Diary June 2025

cliveoconnell

SAMSON ET DALILA

Melbourne Opera

Palais Theatre., St’ Kilda

Sunday June 1 at 2:30 pm

it’s been quite a while since Saint-Saens’ enduring opera of 1877 has been staged here. The one and only time I can recall is from November 1983 when the Victorian State Opera forces, conducted by Richard Divall, presented a version in Hamer Hall, the company’s chairman, Sir Rupert Hamer, having to make a small statement defending the microcosmic amount of nudity that occurred during the Bacchanale. Mind you, this was during the oddly strait-laced premiership of John Cain Jr. who was no stranger to the art form. A lot was made of some naked bodies that were intended to spice up Act 3, Scene 2 and the more salacious among us were looking forward to a bit of real Philistine brouhaha, especially as you had to sit through a fair amount of tedium before the fun started and the roof caved in. Let’s hope that Melbourne Opera has better luck with its orgy. Details are slim: mezzo Deborah Humble is taking on the temptress role; tenor Rosario La Spina will wind up shorn but triumphant as the strongman judge, The director is Suzanne Chaundy, conductor Raymond Lawrence. It seems as though the company is not using the Palais lounge or balcony while ticket prices range between $69 and $199, never forgetting the $7 ‘handling fee’ which gives an expensive venture a little extra bite – and a fiscal necessity for reasons that nobody can explain to me without blushing.

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

SCHEHERAZADE

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Monday June 2 at 6:30 pm

Have you ever heard a satisfactory live performance of this marvel of orchestration? I can’t say that I have, but my experiences have been limited to three state orchestras in this country. I mean, you can be wrapped in a pleasant cocoon of sound as Rimsky-Korsakov’s suite from 1888 moves from its snarling opening bars to the soaring, placid triumph of its conclusion, but an average reading loses your interest in the middle movements to do with the Kalendar Prince, and then the Young Prince and Young Princess which test the phrasing inventiveness of several exposed individual players. Conducting the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in this gem is Elim Chan, the young Hong-Kong-born musician who has been wooed with various degrees of success by British and European organizations. Scheherazade is the only work on this program which belongs to both the Quick Fix at Half Six and the Meet the Music: Years 9-12 series which have different modes of preparation for their two distinct types of audience member. Mind you, it pays to be a secondary school student: their tickets are only $9 each. If you’re after the quick fix, your standard ticket costs between $62 and $99 (a hell of a lot for one work); concessionaires can expect to pay $5 less (big deal), and your child under 18 will pay $20. Add the compulsory $7 transaction fee, of course; administering your credit card deployment is so time-consuming.

STEPHEN HOUGH

Melbourne Recital Centre

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, MRC

Monday June 2 at 7:30 pm

The formidable British pianist is a guest of the Melbourne Recital Centre and is always good value, not leat for the spread of his programming. This time round, Stephen Hough opens with a group of three pieces by Cecile Chaminade: Automne from the Op. 35 Six Etudes de concert of 1886, Autrefois from the Op. 87 collection of Six pieces humoristiques written in 1897, and the 1892 Les Sylvains. which is Chaminade’s Op. 60. Well, it’s his program but the little I’ve encountered from the French writer’s catalogue strikes me as fin-de-siecle Light. This triptych is followed by Liszt’s B minor Piano Sonata which will probably overshadow anything that precedes it, anyway. Hough then treats us to his own Sonatina Nostalgica, a 2019 work comprising three movements, all with a combined timing of less than five minutes. This mimics the positioning of the Chaminade in preceding another formidable score: Chopin’s final Sonata No. 3, composed in 1844 and enjoying less exposure in the modern recital hall than its predecessor, the Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor. You’d think this presents as a rather eccentric array of offerings; you’d be right. But Hough has the ability to maintain your interest, even in his easy-going moments. Standard tickets cost between $67 and $115, with some half-decent concessions for students and the elderly. There’s also the inevitable $7 levy for taking your money, an unreasonable tax which has apparently infected every musical enterprise across the city.

FIRST VOICES SHOWCASE

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Iwaki Auditorium, Southbank

Wednesday June 4 at 6:30 pm

Here is one of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra‘s special excursions – the First Voices First Nation Composer program under a Music and Ideas banner. I don’t know how the organization is approaching this concept of giving a voice to Aboriginal writers but this strikes me as tentative. For one thing, it’s not hard to fill the Iwaki space. For another, the event is scheduled to last only an hour. For a final touch, all tickets are $15 . . . and you can add on almost half that again for the gouging transaction fee which pushes your price up to $22. Anyway, what do you get for your money? Three works, as it turns out. First comes James Howard‘s Nyirrimarr Ngamatyata/To Lose Yourself at Sea; followed by Leon Rodgers‘ Seven Sisters; the set concluding in Fragments by Nathaniel Andrew. Howard is a well-established academic with a solid background in tracing cultural heritage. The piece by Rodgers was programmed in last year’s First Voices concert, according to a still-extant website. Andrew presents as the most versatile musician with a strong base in performance both here and overseas. I know nothing of the work of any of them but, if in the audience, would be waiting with anticipation for any sign of innovation or irregularity elements that are absent all too often in the output of contemporary writers.

NORTHERN LIGHTS

Musica Viva Australia

Melbourne Recital Centre, Southbank

Tuesday June 10 at 7 pm

An inevitable title, given the Swedish-Norwegian background of this recital’s violinist, Johan Dalene. This young celebrity appearing for Musica Viva will be partnered by Hobart-based Jennifer Marten-Smith, latest in a long line of pianists who have partnered Dalene across an active schedule of performances. Mind you, some of the material he’s presenting tonight has been part of his duo programs for some time, like Rautavaara’s Notturno of 1993, and Ravel’s spiky Tzigane from 1924. Dalene also specializes in Grieg’s Violin Sonata No. 2, written in a nationalistic blaze during 1865. And he has been known to play Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 8 in G, last of the Op. 30 set of three written in 1902. Three other works that the artists present tonight seem to be new. The most unarguable in this respect us Tilted Scales by (fairly) young Australian Jack Frerer, commissioned for this national tour. Another is Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir d’un lieu cher of 1878 in which we will be hearing all three parts, not just the popular Meditation. And Lili Boulanger’s D;un matin de printemps enjoys a hearing, written near the composer’s death in 1918. Prices range between $20 and $153; don’t say you don’t have choices. And there’s no avoiding the $7 fee which will be really welcome for those who qualify for the cheapest tickets.

A REFLECTION IN TIME

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday June 12 at 7:30 pm

Back in the well-furrowed trench of orchestral concerts as they were held in this country for years, this presentation follows a venerable pattern, its main components a concerto and a symphony. The difference this time around is that the night’s three components all show their composers at highpoints in their public careers. Conductor Benjamin Northey opens the event with Barber’s Adagio for Strings, originally the slow movement from the 26-year-old composer’s String Quartet Op. 11 from 1936. Christian Li, the Australian-born 17-year-old violinist, is soloist in Korngold’s concerto of 1945; this has become a standard these days, suffering no little neglect for several years after the composer’s death. Finally, Northey takes the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra through Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, written in 1937 allegedly as a response to Stalin-inspired criticism of the composer’s modernist tendencies. These days, the work is seen to have undercurrents of protest against the Soviet state and its oppression of artists. You’d be a noggin-head to take all that final movement bombast at face value but plenty of people do. Whatever the reaction you have, Shostakovich was seen as toeing the Party line, especially by the time-serving music critics in the Russia of that time. It’s all a fascinating reflection of the decade across which these works were written. Standard tickets tonight fall between $75 and $139, concession card holders enjoying a $5 discount, while children under 18 can get in for $20. And there’s the eternal $7 booking/transaction fee/extortion to add on to your cost.

This program will be repeated on Friday June 13 at 7:30 pm in Relaxed Performance mode with special consideration for audience members with disabilities (special prices apply for tickets on this occasion of $35 standard and $30 concession), and on Saturday June 14 at 7:30 pm under regular operating conditions.

ANAM AT THE CONVENT: ELISION ENSEMBLE

Australian National Academy of Music

Rosina Auditorium, Abbotsford Convent

Friday June 20 at 7 pm

The country’s premier contemporary chamber ensemble is playing in the Australian National Academy of Music precincts and also features among its ranks some ANAM alumni. All the same, I think that, from the publicity material, regular Elision Ensemble players will be reinforced by current ANAM musicians. In any case, tonight’s offerings hold memories for me, including the ensemble’s long-time advocacy for the works of Franco Donatoni, whose 1977 Spiri for ten instruments is being played here. Also, the voice of Liza Lim, an Elision essential, will be heard in her Veil for seven players of 1999. Then there’s a work by Xenakis to start the second half – his Eonta of 1964, written for a most mixed sextet of piano, two trumpets and three trombones.. We have an Australian premiere in German composer Isabel Mundry‘s Le Voyage, written in 1996 for four woodwind, three brass, two percussion and a string septet which makes it the most substantial work we’ll hear in terms of participant numbers. Lastly, Russian-born German-based writer Dariya Maminova is represented by her Melchior from 2021; scored for two synthesizers and samples, this promises to exhibit the composer’s attempts to fuse contemporary with rock – I know: an impossible task but the texts come from Edward Thomas and Pasternak, and the piece lasts for ten minutes. Pricing is one of those 1960s box office deals where you can offer $60 if you have the cash, $40 if you fit into the standard patron category, and $20 if you’re feeling the cost of living weighs heavily. And, to show that the organization is really a freedom-loving, libertarian revenant from the hippie era, your booking fee is only $5. As the old song has it, who could ask for anything more?

