Tag: Australian Chamber Orchestra

That’s entertainment

cliveoconnell

GIOVANNI SOLLIMA: SEQUENZA ITALIANA

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall

Sunday July 3 and Monday July 4, 2016

Giovanni Sollima - Copy

                                                                                  Giovanni Sollima

In the absence of their resident guru, Richard Tognetti, the ACO players hosted Italian cellist/composer Giovanni Sollima as soloist and, in some cases, director.  As the afternoon rushed past, you weren’t quite sure how much direction was involved; three of the four works in the program’s first half didn’t involve Sollima, although he made up for that in a dominant display after interval.  In all, he played a Leo concerto, an arrangement by his father of one of Rossini’s Old Age Sins, and wound up with his own concerto, Fecit Neap 17..  And there is no doubt that these three comprised Sunday afternoon’s most remarkable playing.

He’s an attention-grabbing cellist, although at the first instance this was due to his remarkable virtuosity in the Leo Concerto No. 3 in D minor, that composer one of the masters of the Neapolitan Baroque.  The four-movement work, patterned roughly on the church-sonata form, can be treated with too much care,  but not this time.  Sollima vaulted into its wide melodic arches with no fear and a powerful right-hand urging on zealously the opening Andante grazioso with its melodic minor peculiarities.   As the concerto moved past, the tenor-clef solo line took on an added fascination thanks to Sollima’s chameleonic handling of texture and dynamic; for all the surprises (limited as they were) in the development of the Con spirito and Allegro movements, what really captured attention was the volatile cellist.

Of course, the ACO loves a showman and they got one in spades with Sollima.  While the Leo concerto walked a fine line between extraversion and control, the second part of the program spilled over into unbridled display, first through Rossini’s Une larme Theme and Variations with the ACO strings playing straight-man to the soloist’s wise-cracking hero, the languid and frenetic variants revealing a fully-realized catalogue of devices and effects,  negotiated with both legerdemain and humour.   Sollima’s own composition refers in its title to an inscription abbreviation that features on 18th century manuscripts from Naples; in its content, the concerto moves between a stringent cantabile mood and hurtling dance rhythms that suggest 20th century dance music, simplified Bartok, and Stravinsky without an editor.   The soloist plays games – walking on after the piece has begun and wandering round the ACO, finding a hole in the floor to put his instrument’s end pin, twirling his cello like a dance partner, racing his accompaniment in stretto passages – and gives himself a breath-stopping series of production hurdles to handle.

It all made for fun times, with the benefit of seeing and hearing a charismatic musician at work.  Sollima makes a fine jewel in this ensemble’s setting; he is all fire and passion, bounding through his work with animal spirits and sensuality, while the ACO keeps its cool, giving strait-laced support for the most part and, while appreciating the skills of their guest, seemingly content to surrender the limelight, even in the hyped-up irregular rhythms of the wilder stretches in the cellist’s own composition.

All the program’s music made up a sort of Italian sequence, beginning with an arrangement for strings (with harpsichord and theorbo providing continuo) of Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa madrigal; pleasant enough as a throat-clearer but quite vapid in effect because the (eventual) movement of the four vocal lines over a four-note cantus firmus loses most of its dramatic punch unless the piece is sung.

Then came some a massive temporal leap and a realization of the program’s title: Berio’s Sequenza VIII for violin and Sequenza XIVb for double bass (originally for cello but produced with the composer’s authorization after his death).   Well, when I say ‘real’, that’s not really true .  What ACO leader Satu Vanska and bass Maxime Bibeau did was play about half of their respective sequenze in alternation, so that the pieces interwove, thereby offering two nodes of concentration at either end of the stage.   Both performers made a fair fist of their semi-pieces, Bibeau more comfortable in negotiating an adventurous gamut of sound-manufacturing techniques although his instrument was over-amplified.  You can see why this fusion was attempted – each work on its own lasts over 13 minutes and that level of concentration on challenging aleatoric music would have been a powerful demand for even the most charitably-minded ACO enthusiast.   But was there really a need to perform both?

