has a flawless delivery, projecting each note across his compass with an exemplary balance; not gabbling the lengthy slabs like Die Juden aber and the narrative-ending Darnach bat Pilatum but vaulting sensitively through the recitatives, maintaining the sense of John’s gospel, although prepared to give rein to the slow chromaticism of Peter’s weeping and that hurtling descending flight at the description of Christ’s scourging.   Singing of this elating assurance is experienced rarely these days, and Goodwin struck a fine balance between empathy and simple story-telling; for most of us, I’d suggest, we felt privileged to be in the hall each time the tenor stood up.

Lorina Gore was among the revenants, gifted in this work with two arias only.  Her sprightliness of delivery served well in Ich folge dir gleichfalls, interweaving to telling effect with the escorting flutes; later in the ornate Zerfliesse, mein Herze, the soprano’s craft shone through in her negotiation of the exquisitely figured vocal line and in a well-judged handling of breath control in some difficult legato passages.

Dominica Matthews sang the Passion’s alto arias; she did not feature among the preceding year’s soloists but put her own stamp on this work, handling her allotted arias with a firmness that mirrored her male colleagues.  Her version of the pivotal Es ist vollbracht! proved excellent for its sense of forward motion, in tune with the general dynamic of this performance.   Matthews made sure of offering maximum contrast when the pace quickened for the Der Held aus Juda siegt mit Macht pages, a riveting explosion of bravura in the middle of an elegy.

Henry Choo was indisposed by a back injury, which meant that he carried out his work but then retired backstage rather than sitting in front of us for the performance’s length.   You could hear no signs of stress in his athletic Ach, mein Sinn, the top As in this aria’s central section punched out with a vigour that typified the tenor’s approach to these restless pages.   And his energy remained constant in that exhausting Erwage aria which holds three of the entire work’s most continuous passages of rest-less singing; luckily, Choo has a bright, clarion-clear timbre that made following his line a rare pleasure.

Bass Jeremy Kleeman impressed in the St Matthew Passion and enjoyed similar success on Friday.  While Part One held little content apart from some recitative contributions, he produced a pair of stalwart gems in the score’s second part where the soloist is interrupted/escorted by choral forces; first, with sopranos, altos and tenors in the scale-rich Eilt, ihr angefochtnen Seelen handled here with deftly-controlled restlessness; then, in one of the work’s most consolatory sequences, the chorale Jesu, der du warest tot underpinning the lilting Mein teurer Heiland – a stretch of unabashed candour in this Passion’s high drama and a joy for any bass.

So yet again, the organization achieved a successful Good Friday commemoration, giving Bach’s formidable score a fine airing, crowned by a real sense of accomplishment with a fervent declamatory attack on the concluding Herr Jesu Christ, erhore mich, ich will dich preisen ewiglich!   On which promise, the Bach Choir, Orchestra and soloists delivered handsomely.

And again I say, rejoice

cliveoconnell

GEORGE DREYFUS . . . LIVE!

George Dreyfus and Paul Grabowsky

Move Records 3300

Dreyfus

Next year, George Dreyfus will turn 90.   On the current Australian music scene, he regards himself as a true rara avis, in that he seems to be one of only a few survivors from that halcyon period when this country discovered best European practice and the creaking shackles of musical composition  –  as taught by transplants from British academia  – started to buckle.   Unarguably, many of the Bright Young Things of that Golden Age from the 1950s to the 1970s have passed on: Don Banks, Ian Bonighton, Bruce Clarke, Ian Cugley,  Ian Farr, Eric Gross, Keith Humble, Richard Meale, James Penberthy, Peter Sculthorpe, George Tibbits,  Felix Werder and Malcolm Williamson.   And their own near-predecessors have definitely left us – John Antill, Clive Douglas, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Raymond Hanson, Robert Hughes, Dorian Le Gallienne and Margaret Sutherland.