CLASSIC 100 IN CONCERT

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Friday June 20 at 7:30 pm

Not sure about these popularity polls for serious music because they usually display the responders’ lack of musical experience as the outcomes, especially near the top, are numbingly conservative. This year, the ABC Classic FM hosts and announcers have focused on the piano and are asking which work written for this instrument as a solo, as part of a chamber ensemble, or having the instrument in front of an orchestra happens to tickle your fancy. At moments, I feel like doing a Tom Gleeson and fixing the vote by having numerous people propose Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 2, or Webern’s posthumous piano scrap, or Paisiello’s Concerto in D. You have until 1 pm on Monday June 2 to make your voice heard. Needless to say, patrons won’t be hearing the complete election result; rather, selections will be presented by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under conductor Benjamin Northey (who is also billed as having ‘creative direction’) , with Andrea Lam as the focal pianist who presents the concertos and solos and chamber music extracts: the sole fount of pianistic wisdom – all without Harry Connick Jr. Your normal everyday customer can pay between $59 and $109 for a seat; the concession reduction remains a risible $5 and the booking fee of $7 still obtains, despite the fact that you have no idea what you’re going to hear – although I’m guessing that surprises will be almost non-existent.

This program will be repeated on Saturday June 21 at 2 pm.

ACO UNLEASHED

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Sunday June 22 at 2:30 pm

A continuation of the Australian Chamber Orchestra‘s 50th birthday celebrations, this event serves to showcase some individual talents from the ensemble’s ranks. The program has been curated by artistic director Richard Tognetti, but he is shining the opening spotlight on violins Helena Rathbone, Satu Vanska and Anna da Silva Chen (the ACO’s latest recruit) through Bach’s Triple Concerto BWV 1064R, which actually enjoyed reconstruction as a three-harpsichord concerto during the mid-Leipzig years. Then Vanska takes the solo line in Ravel’s Tzigane of 1934, here arranged with a strings and percussion support). After this, we can relish Tognetti’s own arrangement of the Beethoven String Quartet No. 11, the Serioso. of 1810 which will be followed by Schubert’s 1820 Quartettsatz; that too will probably involve the ensemble rather than a select four – more’s the pity. Finally, we hear a true rarity in Jaakko Kuusisto’s Cello Concerto, written in 2019. It was the composer’s last completed orchestral work before his 2022 death from brain cancer and will have principal Timo-Veikko Valve taking the solo line; as in the Ravel arrangement, this piece’s orchestra comprises percussion and strings. Standard tickets range from $49 to $141 in the stalls, the cheapest rising to $71 in the circle. Top price for concession card holders is $113 while Under 35s can get in for a flat $35 for those seats still available.. But there’s a lavish $8.50 ‘handling fee to queer your economical pitch; at the moment, this sum tops the list in add-on costs for following live performances of serious music.

This program will be repeated on Monday June 23 at 7:30 pm.

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Friday June 27 at 11 am

A short program in the MSO Mornings series, chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Jaime Martin, has charge of Mussorgsky’s formidable piano suite in its Ravel orchestration. For years, this has been held up as an ideal example of how to transcribe from one medium to another and the process is packed with memorable touches, like The Old Castle‘s saxophone solo, an exposed tuba powering through the first 20 bars of Bydlo, the strings’ bite throughout Baba Yaga, and the overwhelming cascades of sonority in the last pages of The Great Gate of Kiev. Fleshing out this experience, if not by much, comes Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso; originally a piano piece from the Miroirs collection of 1905 but orchestrated by the composer in 1918. All of which is very interesting if you know the piano originals of both works, although the orchestral tapestries are fascinating in themselves. Your everyday punter pays between $62 and $99, concession holders $5 less, children under 18 pay $20 – and you add on the $7 ‘transaction fee’ to flesh out that warm feeling that always accompanies meaningless, mindless charity.

Spotlight on a curiosity

cliveoconnell

THEREMIN & BEYOND

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Sunday May 18, 2025

Carolina Eyck

This was an afternoon full of listening material, some of it worthwhile, most of it entertaining. But it did come down to a case of special pleading for guest Carolina Eyck‘s specialization: the theremin. The Australian Chamber Orchestra‘s artistic director, Richard Tognetti, has taken on board some unexpected colleagues, like oud master Joseph Tawadros and accordion guru James Crabb. But Eyck’s is a pretty obscure sound-maker, even if it pops up in unexpected places – or sounds as if it does, as in the original Star Trek title music where the actual sound you hear on top is a soprano.

I’ve had to learn to distinguish it from the ondes Martenot that Messiaen uses to devastating effect in his Turangalila-symphonie; still, to my increasingly useless ears, both instruments sound remarkably similar. Does the thremin have a masterpiece like that to boast of in its catalogue of works? It seems not, but Eyck made something of a case for its use as a solo by performing a welter of scraps from the serious to the popular, with a few touches of humour along the way; never a bad thing in this context.

Throughout the program, the ACO presented some chamber works without Eyck, beginning with an extract from Brett Dean‘s Short Stories of 2005. This was the fourth of the set, Komarov’s Last Words, referring to the Soviet cosmonaut who died re-entering Earth’s atmosphere in 1867 – the first casualty of the space race. It’s a fast if not furious piece which somehow manages to suggest nervousness, fear and strong resignation all at once. Somehow, this linked in with Glinka’s The Lark, part of the composer’s A Farewell to St. Petersburg song-cycle of 1840 in which Eyck came to the fore playing the melody line, with pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska providing some punctuation from the florid Balakirev transcription.

So far, so fair. Eyck produced a gentle version of the sung line, which served to underline the instrument’s inbuilt limitation of producing one note at a time. Then, Tognetti started his strings on the Air from Bach’s D Major Orchestral Suite (c. 1730), the one on the G string. After the opening strophe, Eyck joined in on the repeat and stayed a constant, playing the top violin line with no little grace and a few traces of the theremin’s glissando trademark effect..

For the last part of Offenbach’s Overture to his highly successful opera of 1858, Orpheus in the Underworld – the Can-can – Tognetti and his strings (with the aid of percussionist Brian Nixon) gave a fair simulation of the dance’s energy, even if we missed the brass timbre when the piece’s broadest theme breaks out at the key change to G Major. As well, at about this stage, you came to appreciate just how few of the ACO force were on board: five violins, pairs of violas and cellos, and one bass.. Yes, you can’t doubt the ability of any ACO member but both here and later on you felt the lack of weight in the ensemble’s output.

Anyway, this Galop infernal led into its parody by Saint-Saens in his 1886 Carnival of the Animals; the Tortoises, to be precise, where both Cislowska and Eyck figured. We also heard The Elephant, Aquarium and The Swan, all of which found the theremin taking pride of place or sharing the honours with the original front-runner (e.g. Maxime Bibeau’s bass dealing with the pachyderm). Still, my attention was taken more by Cislowska’s handling of the piano part across these extracts which proved as atmospheric and broad-beamed as the original’s two piano contribution.

It’s also worth noting that all four of these pieces from the suite are slow-moving and well-suited to the theremin’s ability to outline a top solo part with elegance. Much the same came just before interval with Miklos Rosza’s Spellbound Concerto, sourced from the 1945 Hitchcock film’s score which did use a theremin. So we came to a non-arranged work at last, even if the composer’s lush Hollywood score was presented here as a pallid reflection of its original full-bodied amplitude, and at half the original concerto’s length with an over-emphasis on Eyck’s instrument at the expense of Cislowska, the work’s real soloist.

Preceding this reminiscence-laden offering, the ACO played Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet of 1924. These dances come from the pen of a young man intrigued by the wrong-note high-jinks of Les Six; the sore is dedicated to Milhaud. And the whole is clever and spiky as Schulhoff moves from waltz to tarantella with a deft mixture of vigour and not-too-serious eroticism. When the Signum Saxophone Quartet played the final three of these pieces here last week, I noted that you missed the bite of the original’s strings; now, I’m not so sure as the ACO players moved through this score with a fluency that flattened out its acerbities.

Straight after the break, we moved into our times with a vengeance. beginning in 1993 with Jorg Widmann‘s 180 beats per minute for string sextet where the young composer played a few amiable games with rhythmic displacement in an unpretentious jeu d’esprit. Much the same could be said of Holly Harrison‘s Hovercraft, commissioned for this tour and giving Eyck space to show off those special effects, like rapid glissando loops and burps, that make up part of her instrument’s reputation for special effects on film-tracks. This proved to be a clever example of scene-setting, the title mechanism’s swoops and starts (not to mention its periods of stasis) mirrored in this new score.