Vanska later offered some Paganini: the Introduction and Variations by Paganini on the prayer Dal tuo stellato soglio from Rossini’s opera Moses in Egypt.  One of the great tests on a violinist’s ability to transcend improbable limitations, the work asks the soloist to perform only on the G string.  Vanska gave a good account of this trial, which is much more interesting to watch than to hear, the theme itself enunciated with throbbing strength.   Most of the upper-register filigree came off, apart from a couple of very exposed harmonics; like the Rossini piece, the whole point here is exhibitionism – brilliant technique displayed in throwaway frivolity.

Bibeau also enjoyed another solo spot in Giacinto Scelsi‘s C’est bien la nuit from the 1972 diptych Nuits.  Here was an engrossing reading, music of concentrated vigour and informational intensity that established a cogent voice using limited materials and sustained attention throughout a tantalisingly brief time-span.   This composer’s work is rarely played here; indeed, the few times I’ve heard any Scelsi products occurred many years ago when the ELISION contemporary music ensemble under the benevolent artistic direction of Daryl Buckley was operating in Melbourne.   This brief remembrance of things past came as a standout, an enjoyable surprise in this often-sparkling, sometimes brilliant concert.

Best of partners

cliveoconnell

CINEMUSICA

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall

April 10 & 11, 2016

Best of Partners
                Synergy Percussion

For a collaboration between the ACO and Sydney-based group Synergy Percussion, this program delivered some odd goods, founded a not-quite persuasive backdrop of music written for film.  To be sure, Tognetti and his ACO played some genre-specific samples: a string orchestra suite constructed by Bernard Herrmann from his score to Hitchcock’s Psycho, some extracts arranged by Sydney composer Cyrus Meurant  from Thomas Newman‘s aural backdrop to Sam Mendes’ American Beauty.

But one of Monday night’s more outstanding passages of play had no celluloid connection, as far as I could tell.  Voile for 20 strings by Xenakis served as a fine curtain-raiser to the evening’s miscellany-of-sorts, the ACO players confidently constructing some excellent sound-clusters, their disposition of pitches typified by fearless attack and an almost-nonchalant embrace of the sonic barrage that at times comes close to white noise.  Further, the performers underlined the internal discipline of this score, notably the block chords alternating with ascending and descending close-interval sequences for small pairs and trios of executants.   It made for a bracing overture, too much so for the Hollywood products that followed.

In fact, after the acerbic bite of Xenakis’ final chords in Voile, the signature brusque glissandi swipes that accompany Janet Leigh’s unforgettable shower scene in Psycho sounded pretty tame, not the visceral shocks of 50-plus years ago.   Hermann’s collation is, by his own descriptor, a narrative where he outlines the film’s plot from Marion’s flight with the stolen money to the Bates hotel, her murder and the eventual psychological dysmorphism of Norman  as his mother’s persona takes over. While the score itself, for strings alone, is a formidable construct as a reinforcement of the film’s action, this performance gave the ACO musicians no challenges although the ensemble captured persuasively the three major contrasts of atmosphere and attack that Herrmann used as mini-pillars for this reminiscence-evoking offshoot.

Newman’s soundtrack is reduced to three scenes in Meurant’s arrangement, all suggestive of the film’s action, or lack of it.  Synergy members Timothy Constable, Joshua Hill and Bree van Reyk, along with Bobby Singh‘s tabla, gave a colourful complement to the ACO’s yet-again untroubled strings which invested a well-paced grace in Newman’s score, an oddly touching employment of simple motives intended to suggest the mundane lackadaisical nature of characters involved in psychological stresses behind well-to-do facades.  While this version brought back vague impressions of the film’s emotional character, the visual complements remained amorphous in the memory – well, mine; here, more than at any other time in the concert, you needed either stills or clips to give focus to pages that could be used to illustrate many scenarios in many films.