But some of the Dreyfus-contemporary  generation are still loitering, like Alison Bauld, Anne Boyd, Peter Brideoake, Colin Brumby, Nigel Butterley, Barry Conyngham, Ross Edwards, Helen Gifford, David Lumsdaine, Larry Sitsky and Martin Wesley-Smith.   Admittedly, some are lingering quietly, outwardly content after the highs and lows of careers in composition.   Dreyfus can not be numbered among these but is still writing, still revelling in every performance of his own work, still kicking against the pricks.

The alphabetical lists above follow the contents page of a volume to which Dreyfus refers in his notes for this CD: ‘James Murdoch‘s piss-weak 1972 Australian Composers picture book’  –  about which, more later.   If I were to follow Frank Callaway and David Tunley’s study published six years later, Australian Composition in the Twentieth Century, the well-gone group would extend to Edgar Bainton, Arthur Benjamin, Moneta Eagles, George English, Felix Gethen, Alfred and Mirrie Hill, Dulcie Holland and William Lovelock;  John Exton and Eric Gross  would feature among the BYTs, while Jennifer Fowler and Donald Hollier are survivors.

Andrew Ford’s Composer to Composer (1993) casts an extra-Australian net but the locals he includes number the very-much-alive Gerard Brophy, Moya Henderson and Liza Lim.

All of which is to say that Dreyfus is not starved for company but he is, of all the composers listed above and still at work, the oldest  –  in many cases, by more than a decade.

This CD is a re-release of a 1978 LP, so it’s offering nothing new except the opportunity to drink old wine from a new jar.   The works – all short – cover the period from 1957 to 1978, the largest number coming from the 70s  .  .  .  as you’d expect.   Dreyfus himself plays bassoon and sings enthusiastically; for the nostalgic among us, memories come seeping back, encouraged by the composer who starts off with his most famous creation: the title theme to Rush, a TV series set on the Ballarat Goldfields brought to vivid life in a hurtling, catchy tune which is actually infiltrated by little quirks that come across loud and clear in this reduced version for two instruments.

The following track also features an early success: the main theme to a children’s TV series, The Adventures of Sebastian the Fox, which had the significant advantage of being singable.   And so it was, by flocks of engrossed young admirers.  After this comes a sort of lucky dip of pieces that can be handled by two performers, among which is a heavy representation from film scores, a form that the composer found most congenial: the main title from the ABC commissioned Marion of 1973; the theme of Ken Hannam‘s post-World War One film Break of Day; another 1976 creation in music for another film,  Let the Balloon Go.   This same productive year also saw the appearance of Power Without Glory, a 26-episode serialisation from the ABC of Frank Hardy’s controversial novel.   Dreyfus provided the score for this ambitious undertaking; and there’s a small scrap called Peace, the lone survivor of a Film Australia production in 1969 called Sons of the Anzacs.

Dreyfus and Grabowsky give these samples of the composer’s music without flourishes, the amiable melodies scaled down in effect from the lavish treatment they are given on a composer-conducted CD The film music of George Dreyfus, Move Records MD 3098 which holds them all.

As for the singing, Dreyfus treats us to his Ballad for a Dead Guerrilla Leader, a segment of his opera The Gilt-Edged Kid which was commissioned in 1969 by the national opera company but never performed by it: God knows why – this extract is falling over itself with accessibility and, when you consider the thousands of dollars lavished on models of local-grown tedium that appeared on Opera Australia’s playlists in later years, you have to wonder about the perceptual frameworks of the apparatchiks involved and their selection criteria.

The earliest track on the CD is Das Knie,  part of the early (1957) nine-part setting of some Galgenlieder by Christian Morgenstern.   Song of the Standard Lamp comes from a 1975 collaboration between Dreyfus and Tim Robertson, The Lamentable Reign of Charles the Last, written for that year’s Adelaide Festival.   Finally, Dreyfus sings his Three Ned Kelly Ballads, with texts by film-maker Tim Burstall but, like the other sung works, without their original accompaniment. Dreyfus’ vocal quality is best described as honest rather than burnished by years of training and Grabowsky’s keyboard contributions support his collaborator without attracting much attention.