Moving back in time a shade, the ACO gave a hearing to Yasushi Akutagawa’s Triptyque for string orchestra, written in 1953 before the composer struck up his friendships with several Soviet writers, including Shostakovich and Kabalevsky. At this stage of his career, his compositions were competent, slightly British in sound as though he were a member of a colonial school like Australia or New Zealand. As far as I could tell, traces of his own country’s background were few and far between. But this comes from somebody who knows nothing of this composer’s later work which could have taken a huge turn after his time in Russia.

From here on, proceedings took an idiosyncratic turn in that we were confronted by Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee from The Tale of Tsar Saltan opera, premiered in 1900. Naturally, Eyck took part in this, though not taking on as much of the buzzing as expected. But it was a remarkable demonstration of her deftness, particularly her right hand which determines pitch in the distance between her hand (or her body) and the instrument’s circuitry.

Then it was one thing after another. We all enjoyed Alexander Courage’s theme music for Star Trek, its raciness enhanced by Dixon’s backing, and memories of the three-handed (Eastwood, Van Cleef, Wallach) stand-off at the climax to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly 1966 film of Sergio Leone reared up in response to Morricone’s tense underpinning for this The Ecstasy of Gold scene. Somewhere along the way came Eyck’s own composition Oakunar Lynntuja (Strange Birds), the first of her Fantasias for Theremin and String Quartet from 2016; this left not a rack behind in this memory – too little, too late.

We endured a pretty lengthy handling of the 1966 Brian Wilson/Mike Love collaboration, Good Vibrations, here enriched by a true theremin rather than the electro-cousin/bastard used in the original recording. Again, Eyck’s timbre dominated this version, somehow reinforcing its association with the counter-culture at work in the naïve United States of those distant years.

As you can see, this was an exhausting collation, yet the mainly elderly audience enjoyed it, if an air of relief permeated Hamer Hall when familiar melodies emerged from the mix. Added to which, Eyck has a quiet personal charm that made her explanations and illustrations useful and entertaining. The instrument is a curious one and this musician’s handling of it quite exceptional. Yet you can understand why it wasn’t taken up by the electronic music laboratories and workshops that sprang up – for a while – when Stockhausen & Co. emerged to brighten up our lives with their mid-20th century experiments.

Pleasure regained

cliveoconnell

THIS MIRROR HAS THREE FACES

Selby & Friends

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday May 13, 2025

Kristian Winther, Kathryn Selby, Clancy Newman

One of the grievous losses about moving to the Gold Coast was the loss of Selby & Friends recitals; you can hear the various combinations in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, even Bowral, but crossing the Tweed has never been part of the organization’s reach. And a great consolation in leaving behind the Not-Too-Deep North’s sybaritic delights is a reacquaintance with Kathryn Selby‘s mobile set of musicians and the assurance that the high quality of these events has not diminished in the interim.

Selby is the fulcrum pianist for this annual sequence of five programs that usually follow the piano trio format and, for this Tour No. 2 in 2025, her associates were violinist Kristian Winther and a long-time favourite of these events in cellist Clancy Newman. The latter I remember seeing several times before leaving Melbourne and being favourably impressed by his enthusiasm and reliability. Winther was a constant presence up to his departure from the Australian String Quartet in 2014 under unsettling circumstances. Since then, his career has remained a series of sporadic appearances in my experience, but clearly the years have been kind to him as he’s playing with the same vivid personality and skill as he showed ten-plus years ago.

Selby encourages her colleagues to share in the introductory talks that have become part-and-parcel of chamber music recitals over the years. Sometimes these can be excruciating because of personal awkwardness or lack of preparation. Newman’s had a layer of personal interest as he introduced Lera Auerbach‘s Piano Trio No. 2 – Triptych: This Mirror Has Three Faces (which may be the case, even if the work holds five movements). This work was written in 2011 and was commissioned by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and the Weiss/Kaplan/Newman Piano Trio; the cellist has been asking Selby to program some Auerbach and here she has obviously succumbed.

This score from the Russian/American writer makes an arresting opening with some powerful piano output, and its progress can be traced from moderato to allegro even if the harmonic language remains unsettlingly familiar and confrontational in turn. The composer tends to play through from one panel into another as the several facets (of one person? of three?) that distinguish the construct’s intellectual process are mapped; fortunately the central waltz gave us a fulcrum to work with as the various personality idiosyncrasies of this venture piled up on either side.

As far as I could judge, the final adagio sounded the most substantial of the movements: a spacious postlude that brought to a simpler ground all the compositional complexities that preceded it. But Auerbach’s score is intriguing, even in the abstract; we don’t know what to look for in her mirror, whether the five panels (two exterior, three interior – it’s a triptych, after all) hold a common thread, if the images presented are personal or generic. At the end, it retains its stolid mysteries and, for this listener, it was worth hearing. Which you find hard to say after many another (near-) contemporary composition.

The players then moved to surer ground for their elderly audience through Schumann and Smetana. With the Czech master, you have no choice: he wrote only one, the draining G minor commemoration of his eldest daughter Bedriska’s death. As for Schumann,, you have a choice of three, with No 1 in D minor almost always the one that ensembles pick to display their talents. It’s been a long while in my experience since No. 3 in G minor has been played live, so full marks to Selby and her partners for giving it an overdue airing.

For all its unfamiliarity, Schumann’s opening Bewegt makes a compelling argument with a notably compressed set of materiel sources spiced up by unexpected touches as in a couple of Brahms-like hemiolas before the exposition ends, and a marked lightening of the atmosphere towards the end of the development where the atmosphere thins out to fragments and pizzicato. These players, however, appeared engrossed in the movement’s assertiveness and closely-knit temper, Selby having the most to contribute; at a few stages, she would have benefited from a brief fermata to regroup, but both strings powered forward.

Schumann’s piano part has less to offe4r at the start of the following langsam pages, which begin as a benevolent string duet, finely executed by both these executants with a sense of real reciprocity in their linear entwining. Selby entered the argument with something more than simple chords four bars before the Etwas bewgter direction when the keyboard serves as both protagonist and support. Despite an infusion of welcome placidity at either end of this section, the action in these central pages impressed more because of the amplitude on show, the performers fully invested in the abrupt shift to dynamic motion.

You could have asked for more more contrast in the scherzo, especially at the arrival of each trio in C Major and A flat Major, but they seemed of a piece with the rather hefty approach to the main repeated segment which took the Rasch direction as involving punch alongside the requisite rapidity. Both this movement and its predecessor impress as brief intermezzi, compared to the trio’s discursive bookends, but their pairing is yet more evidence of Schumann’s emotional versatility. When it comes to the Kraftig finale, we appear to be in a much more monochromatic landscape where the ebullient main theme is worked into the ground with restatement after reiteration, albeit consistently optimistic. You find few surprises in these pages beyond the sudden appearance of a rapid violin A Major scale 12 bars from the end, and the dominance of the piano contribution which acts as a doubling agent for much of the movement’s progress and in which role Selby excels.

After interval, we heard the Smetana trio which is well-trodden territory for Selby throughout her career across several distinguished trio combinations. Still, there are plenty of potholes along this score’s path; I may be partial but it seems to me that most of them lie in wait for the pianist, thanks to some pages of Liszt-style virtuosity. As well, you encounter swift changes in temperament that test the adaptability of all performers.

Winther took us all on board with the famous G string solo that sets the trio on its tempestuous path. Even more than with the Schumann interpretation, this treatment impressed for its determination in the clinches and the alternating lissomness of line in passages like the Alternativo 1 which in one page moves from insouciance to high-strung elation. Mind you, the tension was high from the start with Selby eventually exploding in bar 17 where the keyboard breaks free from its accompanying function.

Some moments linger in the memory, like Newman’s eloquent statement of the noble second subject in this first movement at bar 43, followed by Selby’s transformation of the first motif across bars 53 to 55 where optimism turns down its mouth in one of those wrenching changes of ;prospect at which Smetana showed such mastery, specifically in this score. And Winther brought his own voice to the mix with that soaring nine-bar solo beginning at bar 55 when a rhapsodic ascent sinks slowly back to earth. Beside all the heroic clamour of protest and tragedy, passages like these come back to life for days after their articulation if the performance has been vivid enough.

A little later, I was taken aback, as usual, by the sheer carrying power of Selby and Newman doubling a formidable triplet-heavy bass line from bar 80 to bar 89 underneath the violin and right-hand piano’s peroration treatment of this same theme. These players sustained the fire throughout the major part of the movement’s development with its fierce, close canons and harsh insistence before the opening returned and the composer worked his material towards that manic G-dominated acceleration to the end.

Just as striking were both the Alternativo interludes during the work’s central Allegro; first, the simple charm of the F Major, then the switch to grinding power at the E flat Major one’s climax in bar 187 where all three players reinforce each other in a slow march fragment oscillating between C Major and F minor, the strings in fierce competition with the keyboard chords through powerful triple and quadruple stop slashes. – a sudden burst of pageantry in this movement’s pervading aura of secrecy and scuttling.

With a few exceptions, the finale belongs to the pianist who sets the running for a solid initial stretch (bars 1 to 118), and Selby shines in these rapid-fire conditions, making the sudden emergence of Newman with a firm lyric all the more striking. What followed was one of the delights of this afternoon in the duet between cellist and violinist at the score’s Piu mosso marking: a fine instance of intermeshing lines blending in excellent partnership. A repeat of the opening ferment, a revisit of the string duet and we arrived at the movement’s gloomy core: a slow march using a fragmented version of the strings’ theme, followed by another frantic presto rush to an emphatic G Major ending which to me offers no consolation, just a gasp of release.