Another Xenakis finished the program’s first half: Psappha for percussion alone.  Here, the Synergists took to the 1975 score with determination, Hill given the scene-setting opening statement, van Reyk restricted to two timpani and bass drum while Constable enjoyed the most timbral variety.  The composer’s requirements are simple enough: three groups of wood instruments, possibly another of skins, certainly another group of metal.  Ostinati of an unreliable nature with regular and odd accents alternating recur throughout the work’s progress, the most arresting moments long, enervating silences before single, sudden bass drum strokes.  What the work has to do with Sappho, a variant of whose name supplies the work’s title, remains a mystery; nothing to do with the poet’s verse, I’d guess, except possibly in the mathematics of its metrical construction which, without reference to specific texts or arithmetical metadata, preserves its mysteries.

As a central collaboration, both participating bodies ended their concert with Bartok’s Music for Strings Percussion and Celesta; the film connection here coming about through this work’s use in that arch-musical magpie Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and also in Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze’s fantasy of 1999.   Just prior to this, Constable took centre-stage  – and vibraphone? –  for his own Cinemusica, a two-movement reflection on the evening’s content – well, some of it – with focal roles for his Synergy colleagues and Singh.   As the composer intended, the work provides contrasts in emotional impact and colour variety.  Not much remains in the memory some hours later, except a clear affinity with the film score language of Herrmann and Newman: amiable, undemanding, and, in this instance, deftly carried out.

For the Bartok, Neal Peres da Costa provided the celesta voice, Benjamin Martin the piano, Julie Raines on harp and an extra ten strings fleshed out the ACO for the double orchestra required with Synergy percussion making their marks through the required xylophone, snare drum, bass drum, timpani, tam-tam and cymbals.  What we heard was a far cry from the usual glutinous mash, particularly in the fugue opening movement and the high-point to the Adagio.  Taking its cue from the percussion writing, this reading worked towards a clear statement of material throughout, not just in the even-numbered dance movements. For the first time in my live experience of the piece, the antiphonal passages for strings succeeded splendidly, probably because both bodies were evenly split in executive skill, but also because of the integrity of the interpretation where each player slotted into the complex, particularly noticeable in the edgy upper strings; there are no passengers in this ensemble.

In fact, you could catalogue a whole range of specific pleasures to this reading, but the main headings would include the clean-limbed string lines, particularly in moments of maximum interweaving like the build-up in the first movement and the rich peroration that caps the finale; the welding of percussion into the fabric, notably Martin’s piano and van Reyk’s third movement pointillist xylophone; the luminous sound-world conjured up by celesta, harp and piano in the centre and at the end of the work’s central ‘night music’ pages; the whole body’s energetic control of Bartok’s hefty but ever-changing rhythms.

As a collaboration, they don’t come much better than this; the pity is, as others have observed, there’s precious little written for the strings and percussion combination.  Even so, experiences like this open our ears to possibilities, as well as doing the inestimable service of scouring sentimental, vibrato-heavy dross from a vibrant, glittering 80-year-old masterpiece.

East is East and . . .

cliveoconnell

THE FOUR SEASONS

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre

December 9, 2015

Vivaldi_caricature
Caricature of Vivaldi Il prete rosso by Pier Leone Ghezzi                                       (1723)

In virtually identical fashion, the ACO began and ended its Melbourne year with this program built around Vivaldi’s well-worn quartet of violin concertos.  Richard Tognetti roused audience approbation for his vital interpretations of these familiar pages at both last Wednesday’s packed concert and back in the last week of February.  With characteristic mastery, he found refreshing novelties in both tutti passages and solos – heaving the line into faster or slower pace to unsettle expectations, lingering suggestively over chromatic ascents, then abruptly hurtling through whole segments in the Autumn and Winter scores with remarkable rapidity, and always finding a ready response from his associates – a string nonet of ACO regulars, Neal Peres Da Costa oscillating between harpsichord and chamber organ in performing continuo offices, Tommie Andersson also doing dual service on theorbo and guitar.

So far, so fair.  These concerts have a well-earned reputation for rattling cupboards, raising dust, turning on unfiltered lights.  Along with a re-viewing of the season-celebrating evergreens, with two isolated Vivaldi movements from other concertos and a Gabrieli sonata for extra Venetian heft, Tognetti arranged a juxtaposition of European Baroque and contemporary Egyptian through a collaboration with the Tawadros brothers, Joseph playing oud and James on the tambourine-like riq and occasionally the bendir hand-drum.  Not that this musical association is new; both Tawadros musicians have been performing with the ACO for almost 15 years.