Apart from the Ballads, the longest work on offer is Deep Throat, a work of no little oddity.   Offended by Murdoch’s evaluation of his Symphony No. 1, Dreyfus put together a short two-page score (reprinted in the CD’s accompanying leaflet) consisting of scraps from Murdoch’s commentary given a mundane vocal setting alongside scraps from other sources – Mahler, Bruckner, Beethoven, the composer’s own symphonies  –  the most dismissive of Murdoch’s statements coming in for special repetition.   The score comes complete with performing instructions which basically amount to open slather, to the point where players can introduce whatever they feel is fitting, i.e. any other symphonic scraps that strike a performer’s fancy; Dreyfus himself brings in a bit of Tchaikovsky’s F minor Symphony.

Deep Throat is a satire, poking fun at the aleatoric practices of mid-20th century advanced composers and charlatans alike.   The humour is far from subtle but the sense of anger is obvious enough.   As you’d expect, the work isn’t meant to travel far outside the world of contemporary Australian composition in the late 1970s.   Far more interesting is to re-visit Dreyfus’s Symphony No. 1 with Murdoch’s pallid observations in mind; here, the composer’s justification rings with resonant force, particularly throughout the powerful Moderato finale.

At the end of the CD, what you have enjoyed is a small retrospective; even for its time, it was light-on in content and length (a bit over 33 minutes).   It’s unlikely that even as well-disposed a company as Move Records has the resources to re-issue some of Dreyfus’ sterling works, like the Symphony No. 1, From Within Looking Out, Jingles, The Seasons, the Noverre Wind Quintet, the Sextet for Didjeridu and Wind Instruments,   And what of the operas that have been produced successfully overseas – Rathenau and Die Marx Sisters, both of them over 20 years’ old and not a note of them heard here?   Furthermore, I haven’t mentioned (so far) other small gems like Larino, Safe Haven, Lawson’s Mates or Waterfront that have enriched that ever-stretching shelf that holds the Dreyfus catalogue.

This brief remembrance of things past is welcome yet it can’t help but bring to mind a larger canvas, one that deserves re-viewing and so shining a light on the major role that Dreyfus played during a strikingly productive era in this country’s serious music life, a time that many of us recall with affection and respect.

Pastoral power

cliveoconnell

THE PROSPECT AND BOWER OF BLISS

Tall Poppies TP 240

Jo Selleck

This disc holds two song cycles by Melbourne composer Johanna Selleck, both different in atmosphere and performance modes.   The shorter composition, in four parts, uses texts extracted from Aphra Behn’s A Voyage to the Isle of Love, set for soprano and piano. here interpreted by Merlyn Quaife (for whom the cycle was composed) and Caroline Almonte.   Graeme Ellis‘s Seven Tanka also uses Quaife as well as soprano Judith Dodsworth, with Arwen Johnston‘s percussion and Anne Norman‘s shakuhachi as instrumental support.

The Behn poems are part of The Prospect and Bower of Bliss segment of the large poem, Selleck setting the first four of its six stanzas.   The opening ‘Tis all eternal Spring around takes a measured approach to the happy verses, Almonte’s piano setting up a slow-paced pattern over which Quaife’s line roams across a wide compass, coming back to the opening line’s statement from time to time, a sort of thread linking the poet’s placid descriptions of burgeoning nature.    Fountains, wandering Banks, soft rills begins pictorially enough with a fragile figure high in the piano, the voice also used deftly to suggest sparkling textures, before the performers move to a lower compass when Behn turns her attention to forests and earth.   This setting is fragmentary, interrupted by a series of long pauses,  Selleck bringing her setting to an ecstatic climax before returning to that opening delicacy before arriving at a firm salutation to the poet’s Bower of Bliss.