In sum, an event that reassured us of the consistently high standard that Selby and her confederates can achieve, especially when each of them is versed in both the practices and repertoire of chamber music. Even so, this combination proved singularly effective in its work. Yes, there were surface flaws, mainly of ensemble rather than individual miscarriages. But at the end you were swept up in the participants’ enthusiasm and devotion towards this presentation of contemporary, slightly obscure and all-too-well-known music.

Experts revisit us

cliveoconnell

HOLLYWOOD SONGBOOK

Musica Viva Australia

Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday May 6, 2025

Signum Saxophone Quartet (L to R David Brand, Jacopo Taddei, Blaz Kemperle, Alan Luzar), Ali McGregor

First off, you would find it hard to fault the musicianship of the Signum Saxophone Quartet. When these players are handling music that fits their talents and performing environment, they demonstrate exceptional musicianship; on this night, for example, when they treated us to three excerpts from Copland’s Rodeo ballet from 1942 arranged by Linda Waid, which brought us the brightest and most effective numbers on their program.

Three of the group’s members survive from their last tour in November 2022: Blaz Kemperle (soprano), Jacopo Taddei (alto), and Alan Luzar (tenor). Guerino Bellarosa from that tour has been replaced in the baritone chair by David Brand, who was in fact a former Signum member. So the musicians have experience with one another, and it shows throughout their ensemble stints which covered a wealth of 20th century material.

The saxophone ensemble opened with Stravinsky’s Circus Polka for a Young Elephant, written in 1942 for a troupe of gifted pachyderms. Here, the piece served as an establishment of sound level and timbre, the reading full-frontal with plenty of definition in the quick-march segments, if you missed the subtleties of the composer’s orchestrated version which shows as more hefty than the strident approach of the Signum group. A deft bagatelle, the piece travelled past evenly enough, but you were impressed once again by how powerfully dynamic this quartet combination can be.

More of the same arrived a little later with Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet, from which collection we heard the final three: Alla Cseca, Alla Tango milonga, and Alla Tarantella. You missed the acerbity of the original’s strings and the slightly abrasive ‘wrong-note’ language that the composer employed at this optimistic time (1923), compared to what was waiting in the historical wings. When you have four reeds in play, the harmonic shifts are more in-your-face and probably succeeded best in the tango where the ensemble devoted themselves to spun-out lines rather than short sharp ejaculations and taking the pages on at very rapid speed.

To end the program’s first half, the Signum players gave us two well-known excerpts from Prokofiev’s 1935 Romeo and Juliet: Juliet as a Young Girl, and Dance of the Knights. Taking on this kind of work presents several problems, the main one being the ensemble’s monolithic timbre replacing one of the composer’s more brilliantly scored works. For the ponderous Knights’ Dance, the approach showed an awareness of the opening and closing strophes’ ponderousness, although Brand’s bass line came over as noticeably heavy; yet it is weighty in the original, if owning somehow less of an oompah deliberateness. On the other hand, you could admire Kemperle’s top line right from the start of the skittering presentation of Juliet: excellently clear and precise in articulating a difficult sequence.

We heard an authentic suite in Bernstein’s Three Dance Episodes from On the Town, extracted from the musical by the composer a year after the 1944 premiere for concert performance. By this stage, I suppose, most of us were hardened to the prevailing saxophone climate and, in any case, we were hearing a voice that spoke the instruments’ language, particularly in the raucous concluding Times Square: 1944 with its continued references to New York, New York – the only song from the musical that remains in common parlance. It might be an early work, but On the Town established the Bernstein voice – well, the most recognizable one – with its spiky rhythmic jumps and a sugar-and-salt melancholy that owes more than a little to Gershwin, viz. the solid lyric at the heart of Lonely Town: Pas de deux which could be part of the appropriate melancholy stage at the middle of An American in Paris.

Once again, the group gave us a vital, exhilarating account of the last section, packed with energy and an impressive precision on Bernstein’s stops and starts, with an attractive ebullience in their output that found the performers sharing the space like jazz artists, the middle voices of Taddei and Luzar taking the limelight with full-bodied ease, although that is probably due to the skill of arranger Izidor Leitinger who also arranged the Stravinsky and most of the songs.

As I said above, the Signum reading of Buckaroo Holiday, Corral Nocturne and Hoedown from Copland’s brilliant portrait of an America that never was (see also Appalachian Spring) made a striking impact because the simple directness and charm of the composition found a sympathy in these performers that carried us through on their enthusiasm, even during the alarums and excursions of the final piece – which is the most good-natured expression of national colour you will find of the nation, and how many of us would like to believe in it, too.

But you could take pleasure in all three segments; the first for its balance of lines and coherence, the second for its finely-spun lines of melody. As with their Bernstein, the ensemble impressed for their crisp coherence, so much easier to achieve in small numbers as compared to the original orchestral sprawl. And I don’t think any large body, no matter how well-coordinated, could have taken the Hoedown at the pace of these saxophonists, nor could they have achieved the same energetic bite in attack.

far as the vocal part of the night was concerned, I felt sympathetic but ambivalent. Ali McGregor is best known to me for her work in opera (The Magic Flute, Fidelio, Die Fledermaus) where she presented as a bright and polished soprano, informed by an infectious onstage sparkle. Most of this night’s work proved to be brooding, melancholy, if not downright sad, starting with the traditional ballad I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger which McGregor turned into a sort of blues over a drone-like backing from the Signum players. This made for a sombre start, but no matter: an attractive melody if not part of what normally passes for membership in a Hollywood songbook.

A brace of songs by Friedrich Hollaender made for a welcome introduction to the real thing. First came Illusions from Billy Wilder’s 1948 film A Foreign Affair which served to show (if you hadn’t picked up on it already) how amplified the singer’s voice had to be in order to cope with Leitinger’s arrangement. More accessible to most of us was Falling in Love Again which distinguished Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel of 1930, helping to promote Marlene Dietrich. McGregor’s version was notable for a security of pitch and articulation which betrays a voice that is properly trained; enjoyable to encounter this classic sung with musicianship allied to mild theatrics.

Kurt Weill was represented by that ode to the bright side, One Life to Live from Lady in the Dark of 1941 and, from two years later, the clever I’m a Stranger Here Myself that graced One Touch of Venus with Ogden Nash’s words and a brilliantly meandering vocal line that found a responsive interpreter despite the often clamorous backing.

On the evening’s second half, McGregor gave a typical chanteuse (chantoosie?) version of Irving Berlin’s Let’s Face the Music and Dance from the Follow the Fleet film of 1936 where Fred Astaire sang it and then danced it into the ground with Ginger Rogers: a memorable Hollywood song which here was given with more power and vim than Astaire could have managed, and rose to a fine peroration at its high-note climax.

We then arrived at the four excerpts from Hanns Eisler’s The Hollywood Songbook of 1943 – the night’s raison d’etre: Hollywood Elegy Nr. 7, To the Little Radio, Die Landscaft des Exils, and The Homecoming. All of the texts were written by Eisler’s most famous collaborator, Brecht, but none of them lasted particularly long, although permeated with the composer’s desolation in a necessary exile. McGregor sang in English, with the exception of her third offering, and all of them recalled the nervous sadness that permeates the between-wars period in German and Austrian cabaret music. But, in the end, there was precious little to get your teeth into, apart from a vague atmosphere of displacement and depression.

We ended the program with two Hollywood evergreens: So in Love by Cole Porter from his Kiss Me, Kate of 1942; and Somewhere Over the Rainbow – an essential for any compendium of Hollywood songs – taken from 1939’s classic The Wizard of Oz film. Both of these succeeded largely through McGregor’s sheer verve when faced with several passages of glutinous support from the Signum men, notably in the Porter lyric – thick and busy at the same time.

An odd juxtaposition, then. Nearly all of McGregor’s material could claim to be Hollywood-bred, apart from the Dietrich reminder. But the saxophone quartet would have trouble finding a link for Schulhoff and Prokofiev; Bernstein’s musical was originally a Broadway production, and Copland’s ballet premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. So not much Hollywood from the visitors. But they’re a smooth organization, experts in their craft, and watching high-quality musicians at work is always rewarding, no matter how haphazard the program’s organizing principles.