But this program proposed a more serious aim than a mirror reflecting culturally differing musical elements.  Tognetti has been looking for a common ground between the worlds of Islam and the Venetian Republic with specific reference to music, given that the inter-relationship certainly existed in artefacts, goods and solid artistic objects, not to mention that trite descriptor of cross-cultural  pollination – cuisine.

But when it comes to music, the influences, one-sided or mutual, prove difficult to track down.  In the end, what this program offered seemed unconvincing, even more so after a second experience.  Joseph’s lute-like instrument served competently in giving an edge to the orchestra’s output, reinforcing Andersson’s timbre if with a more brusque sound-quality, less happy doubling the solo line in several concerto movements.  Joseph’s percussion underpinning, especially in the more bouncy third movements, sounded like an unnecessary adjunct, sadly reminiscent of that inane version of the first Allegro in Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 which was supplied with a drum-kit undertow.  What did the insertion of that percussive supplement add to the Mozartian experience?  Precious little, if anything.   I fear, the same applied to this Vivaldi fusion experience.

Interleaved between the Vivaldi concertos and single movements, Joseph presented seven of his own compositions, episodic constructs with occasional spotlights on ACO players – Tognetti, of course, and bass Maxime Bibeau – but the focus centred consistently on the oud, apart from one extended riq solo to begin Give or Take.   Modal melodies, sprightly metrical set-ups, plenty of unison work for the ACO strings, cadenza-type breaks all helped to create a specific sound-world although I found it hard to differentiate between most of these pieces and what I’ve heard from Turkey and Iran.  Complicating the mix, an Indian influence is inescapable, the riq’s rapidity and ability to produce rapid-fire bursts and semi-complex patterns resembling the tabla in everything but the use of the palm, while the decorative ripples from Joseph’s lute occasionally came very close to a sitar’s enunciation of a raga.

Yet, while both the orchestra and its guests entered into each other’s worlds with that confidence gained through a long-time aesthetic conversation and built on the performing security invested in the last night of a national tour taking in four state capitals,  their respective worlds, their basic languages remained discrete.  In the opening Gabrieli sonata for three violins, it seemed that an attempt was made to give lines an Eastern curve – hesitant, languorous, dynamically restrained – but when all parts were well under way, the Orient disappeared and the instrumental fabric reverted to type.   In the Tawadros pieces, the ACO players sounded as if added on, providing a sound quality that all too often sounded suggestive of an old-fashioned the dansant straight out of Death on the Nile.  When Tognetti took a prominent part, the spectre of Stephane Grappelli and his Hot Club Quintet loomed unnervingly close.   Added to this odd non-Venetian shadow of reminiscence, the works  sometimes began promisingly – the oud solo at the beginning of Point of Departure with suggestions of intriguing irregularities,  a similarly expectation-lifting start to Permission to Evaporate  – but settled for rapid-fire rushes of activity, negotiated with a palette of colours in which eventually you laboured to find points of differentiation, let alone any timbral, melodic, harmonic or rhythmic congruence with the European scores.

Perhaps I’m wrong.  Further exposure to Tawadros’ music may reveal connections with music of the European Mediterranean that are definitely discernible in several parameters.  At present, the links continue to elude. Not that this concerned the rest of the MRC audience, who were fortunate to hear these players in the clear acoustic of the Recital Centre’s Elizabeth Murdoch space rather than at the ACO’s usual theatre of operations in Hamer Hall, as was the case in February.  A well-applied amplification system helped even more in heightening accessibility, particularly during the central movement to Vivaldi’s Autumn where Da Costa filled in its 45 bars with a deftly executed  solo over the semi-static string chords.  More importantly, it put us up-close with the Tawadros brothers’ determined attack and sharp delivery right from their opening Kindred Spirits – one of the concert’s most effective demonstrations of their craft.