For the third song, The verdant banks no other prints retain, begins in a plain-speaking B flat Major tonality, the forward movement from the keyboard suggestive of a rhythmically unsteady country dance.   The text introduces human beings onto a scene that has been focused so far on a lush natural world and both composer and poet bring the atmosphere down to earth with a set of pages that come close to suggesting a British folk-song setting, especially the reprise in C Major at the work’s centre.    Above everything else, you appreciate the easy lustiness of the lines and their straightforward musical setting: a mostly successful juxtaposition of sophistication and simplicity.

The final piece, A thousand gloomy Walks the Bower contains, returns to the same world as the second song, Almonte’s piano proposing a shadowy aura of soft dissonance while the vocal line meanders and, after reaching a climax, subsides into silence.   The movement is slow and close to meditative, suggesting the depletion that comes after the Bower’s purpose has been achieved.   This is the longest of the cycle’s parts, almost equal to its combined predecessors.   But it is a finely graduated sequence where the temptation to word-paint is almost entirely resisted and the evanescent conclusion is emotionally soothing and intellectually apposite.

Behn’s lyrics centre on love; to this over-reactive mind, erotic passion rather than courtly interchanges.  The bucolic scenes set a calmly sensual scene and, if the poet is not the most mellifluous of her generation’s creators, her intentions are pretty clear, particularly in her insistence on concluding each stanza with the word ‘ravishing’.   Quaife emphasizes this imagery of sexual passion in the suggestive portamenti on the sequence Gazing, sighing, pressing, dying in connection with a ravisht swain  –  the only solid human figure in the setting’s scenario.

The work offers a stimulating exercise in giving a modern voice to a 334-year-old poem, Selleck handling her text with unexpected ease, finding her own metre in the verses and not afraid to halt the process and reflect for a moment – on ‘gloomy Walks’, for example.   She keeps her interpreters harnessed to the work but the impression is of a gently spreading ambience, not an adherence to rhythmic and harmonic discipline.   Further, this set of pages speaks an individual language, one that suggests certain influences, but these hints rarely solidify into certainty; like the music itself, they remain possibilities.

Judith Dosworth emerges fairly soon after Quaife in the first of Ellis’s Seven Tanka where Selleck follows a pretty substantial tradition of Australian composers engaging with Asia –  if you allow that the tradition is less than 70 years old.   The two sopranos alternate and intertwine with Norman’s shakuhachi, these three lines  armed with a set of ‘effects’ like short notes that fall downwards, sustained tones that eventually take on vibrato (as those sadly under-prepared and untrained children do on television talent shows), remote pianissimi.   Other colours emerge from Johnston’s percussion, which seems to consist mainly of vibraphone and a touch of marimba.

That distant thunder offers a more dramatic scena, complete with a straight duet passage for the singers.   Johnston employs cymbals, bells and what sounds like a water gong and a light tam-tam as Selleck depicts the poet’s active imagery.   Next, Grey before the first dawn is a slow threnody in which the singers begin by keeping pace with each other, note for note, while the shakuhachi operates on several levels – as an orthodox Western flute, using noteless breaths, sliding off the note – and, like its predecessor, has an elongated postlude.   The force of Red wine of maple takes you by surprise.   It’s another of Selleck’s direct-speaking pieces, the sopranos striding through the lyric with loads of colour from Johnston’s keyed percussion and metal sheet; then, just when you think the lyric is ending jubilantly (although with an unhappy low note from Dodsworth at the end of the final line, The cracking of winter calls), the voices return softly, suggesting that the wine has had a less-than-happy effect.

Soft marimba wood-block sounds and quavering shakuhachi vocalisms set a sonorously suggestive scene before the voices enter on Long crane free feathered, in which the instrumental work is of striking interest for its complexity, in particular the hard-pressed Johnston who produces some remarkable juxtapositions and superimpositions.   The moon is gliding finds singers and Norman making great play with the first line’s last word; in fact, ‘gliding’ is the first word you hear, and the last.    While the outer parts of this setting have lots of slow eliding and imitation, the central line, Scattered with starlight, brings into play some brisk, consonantial vocal vaulting.   Selleck is also not afraid to have Quaife and Dodsworth articulate a straight descending sequence based on a harmonised C Major arpeggio; but the composer’s vocabulary is a catholic quantity and the tonal sits comfortably alongside advanced flourishes and an unclogged impressionist palette.