Diary May 2025

cliveoconnell

THE SOUL OF THE CELLO: TIMO-VEIKKO VALVE

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday May 3 at 7:30 pm

After an out-of-town try-out at the Gippsland Arts Centre in Warragul the previous night, the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s principal moves to a same-but-different sphere with this Election Day program which reminds us of the cellist’s main arena of operations because both major works are arrangements for string orchestra and it’s only the MSO strings that will be heard tonight. Timo-Veikko Valve begins with a solo in the Prelude from Bach’s E flat Suite, which is followed by one of Mozart’s arrangements of Bach – suitably, an E flat Fugue. But I don’t know whether this is a version of The Well-Tempered Klavier‘s Book 2 No. 7, or the Trio Sonata No. 2’s fugue. Speaking of Mozart, Valve then presents his own arrangement of the String Quartet in D minor No. 15 K. 421, one of the set dedicated to Haydn. A touch of modernity appears with brother-of-Pekka Jaakko Kuusisto’s Wiima of 2011, a 13-minute landscape which Valve has promulgated since its composition in 2011. We finish with Schumann’s Cello Concerto without the original woodwind, horn and trumpet pairs and lacking timpani; I assume this is the transcription by F Vygem (Florian Vygen?) and a. Kahl (Andrea Kahl?). Remaining tickets at this venue for adults are from $57 tp $67, while; the young get in for $20. I assume that a booking fee is imposed but you can’t tell without putting your money down. If not, this would be a major advantage over where I’ve spent the last 5 1/2 years.

FOUR BASSOONS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Iwaki Auditorium, ABC Southbank Centre

Sunday May 4 at 11 am

Necessarily, we’re talking arrangements again, given this unusual front-and-centre combination of Jack Schiller, Elise Millman, Natasha Thomas, and contrabassoonist Brock Imison; all escorted along their way some of the time by an MSO string quintet of violins Anna Skalova and Philippa West, viola Fiona Sargeant, cello Rohan de Korte, and double bass Ben Hanlon. Mozart starts the morning with an unspecified ‘suite’ arranged by Imison for bassoon quartet. Then, an abrupt jump to Wynton Marsalis and his Meeelaan for bassoon and string quartet: a fusion piece now about 25 years old and which lasts between 13 and 16 minutes. Imison revisits his arranger status, this time of Giovanni Batista Riccio’s brief Sonata a quattro, here organised for a quartet of bassoons. Australian writer Gerard Brophy scores with his Four Branches of 2015, dedicated partly to Imison and lasting about as long as the Riccio. Last comes Dutch bassoonist/composer Kees Olthuis’ Introduction and Allegro of 2006 for bassoon, contrabassoon and string quintet; at 20 minutes in length, this promises to be the focal work of the program. The Mozart apart (perhaps), these pieces are completely unknown to me but that has been an occasionally welcome surprise factor in these recitals by musicians who are rarely heard together in intimate converse. As for prices, you might as well forget it because this recital is sold out, thanks to the plethora of bassoonists in Victoria. Bad luck, unless you have high-level double-reed connections . . .

HOLLYWOOD SONGBOOK

Musica Viva Australia

Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday May 6 at 7 pm

Soprano Ali McGregor collaborates with the Signum Saxophone Quartet, a group I heard in Brisbane on their last tour supporting Kristian Winther in an arrangement of Kurt Weill’s Violin Concerto. Here, the participants’ combined efforts are centred on film music from the legendary American Dream Factory. We’ve heard of the Great American Songbook and know that this could refer to any collection of songs that your average schmuck could put together and then call his/her collation by that name; a con trick to equal Trump’s repeated clams to singular greatness. But the Hollywood Songbook was a reality: a compilation of 47 songs by Hanns Eisler to poems by Brecht, Holderlin, Goethe, Viertel, Eichendorff, the Bible, Morike and himself – all written in 1943 when the composer was an unhappy refugee in Los Angeles. McGregor and her colleagues will present selections from this liederbuch as well as some scraps by Weill, Porter, Berlin and Harold Arlen’s Over the Rainbow. Mind you, the Signata share the limelight with a few of Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet from 1924, a set of numbers eviscerated from Prokofiev’s 1935 Romeo and Juliet ballet, a respectable composite in Three Dance Episodes from Bernstein’s On the Town musical of 1944, and then back to selection land for some chunks hacked out of Copland’s Rodeo ballet score, dating from 1942. Tonight will be the second in a series of eight performances and you can attend as a full adult for seats ranging between $65 and $125, with student rush places available for $20. But never forget the $7 transaction fee added on for a reason that no reasonable entrepreneur can explain.

DISCOVER SIBELIUS: SIDE BY SIDE WITH MYO

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 8 at 7:30 pm

Yes, you can discover a sort of Sibelius tonight with newly-created stars from the Melbourne Youth Orchestra featured alongside MSO regulars. But what conductor Benjamin Northey and his forces offer is a Reader’s Digest version of the Finnish master; a little bit here, a morsel there, and perhaps enough to titillate – hopefully. But then, who needs this sort of itty-bitty introduction to one of the 20th century’s most individual and approachable voices? The night opens with Finlandia, the composer’s 1899 not-so-open act of anti-Russian propaganda that still thrills to this day with its combination of power and lyricism. Then comes the first movement to the 1902 Symphony No. 2, which is excellent but pales into the background when compared to the score’s sweeping finale. Likewise, we get the last movement of the Violin Concerto of 1904 (with an unknown soloist), but this acts as roughage when compared to the work’s preceding pages which give a fairer picture of the composer’s moody emotional environment. We then hear the Valse triste of 1903, one of the composer’s most frequently performed scraps, and about as useful a musical piece of information as Elgar’s Salut d’amour. To end this brief procession of delights, we come to something more mature in the Symphony No. 5 in E flat, written in 1915. Its grinding. inexorable ending tolerates no grounds for complaint as it simply carries all before it. Sorry, but I’d rather spend my cash on a full performance of either symphony or the magnificent concerto. If you’re under 18, you get in for $20; any older and you have to cough up $39. There’s no fee, unless you want your tickets delivered non-automatically, where you fall victim to the fiscal demands of supplying human contact; it’s not much, but enough to generate a slight feeling of sourness.

AN EVENING OF FAIRY TALES

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 15 at 7:30 pm

You’ll get to enjoy your other-worldly experience here without a soloist; the main interest in a pretty pedestrian program comes from conductor Alpesh Chauhan, a British musician who began by playing cello, then sank to the level of directing orchestras – first in Birmingham, then Italy and Scotland, before landing back in Birmingham with side-trips to Dusseldorf. Tonight he expands our awareness with the 1892 Prelude to Humperdinck’s ever-welcome dose of gemutlichkeit, the opera Hansel and Gretel. We are then taken to Prokofiev’s 1944 vision of Cinderella, although nothing is definite here in the land of ‘selections’. Speaking of which, we enjoy more bleeding chunks of extrapolated pleasure in some extracts from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty of 1889 which admittedly lends itself to filleting. Not sure about such a night where you’re faced with extracts from two ballets and an opera and you have to do a lot of extrapolation and supplementary imaginative work to get much out of the whole exercise. Still, for all I know Chauhan has a magic baton that directs such music with brilliant transformative power. You pay full-price $139 in the stalls and circle of Hamer Hall, with a minor reduction to $127 for the balcony. Sit further back and you’re up for $81 or $93 respectively.

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

BACH TO THE BEACH BOYS AND BEYOND

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday May 17 at 7:30 pm

Carolina Eyck is the centrepiece of this night’s work. She is a theremin player, mistress of that primal electronic instrument that provides the focus for so much of Messiaen’s Turangalila-symphonie. Richard Tognetti leads his ACO and includes among his forces ABC Radio celebrity pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska. As for what this combination gets up to, the program is as wide-ranging as its title proposes. We start with Bach’s Air on the G String from the Orchestral Suite No. 2, and we end with a compendium of music from Miklos Rosza’s soundtrack to Spellbound (1945), Jonny Greenwood‘s background for There Will Be Blood (2007), Star Trek (Alexander Courage’s opening credits theme for the original series of 1966, you assume), Morricone’s 1966 score for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, as well as Jim Parker’s title music for Midsomer Murders that actually used the theremin and which also dates from 1966. In between come Brian Wilson‘s Good Vibrations (you wouldn’t believe it – released first in that vintage year of 1966), Offenbach’s Can-can (originally from 1858), all Five Pieces for String Quartet of 1924 by Schulhoff, some off-cuts from Saint-Saens’ 1886 Carnival of the Animals as well as his Danse macabre of 1874, Rimsky’s 1900 bumblebee, Glinka’s The Lark romance from A Farewell to St. Petersburg written in 1840. And we’ll have a few samples of local content with the 2005 commission by the ACO of Brett Dean‘s Short Stories: IV. Komarov’s Last Words, plus a world premiere from Holly Harrison. Alongside these works, Eyck gives the Australian premiere to her own 2015 Fantasias: Oakunar Lynntuja for herself and a string quartet, and there’ll be an outing for Jorg Widmann‘s 180 beats per minute of 1993 for two violins, a viola and three cellos. Well, they say it’s the spice of life. Entry costs $49 to $158 for an adult, $75 to $128 for concessionaires, $35 for those under 35, and $30 for a student. There’s an extra fee of ‘between $4 and $8.50’ if you order online or by phone – which pretty much involves everybody in what amounts to an unabashed grab for extra cash.

This program will be repeated on Sunday May 18 at 2:30 pm in Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne, and back at the Melbourne Recital Centre on Monday May 19 at 7:30 pm.

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS IN CONCERT

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 22 at 7:30 pm

Nothing’s changed, then, in the past 5-plus years. Our chief orchestra sticks to a sure-fire dollar spinner with the old live soundtrack exercise although, to my mind, there’s little to commend this episode of the saga, the first of the third trilogy that I dutifully saw in the theatre, bought the DVD, then never looked at again. Visually startling and quite devoid of character-interest, the film once again features music by an incorrigible John Williams which on first hearing sped past my ears at warp speed. But that’s what the MSO, under Benjamin Northey, will be resuscitating tonight under the big screen. Are they still using subtitles so that the actors can be heard over the orchestral sub-text? Let’s hope so because, even in the original cinema screening, parts of dialogue bolted past, incomprehensible and unable to be relished. Still, another viewing is almost worth it just to see Han Solo killed by his psychotic son. Standard adult tickets range from $81 to $150; concession card holders and children enjoy a cut rate of a few dollars less. Makes you salivate, doesn’t it? As well, you have to cough up an extra $7 for a ‘transaction fee’, although I can’t find mention of that when I tried booking. To be honest, I find the MSO ticketing process to be all over the place – something like the entertainment on offer here.

This program will be repeated on Friday May 23 at 7:30 pm, and on Saturday May 24 at 1 pm.

GRIEG’S PIANO CONCERTO

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 29 at 7:30 pm

While it’s hard to plumb securely the dim recesses of the past, this popular concerto was probably the first of its Romantic kind that I became aware of, thanks to an LP recording by Dinu Lipatti that I was somehow forced to buy while in a state of early-teen innocence. Still, the reading proved memorable enough to colour several later renditions – and there were many of them as the Grieg proved popular with entrants in the ABC’s Concerto and Vocal Competition staged during the 1950s and 60s. For all its renown, this is one of the easier examples of the Romantic barnstormer; little wonder that Liszt was able to sight-read it for the composer as it’s right up his virtuosic Hungarian alley. Tonight, Alexander Gavrylyuk makes another welcome Melbourne appearance to invest this familiar score with his considerable skill and insight. Surrounding this, Hong Kong-born conductor Elim Chan leads the MSO through British/United States writer Anna Clyne’s This Midnight Hour of 2015 which takes its kick-off from poems by Juan Jimenez and Baudelaire and serves as an aural feast for about 12 minutes – or so they say. To end, the orchestra will struggle through Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a voluptuous and still-testing feast from 1888 that celebrates repetition and instrumental colour in a brilliant exhibition of capture and release. One of the acting concertmasters, Tair Khisambeev or Anne-Marie Johnson, is in for a wild ride. To get in, you need between $75 and $142 for a standard ticket; concession card holders get a $5 reduction. A child is charged $20 but there’s a $7 transaction fee applied to each booking. Mind you, this information comes from the MSO website, so it should be right, right?

This program will be repeated on Saturday May 31 at 2 pm.

A change of scene

cliveoconnell

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

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

A near-forgotten voice

cliveoconnell

THROUGH TROPICAL STARS

David Joseph

Move Records MD 3467

There’s something enigmatic about the music of David Joseph. If it weren’t for Move Record’s initiative, I would know very little about his contribution to Australian music. As it is, any material you come across is deficient in detail. For example, the opening work on this disc, a Concertino for flute, viola and percussion dates from 1988 but doesn’t appear in the Australian Music Centre’s catalogue of Joseph’s works. Likewise, the concluding piece, The Afternoon of 1991 for piano trio, is absent from the same list. Slightly less confusing is the attribution of the title track for two flutes to 1977 on the CD, but 1978 in the AMC’s listing. Ditto for the String Trio No. 2 (CD 1991, catalogue 1990) and a Sonata for clarinet and 2 percussionists (1978 according to the CD, but 1979 in the catalogue demi-raisonne).

Not that such discrepancies will keep anyone awake at nights, but they speak of a certain slovenliness in the provision of accurate information. As for performers, the Concertino boasts members of Sydney’s Seymour Group before that ensemble ceased operations in about 2006; flute Christine Draeger, viola John Gould, percussion Ian Cleworth and Rebecca Lagos (or is it Graeme Leak{e}?) as announced on the CD’s sleeve?). Jennifer Newsome and Zdenek Bruderhans perform Through tropical stars, while Nigel Sabin clarinet and Cleworth with Ryszard Pusz present the sonata. A group appropriately called the String Trio Holland consists of violin Josje Ter Haar, viola Susanne van Els, and cello Job Ter Haar. As for the brief The Afternoon, that features the untraceable Trio Classico comprising violin Urs Walker, cello Regula Hauser Menges, and piano Stefan Fahmi.

As you can see from the dates of each work listed above – 1977 (1978), 1978 (1979),1988, 1990 (1991), 1991 – Joseph’s compositions on this CD are not fruits of the composer’s time spent in Benalla where he has worked as a lawyer for nearly the last 25 years. It would seem that his musical creativity has come to a halt – a lume spento. Nevertheless, these five tracks from the past remind us of the individual voice that Joseph spoke and the sheer attractiveness of his vocabulary. By the way, all offerings on this CD are from live performances – at the Seymour Centre, Elder Hall in the University of Adelaide, Melba Hall at the University of Melbourne, and St. Peter’s Church, Zurich.

What the Concertino offers is a garden scene, albeit a furiously active one where the bird-life approaches the manic in its opening strophes, vivified by a rapid semiquaver flute pattern and viola flutterings above campanile, vibraphone and marimba backing. Every so often, we reach a hiatus point and the motivic matter changes, if the textures remain pretty constant, as does the level of action. When you think things are slowing down (the use of quaver triplets), the flute stirs itself into fresh flights and the percussion mimics the frenzy. For all that, the atmosphere is a benign one and it is conceivable that Joseph is presenting a kind of promenade where a change of vista prompts an alteration in texture.

Still, the soundscape is a consistent one with recognizable patterns enjoying a transmutation process and the ensemble working as a well-oiled rhythmic machine, punctuated by a cadenza flight from Draeger and Gould towards the conclusion . Just when you think the piece is descending into a twilight phase, the initial energy and textures reappear, although the final bars offer a kind of placid resolution. It seems to me that Joseph is most concerned with exercising a timbral palette which he varies most obviously by changing his percussion instruments. This results in an effervescent kaleidoscope of colours to which all four participants contribute in almost equal measure.

According to the AMC site, Through tropical stars is meant to last about twelve minutes; Newsome and Bruderhans get through it in under nine. It’s not intended to be another ‘bird’ piece and in some ways it isn’t, having a wider scope than mere avian imitation. But there are passages where you can’t escape the querulous nature of bird chirrups and competing calls, circling around each other in close imitation. One player uses piccolo, concert flute and alto flute; the other sticks to concert flute throughout. While the work is a dazzling exhibition piece for its interpreters, its atmospheric character suggests a natural world abuzz with growth and light: a brilliant tandem ride of coruscations, here articulated with admirable interdependence.

Something like the Concertino, Joseph’s Sonata works hard to present textural and timbral interplay/contrast. It certainly exploits Sabin’s flexibility and rapid recovery in its initial stages where a dialogue between clarinet and marimba displays a mastery of quick-fire articulation. A chain of sustained wind notes takes us a short space away from the initial chattering, but not for long; when the clarinet is occupied with delivering a high pedal note, both marimba and xylophone indulge in a furious clash of lines.

It makes for an experience that is heavy in events. If a score were available, I’m sure the interconnections and inner references would become clearer but, as it is, you just surrender to the aural avalanche-with-recesses that prevails at the end, despite the sudden emergence of some moments of what pass for rest in this active work. Percussionists Cleworth and Howell are no shrinking violets but take over the running, occasionally drenching the clarinet in powerful mallet work as the score drives towards its affirmative conclusion.

With the string trio, despite the CD leaflet’s stipulation that it is a nature portrait similar to the Concertino, we are in a different landscape where abrasive chords serve as fulcrum points, demanding attention right from the opening. True, you hear whistles and throbbings that might represent wildlife red in tooth and claw, alternating with compulsive motor rhythms that bear witness to the ongoing influence of Stravinsky’s early years. Again, the composer utilises obsessive motives and near-splenetic bursts of repeated chords to animate his intended ambience.

As with its precedents on this CD, the trio deals with patterns that can be transformed or just repeated till the next one appears. What is different is the sense of menace as we move through a sound world that is packed with percussive-sounding bursts. The burbling and twittering has gone and we find ourselves in a world of menace and uncertainty which eventually fades to an uncertain final querulousness: the first piece on this album that ends, like Petrushka, with a question.

The last track, and the latest of Joseph’s works represented here, The Afternoon is a brief vignette that intends to acquaint the listener with the sad quietude of approaching twilight. In fact, the piece succeeds very well in following a path into quiescence, the final words given to the piano after a process that maintains Joseph’s practice of exploiting brevities, even if these ones present themselves with more angularity than we’ve heard so far.

For recordings that were made some time ago – 46 years in two cases, 34 years the most recent – the quality of these tracks is remarkably clear, in particular the final one from Zurich where Walker’s violin and Fahmi’s piano have a fine, piercing character that makes every note resonate. And it serves as an attractive envoi to this series of one-movement scores that remind us of the intellectual and emotional appeal of the music created by this remarkably gifted writer.