The final tanka, Five white stones unite, finds the vocalists working in canon on a striding march-suggestive melody; but the canon is not strictly observed.   As you can hear in other tracks on this CD, the composer bends patterns and expectations; not disturbingly so that you lose track of her sequences, but offering intriguing variants from the predictable.   The singers work through the lines twice and then the instrumentalists play a lengthy postlude, loaded with some brisk percussion commentary and Norman’s plangent sounds eventually ending on a muffled gasp.

In these Seven Tanka, Selleck has written a clear-voiced and idiomatic setting of poems that were written in traditional Japanese format.   The use of Norman’s instrument takes the listener into that country’s musical atmosphere, as do Johnston’s various percussion underpinnings  –  bass drum/timpani standing in for the dayko, not to mention the suggestive small chimes that get an occasional airing.    But you experience little sense of self-consciousness; the resources employed are not used simply for Oriental mimicry.   As with her Behn cycle, Selleck has a firm artistic personality, a writer hard to typecast as belonging to any particular compositional methodology.

This CD is not lavish with its contents – the total running time is 46′ 43″.   But it’s well worth attention for the excellence of the participants and the chance of hearing a pair of song cycles by a highly expressive voice in the cluttered ranks of Australian composers.   As well, its executants are all female and that’s something of a rarity in contemporary chamber music-making.

Take my breath away . . . sometimes

cliveoconnell

BACH VIOLIN CONCERTOS

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall

Sunday April 2 and Monday April 3, 2017

Johann-Sebastian-Bach

A congenial combination of Haydn and J. S. Bach provided the fodder for Richard Tognetti‘s ACO concerts over the weekend.   Playing to indubitable strengths, the ensemble presented three Bach concertos: that for solo violin in E Major BWV 1042, which some of us may know better as a keyboard work; the overwhelming D minor Concerto for Two Violins BWV 1043, fixed firmly in this backward-gazing mind by the inspired recording of David and Igor Oistrakh from the early 1960s; and the Concerto for Three Violins BWV 1064R, reconstructed from the Three Keyboards pseudo-original, but by whom I’m not sure – there’s an edition by Christopher Hogwood but the arranger could easily have been someone less familiar/eminent  .  .  .  like Wilfried Fischer (probably not).

Interwoven with the concertos came some smaller gems.  Tognetti began Sunday afternoon with the Preludio of the Violin Partita in E Major which he himself arranged, taking the semiquaver-stacked solo himself and leaving the ACO strings to pizzicato an accompaniment that struck me as having its basis in the organ-fronting Sinfonia score to the composer’s Cantata No. 29 where Bach indulged in yet another piece of recycling.   In the middle of the program’s second part, room was made for principal cellist Timo-Veikko Valve to perform the Sarabande from the E flat Suite straight, without any accompaniment.

The pair of Haydn symphonies were early: No. 22 in E flat, called The Philosopher for no apparent reason, and No. 27 in G Major.   Both were written within 15 years of Bach’s death but have little relationship with the Bach scores, except as possible commentaries on why the senior composer’s work fell into neglect as a less contrapuntally fixated generation took over the reins.

The Preludio lollipop worked as a throat-clearer, I suppose, its non-stop onward rush a test of left-hand dexterity in negotiating scales and arpeggios interspersed with some interest-raising leaps; Tognetti dispatched it with brisk authority.   More solid matter emerged in the solo concerto and on this wider canvas you could appreciate the violinist’s manipulation of what looks so four-square on the page.   Taking Eliot to heart, Tognetti does not cease from exploration but treats Bach’s bare bones with flexibility – not just inserting ornamentation but investing those long phrases with something close to rubato, just not as obviously following the wait/catch-up process that the term entails. In fact, it’s not just a case of being flexible, but more a pliable quality and, if the distinction seems non-existent, the only explanation I can offer is that you can hear that Bach’s solo line is being manipulated but it comes across as unforced, as part of the performer’s approach: not trying it on but treating the linear contour with respect for its organic elements.