Amiable amalgam

cliveoconnell

JESS HITCHCOCK & PENNY QUARTET

Musica Viva Australia

Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University

Tuesday March 4 at 7 pm

Jess Hitchcock & Penny Quartet (L to R Anthony Chataway, Jack Ward, Amy Brookman, Madeleine Jevons)

It was hard to get a handle on this recital, a rather specialized event from Musica Viva which is being heard in Perth, Adelaide (part of this year’s Festival), Brisbane,, Newcastle and Sutherland. In the program, Glenn Christensen, a former resident with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, is listed as first violin of the Penny Quartet but was he present on this night, your honour? Or has his appearance changed significantly since those halcyon ACO days? The photograph above shows the current quartet’s personnel, according to the body’s website. I didn’t recognize any of the players by sight – three males and a female – although their ensemble output impressed for its deftness.

Jess Hitchcock sang twelve of her own songs and the program included a full set of texts. But then, the organizers turned the lights right down so this information was completely useless. Mind you, the artists wended a lackadaisical way through the mixed dozen lyrics which were not performed in printed order so that you were invited to play a kind of detection game to work out what was going on. In the original concept, the program contained only eleven Hitchcock songs, all of them organized for a string quartet accompaniment by local writers. A fresh arranger – Christine Pan – attended to the additional song.

I think I got them in the right order but, as far as this singer’s work goes, there be no ignorance like unto my ignorance. I believe I heard, in sequence: Days Are Long (arr. Iain Grandage), Homeward Bound (arr. Isaac Hayward), Collide ((arr. Nicole Murphy), Soak To My Bones (arr. Harry Sdraulig), Leader of the Pack (arr. Ben Robinson), By the Sea (arr. May Lyon), On My Own (arr. Holly Harrison), Together (arr. James Mountain), Running in the Dark (arr. Matt Laing), Fight for Me (arr. Pan), Unbreakable (arr. Alex Turley), and Not a Warzone (arr. Grandage).

Apart from the songs, the program also gave an airing to American writer Caroline Shaw‘s Plan & Elevation: the Grounds of Dumbarton Oaks. This quartet was written to commission by Harvard, celebrating the 75th birthday of the university’s famous estate; further, Shaw was the original music fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 2014-15. Now what I think happened was that the Pennies interspersed the songs with the five movements from Shaw’s work. If so, the work was subsumed into the whole experience very cleverly. I can recall some viola double stops suddenly emerging at one point, as well as some rapid Verklaerte Nacht-style arpeggios with harmonics – both identifiable from Shaw’s score. Sadly, the final effect was to make you think that one of the arrangers had included an above-average postlude or prelude, rather than transporting you to the estate’s Herbaceous Border or Cutting Garden.

Adding to the mix, Hitchcock proved to be a fan of the pre-song address, giving us information about her background, her family, her musical training, her participation in the Voice referendum, her personal relationships with people that she was singing about – all the gallimaufry that might/might not add to a listener’s appreciation of what was being offered. Certainly, this singer is involved in her work and is at some pains to tell us all about it, in the way of the young. Whether we need to hear it is another business.

To be honest, I found it hard to differentiate between many of Hitchcock’s songs. Her melodic language shows balance and general placidity; the harmonic structures are innately simple, if spiced up by her arrangers; the tempo of each song rarely ventures into any territory but the four-square. For instance, the opening Days Are Long presented as a simple melody over a pizzicato support that developed into a thudding bass line, soon turning the lyric into a bit of a chug. Immediately, you were aware that the vocalist was well amplified; after a time, it became apparent that so were her string supporters.

During the following Homeward Bound, you encountered some rhythmic irregularity to complement the loud, punchy nature of the actual content but this spike of interest didn’t seem to be part of the original matter but inserted by its arranger. And so the procedure continued with a quickening of interest before a return to the tried and true e.g. Collide where an intriguing drone effect shuffled back into a fluent chordal support. Or else the arrangement stole much of the thunder, as in By the Sea with its plain vocal line overtaken by Lyon’s ornate string support.

Contrast that with the feistiness of On My Own, an unusually fast and assertive song which brought to mind some traces of American protest songs, although the text appears to point to an inter-personal crisis rather than a recrimination aimed towards the current social order. But then, it could be both.

Nearing the end of the night, Hitchcock started playing on a keyboard at the opening to Unbreakable. Mind you, I was in such a state of identification tension that she might have been making subtle contributions before this. This song fell into the same category as several others on offer that encourage self-belief, self-determination, self-confidence, self-assertion – statements of character development that flourish in the egotism of this age. Possibly these might not have grated so much if the vocal lines offered variety, but they didn’t. All of Hitchcock’s melodic threads bore a close resemblance to each other, and all sprang from a base in the American Neo-Romanticism that has flourished in the republic for some time.

What we heard across the twelve-part cycle was pleasant music-making that cast no threatening shadows of modernity. In this reversion to a well-trodden path, the composer stayed within the limitations you can hear in Sondheim’s Into the Woods – a sampler of song construction for the contemporary writer with a disregard for recent advances in melodic design, metrical ingenuity and harmonic experimentation; when I say ‘recent’, I’m referring to anything past the first decade of the 20th century in the history of Western music. Of the original music of our country, I found no trace. Despite her Torres Strait Islander and New Guinean background/heritage, Hitchcock has been trained in her craft by serious musicians; as far as I can tell, she has yet to take up the mantle of original invention.

As a suddenly applied encore, Hitchcock and the Pennies presented a version of Sidney’s My true love hath my heart. I wasn’t able to decipher Hitchcock’s attribution of musical authorship from her preliminary remarks, but the setting rocked no boats and so was of a piece with everything that preceded it.

In this light program, the five artists collaborated to fine effect and the smaller-than-usual Musica Viva audience applauded each segment with enthusiasm. So what was missing? Perhaps a kind of emotional depth, or an aspiring ardour to lift the evening’s cosy level of engagement. You (meaning I) left the Griffith University venue with a sense that we’d heard a deft sequence of songs, thank you very much, but not much remained in the memory.

Celebrate with the tried and true

cliveoconnell

BRAHMS & BEETHOVEN

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday February 17, 2024

Richard Tognetti

You could see this program as a retrograde step in the Australian Chamber Orchestra‘s ongoing path of achievement. Presenting two repertoire standards like the Brahms Violin Concerto and Beethoven’s A Major Symphony doesn’t put many demands on audiences who would/should be familiar with both masterpieces. Of course, in this case you’re bound to hear exceptional readings of these scores, the ACO being what it is – one of the country’s leading ensembles in terms of skill and interpretative talent.

This was the tenth and final expounding of this double feature, the climax of a tour that took in the three eastern state capitals with a detour to Newcastle along the way. So the accomplishment level was as good as it was going to get. Adding to sixteen core members of the orchestra, artistic director and soloist Richard Tognetti had enlisted the assistance of an extra seven violinists, four more violas, two supplementary cellos and two double bass guests. This practically doubled the string body but such reinforcement proved necessary, given that all players were using gut strings.

The recruited flutes weren’t playing metal instruments, as far as I could tell; oboes, clarinets and bassoons all looked contemporary from my seat. The trumpets appeared orthodox but at least two of the horns were employing crooks and the other one of the four that I could see had an instrument whose middle workings looked unfamiliar to me – neither valved nor crooked. So it seemed that what we heard was something of a mixed bag, although the resulting sound complex favoured the woodwind and brass (as you’d expect).

Among the guests were musicians from the Adelaide, West Australian,, Queensland, Melbourne, Dresden Festival, Age of Enlightenment and Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestras. Thomas Chawmer from the Orava Quartet was one of the violas, and six of the other string players were from the ACO’s Emerging Artists of 2025 ranks. You’d think this made for a sort of uneasy agglomeration but the whole complex sounded highly polished and assured in its work, probably more impressive in the symphony because Tognetti spent a good deal of his time directing rather than leading his first violins.

Of course, he had his hands fuller when treating with the concerto, across which he produced one of the most refined interpretations I’ve heard live. A thoroughly seasoned performer, Tognetti knows better than most where to find a balance between assertion and reticence, even if this interpretation was pre-ordained towards the latter. Even so, that brave opening flourish from the solo after the ritornello to the first movement registered as imposingly dynamic even if you missed the steely insistence of the quasi-cadenza upward-shooting spirals before this lone voice settles into its beneficent variants on the opening theme.

As the performance continued, I tried to recall when I’d last heard the ACO and Tognetti achieving a similar sound spectrum. It’s faded in the memory but I think it must have been when they were presenting another of the great concertos where solo detailed work, especially when lodged in the lower strings, dissipated into the accompaniment which was, above all, considerate. Because of this infrequency of bite, you had to concentrate with high attention to follow the opening movement’s argument, compensating for the murmuring activity by fleshing out what you know must have been there.

It’s a marvellous expanse, that first Allegro, relieved in this performance by a departure from the usual Joachim cadenza. Tognetti put together an amalgam of his own from those supplied by Busoni, Hugo Heermann and Auer. He adopted the Busoni venture of having a timpani accompany the soloist for a fair way into the novelty, and later brought in the strings for some preliminary chords prior to the return to normal at bar 527. Whatever the traces of Heermann and Auer, I wasn’t quick (or familiar) enough to pick them up but the demonstration proved to be technically spectacular, probably more so than the original.