In this work, Tognetti was more able to demonstrate this originality of approach, something that amounts to affection for the composer’s product informed by a fine array of dynamic shades and juxtapositions where the soloist could take familiar passages and re-animate them with unexpected differentiations of attack, in particular eschewing the sawing heftiness of many interpretations that emphasize the composer’s harmonic insistence rather than the chromatic subtleties that come between those solid tutti passages.   He might have been following a similar pattern in other works, but this was one where harpsichordist Joao Rival swapped his harpsichord continuo for a chamber organ in the Adagio movement, supporting the momentarily placid ACO strings – nine violins excluding Tognetti, three violas, three cellos and Maxime Bibeau‘s bass.

Later, principal violin Helena Rathbone joined her artistic director for the second solo part in that urgent double violin concerto and again the central players eschewed heft for sinuosity. as in the long intertwining exposed passage in the first Allegro from bar 58 to bar 84, or in the light application of two double-stop passages in the finale where both players pulled back and exposed the orchestral movement, rather than churning out their chords fortissimo.

It would be difficult to find a more affecting interpretation of this work’s central Largo where the pliability of tempo was a shared quantity between Tognetti and Rathbone but the players eschewed that  non-stop mimicry that you expect to hear in these pages.   By contrast, the last Allegro showed the ACO at its most exhilarating, with plenty of bite in attack and lots of brisk work near the nut in a reading that contrasted the linear clarity of its precedent with a fast-paced aggression.   An odder unexpected touch came with the first movement’s concluding tierce de Picardie where probably every other version I’ve heard is content to leave the violas with their F natural.

The last performed of these concertos, that for three violin soloists, brought Satu Vanska to the front as third-line specialist.   This sounded the most virtuosic of the program’s offerings with loads of exposure for each principal either in solo, duo or trio format. with some mini-cadenzas thrown in.   Both outer movements came across with loads of vim and gusto, all concerned obviously enthusiastic about the score’s emotional spaciousness, even in the plangent B minor Adagio.   Vanska eventually enjoyed the limelight in a rapid-fire moment of sustained exposure during the Allegro assai but the principal trio impressed chiefly by dovetailing and curvetting around each other with eloquent elegance.

The Haydn G Major Symphony in three brief movements brought some super-numeraries to the stage in braces of oboes and horns.   Not that this slight piece tests anybody except in clarity.   Unfortunately, the horn work generated an occasional blooper which, in this transparent score, makes more of an impact than usual.   Despite the repeats, this symphony is quickly accomplished and, if the speeds were on the rapid side, that’s fine as there isn’t much ground for meditation.   The E flat Major work sticks out from the ruck by asking for a pair of cor anglais rather than oboes; Michael Pisani from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and visitor Dmitry Malkin from the Jerusalem Symphony made a well-matched pair, offering antiphonal interplay with the Sydney Symphony’s Ben Jacks and Stephane Mooser  on horns in the initial ceremonial Adagio.  The ACO itself bounded through the work’s three following segments with as much finesse and dedication as they had shown throughout the program, but I have to confess that the second movement’s Presto repeats made for dutiful listening rather than the totally elevating experience that previous program components had brought about.

Lost in translation

cliveoconnell

THE PRINCESS AND THE PEA

Victorian Opera

Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne

March 25, 2017

Princess

                                                                                   Olivia Cranwell

After a few hours’ post-performance reflection, you’re left with the sense that there’s not much to Ernst Toch and Benno Elkan‘s treatment of Hans Christian Andersen’s fable.   It barely lasts for 40 minutes, the characterisations offer no dark shadings or suggestions of internal depth, Toch has composed very few long stretches of work for his vocal septet, and the musical vocabulary itself is a puzzling amalgam of tongues, when it’s not just satirising operatic conventions.