When it came to the Adagio, we moved onto a different place, more subtle than that usually displayed in orthodox readings. The initial 30-bar wind chorale sounded seamless, the clarinets enjoying pride of place being positioned above their woodwind peers. The soloist’s unveiling of that spine-tingling initial sentence made for an ideal representation of the composer’s lyrical genius and the movement promised a fully burnished outpouring – until some clown’s mobile phone went off, the idiotic alarm tinkling out the opening bar to Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.

Tognetti paused, then took up the reins again without complaint, even if some of us were seething at this redneck lack of consideration or concern. Further, I suspect a few of us found it hard to re-enter the calm unfolding of this movement’s later stages without being distracted by an inner rage. For which reason, maybe, the giocoso conclusion came over as more aggressive than expected, the soloist’s line slashing and curvetting turn and turn about, the pulse fluctuating without a sign of discomfort right up to the Poco piu presto gallop to Brahms’ warm-hearted conclusion.

I’m pretty sure that the ACO has played the Beethoven symphony before and that I heard it about a decade ago in Melbourne’s Hamer Hall. As far as I can see, the ensemble hasn’t recorded it but might consider doing so, given the finely-spun detail with this group populated by many ad hoc players. As I’ve said, Tognetti spent much of his time exhorting the ensemble, mainly by indicating swathes of sound rather than bow-pointing to individuals or groups. Did he need to offer such encouragement to a set of musicians that were very well played-in to this score? The results were indubitably successful, so no argument.

But there’s not much to report. The work unfolded with very few flaws; an odd horn bleep and some not-quite-right wind group entries, plus a few moments where the strings were in danger of being out-weighed. Still, the Allegretto moved at a brisk pace, not handled as a lugubrious funeral march; the following scherzo ‘s repetitions came close to wearing out their welcome, as usual, but the players’ briskness of attack took the edge of the composer’s wearing insistence.

Finally, that jubilant Allegro con brio rort rounded off the night with elegant bravura, some novel dynamic points set out for the more jaded among us, and an irresistible drive from the strings that lasted up to Beethoven’s peremptory final bark. I, for one, left the QPAC building with feelings of gratitude and elation – a welcome change from the usual sensation of having been aurally battered into submission. After this genuflection to the tried and true, and having attracted a substantial audience, the ACO will proceed with its birthday celebrations by following more challenging paths, this double-bill definitely being the year’s most conservative Brisbane program.

Soft blasts from the past

cliveoconnell

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL THESE YEARS?

Claire Patti, Louise Godwin, Tony Gould

Move Records MD 3469

There’s something disarming about this album which is a collection of songs/folk-songs – several of them well-known – performed as trios, duets and solos by Claire Patti (harpist and singer), Louise Godwin (cellist but not employed as much as she could have been), and Tony Gould (pianist and the heaviest participant in this amiable exercise). I say ‘well-known’, but that might only apply to that generation that boasts Gould and me (he is my senior by a few years). The Skye Boat Song, My love is like a red red rose, Londonderry Air, The Last Rose of Summer, Black is the colour of my true love’s hair and Molly Malone were standard articles of faith in my youth and all enjoy a re-working here.

As well, you will come across a few that ring bells in the memory, if not very clamorous ones: Carrickfergus, Strawberry Lane and Ae fond kiss. Gould and Co. have included an Irish lyric that I’ve never come across – Tha M’aigne fo ghuraim (This gloom upon my soul) – and an English traditional song that none of those great 19th-into-20th century collectors seems to have bothered with: Sweet Lemany. Not to mention a Scottish tune that sounds more promising than its reality in She’s sweetest when she’s naked. Then there’s Idas farval (Ida’s farewell), written by Swedish musician Ale Carr, and Jag vet en dejlig rosa (I know a rose so lovely) which is a traditional tune, also from Sweden; I suspect that both of these spring from Godwin’s interest in that Scandinavian country’s music. From left field comes A little bit of Warlock, which sets some pages from the Capriol Suite, namely the Pieds-en-l’air movement.

The ensemble beginsn with Sweet Lemany, which may have origins in Cornwall, Ireland, or Suffolk; it has certain traits that argue for an Irish genesis. But the setting is original,, first in in that Godwin maintains a one-note pedal throughout, pizzicato and keeping to a mobile rhythmic pattern. Patti sings with a light, refreshing timbre while Gould informs the piece with subtle inflections and brief comments/echoes. For all that, Patti sings four of the five verses available in most editions.

Gould takes the solo spot for William Ross’ Skye Boat Song and, apart from a winsome introduction, sticks to the well-known tune right up to the final bars where the straight melody is subsumed in a brief variant. Most interest here comes from following the executant’s chord sequences which follow an unexceptionable path throughout a mildly meandering interpretation. Gould gives brief prelude to My love is like a red red rose before Patti sings the first two stanzas. Godwin offers a cello statement, before the singer returns with the final two stanzas and an unexpectedly open concluding bar. Gould occasionally offers a high trill to complement Patti’s pure line. And the only complaint I have about the vocal line is the singer’s odd habit of taking a breath after the first few syllables of the third line in most of the stanzas.

Carr’s sweet if repetitive lyric is a sort of waltz with three-bar sentences/phrases, in this case giving the melody first to the cello, then the harp, before the cello takes back the running. The piece’s form is simple ternary and we certainly are familiar with the melody’s shape before the end. More irregularity comes in the Swedish traditional song from the 16th century with its five-line stanzas, here handled as a kind of elderly cabaret number by Patti and Gould, whose support is a supple delight beneath Patti’s somewhat sultry account of what textually should be a love song but musically sounds like a plaint.

The Warlock movement, here a piano solo, gets off to a false start and Gould can be heard saying that he’ll start again. For the most part he is content to follow the (original?) Arbeau melody line and reinforce the British arranger’s harmonization with some slightly adventurous detours along the path. A variant appears shortly before the end but the executant eventually settles back into the format and plays the final two Much slower bars with more delicacy than the original contains. Patti sings two stanzas of the three that make up the ‘standard’ version of Carrickfergus and invests the song with an infectious clarity of timbre, especially at the opening to the fifth line in each division with Gould oscillating between the unobtrusive and mimicking the singer when she moves into a high tessitura.

A harp/cello duet treats James Oswald’s She’s sweetest when she’s naked, which has been described as an Irish minuet (whatever that is). The only peculiarity comes with a change of accent to slight syncopation, first seen in bars 3 and 5 of the first strophe. Patti plays the tune through twice, then Godwin takes the lead for another run-through. Some laid-back ambling from Gould prefaces the Danny Boy reading for solo piano, with just a trace of Something’s Gotta Give before we hit the melody itself. The pianist does not cease from exploration and offers some detours to the original line, as well as a couple of sudden modulations to restatements in a refreshed harmonic setting. For all that, the Air remains perceptible across this investigation, the CD’s longest track.

Staying in Ireland, Gould gives an alluring prelude to The Last Rose of Summer before Patti starts singing Moore’s lines. Godwin has a turn at outlining the original Aisling an Oigfhear melody before the singer returns with the second stanza, then omitting the third, with Gould providing a postlude that puts the first phrase in an unexpected harmonic context. As with all the vocal items on offer, this is quiet and unobtrusive, some worlds away from the habitual thrusting treatment demonstrated by generations of Irish tenors bursting into the role of Flotow’s Lyonel.

Across the sea to Scotland’s Black is the colour of my true love’s hair which Gould opens through some sepulchral bass notes before giving the melody unadorned and unaccompanied before moving into a fantasia that harks back to its source material before resolving into another re-statement of the melody and a reappearance of the opening’s repeated tattoo. This version is comparable in colour to some of the more conscientious American folksingers who have recorded versions of this work, making a slightly unsettling celebration of what is a love-song in a minor key (mode!?) context.

Back across the sea to the island, Godwin plays Tha M’aigne fo ghuraim as a solo, punctuated by sudden turns and grace notes; at well under two minutes, the CD’ shortest track but probably its most obvious and characteristic in terms of its country of origin. Another piano solo, Gould gives us a preamble before playing Strawberry Lane through straight once, then almost doing the same thing again before following his pleasure at the end of the second stanza. Of course, he returns to the melody en plein air near the end but concludes with a reminiscence of his earlier elaboration and an unsatisfying tierce to finish.

Another Burns lyric, if a despondent one, in Ae fond kiss brings Patti’s calm delivery into play once again. She sings all the stanzas except No. 2 in the set of six. Gould offers a mid-flow interlude which, I suppose stands in for the missing lines but the song’s delivery suggests a rather odd 3/4 rhythm as opposed to the more bouncy original 6/8. But the executants’ restraint is put to happy employment throughout. Molly Malone brings up the rear and is another piano solo where Gould plays the stanzas’ sextet several times, giving less space to the three chorus lines. It’s plain sailing through this very familiar melody, the pianist content to follow the air’s contour.

Not everything on this diverting disc works ideally. Some of Gould’s chords sound like abrupt breaks in an otherwise placid flow, some notes don’t sound, and Godwin’s cello seems uncomfortable on one track. Still, you’ll find plenty of material here to entertain and over which you can reminisce – which is clearly (for me, at least) the whole point of the exercise.