Director Libby Hill set the story in a TV studio, starting out well enough with all the usual feverish off-camera action and the semi-histrionics of technical crew and acting/singing cast.  Candice MacAllister‘s set comprises little more than a raised platform for the central action with a square frame surround to mark the screen’s limits; then, matters eventually spill off this acting area and towards the front-of-stage, although the differentiation between the story and its peripheral framework is broken pretty close to the start when studio gofer Olivia Cramwell is prevailed upon to play the Princess and two technicians (cameraman and director), Michael Lampard and Michael Petruccelli, also take on participatory roles as courtiers.

Conductor Fabian Russell controls an active pit with only a few obvious misfires to be heard from his pretty small instrumental force: string quartet with double bass, two flutes and one each of the other woodwind, no trombone but one each of the other brass, percussion and timpani.  The only recording I’ve come across of this work involves a pretty full-sounding orchestra (Berlin Chamber Symphony) but what you lose in depth (in the Playhouse?!), you gain in clarity from the singers.

Here, the production was blessed in a fine cast of extroverts.  Veteran Jerzy Kozlowski gave us a befuddled but booming King; as his consort, Kathryn Radcliffe worked particularly well as the tale’s fly-in-the-ointment figure who casts doubts on the Princess’s aristocratic background; as you’d expect in this era of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, James Egglestone pranced and preened through the Prince’s part, albeit with a fine ringing heldentenor attack; Lampard and Petruccelli backed the rest of the principals with exuberantly forward baritone/tenor duet force in the few stretches where they were required to sing – usually ensembles.

Dimity Shepherd began the piece as a TV Host, explaining the plot and what was happening with all the smiling artificiality of a Playschool adult; then, she entered the action as the courtier with a good idea to test the Princess, and here is where she took centre-stage for a long tract, explaining her scheme with enthusiastic drive and a no-holds-barred dynamic.  Cranwell also presented a forward-stepping heroine, vim-filled and energetic in both movement and vocal flexibility.

You could have no complaint about the company’s singing, then.   But what they sang was another matter.   For reasons that escape me, the opera was given in German; hence the necessary plot guidance from Shepherd-as-Host and some sporadic signpost explanations projected on the front walls.   All this would have been fine, except that pretty well every adult there had a child (or children) in tow.   Some adults believe in the child’s innate ability to cope with the unfamiliar; I don’t and this occasion bore out my misgivings.

For the young audience members, the only times the show came to life were when the characters were arranging the multiple mattresses for the Princess’s bed – a whack in the face here, a crotch-splitting intrusion there – and when the Princess herself re-arranged the bed so that she could get a decent night’s sleep, turning the mattresses into a pratfall-generating slippery slide, albeit one made of fabric.   At these points, the laughs came  out spontaneously.

But the little boy behind me typified the prevailing pre-adolescent puzzlement.   ‘What’s she saying?’; ‘Why did he do that?’ ; ‘Where are they going?’ – a ceaseless interrogative litany which eventually descended into kicking (his own seat, fortunately) and pleas for sustenance.   Of the mother, who betrayed her ignorance every time she opened her mouth (and she adjusted her volume to match her child’s with no attempt to shut the brat up), it boots me not to speak.   Not unexpectedly, my perfectly-behaved grand-daughter found this theatre convention-disruptive counterpoint more intriguing than what was in front of her.  I understand that an English version of Elkan’s libretto exists; why it wasn’t used remains one of the mysteries.

In terms of production values, this piece was rather bare-boned.   The principals had fairy tale-suggestive costuming; the TV crew wore modern dress/studio uniforms.   But the set was as plain as for a Beckett monodrama.  Consequently, the work depended on its singers and, when you can’t understand them, it’s a big ask of pre-ten-year-olds to stay focused.   A lot more slapstick might have helped; the score is perky and jerky enough in its bemusing fusion of Weill, Prokofiev and Stravinsky to support a lot more running around.

The Princess and the Pea was presented three times on the one day only in the Arts Centre and would seem to have been made for touring.   I don’t know what the young of Yackandandah or Yarrawonga would make of this entertainment; for quite a few, it would be a long 40 minutes.