Tag: Molly Kadarauch

Cup half full

cliveoconnell

SAX AND SENSITIVITY

The Melbourne Musicians

St John’s Southgate

Sunday May 22, 2016

Things were fair enough in this latest subscription series concert from Frank Pam and his string chamber orchestra, as long as the body kept within its means, as the Federal Treasurer is currently encouraging us to do.   The afternoon opened with an arrangement of Begli occhi, merce, the most (only?) popular aria by Antonio Tenaglia.   Pretty well known in arrangement form, this F minor slow-mover gave the Musicians no troubles, but then it is the sort of thing a competent player could handle at sight, included here as a warm-up to prepare the ground for harder matter.

Molly Kadarauch

                                                                                 Molly Kadarauch

Molly Kadarauch gave a driving account of the solo in C.P.E. Bach’s first Cello Concerto in A minor, the only one of the composer’s three that seems to get much ventilation.   The Musicians began with plenty of punch, although the tempo could have been quickened with benefit, notably to relieve the impression of stolidity rather than mobility.  Kadarauch was on the same wave-length, however, and urged her line with high intensity, using the busily Romantic double-stopped and chord-packed cadenzas of Friedrich Grutzmacher to transfer us momentarily into the world of Dvorak’s cello.  Even the central Andante sounded stormy and stressed rather than a C Major haven.  Some of the orchestral detail went walkabout, particularly a tendency to read the finale’s dotted-quaver-semiquaver patterns as triplet-based.  Still, the reading held interest through its bravado and lack of affectation.

I wasn’t sure that much was gained by an encore, in this case Bloch’s Prayer, the first section of the popular From Jewish Life suite.  It gave Kadarauch a chance to orate a slow-moving melody line full of melting melismata and a line-up of the composer’s expected tropes reminiscent of the Schelomo Hebraic Rhapsody, but it sat oddly alongside the discipline of the concerto’s framework.

After interval, another guest appeared: Justin Kenealy, leading the Glazunov Saxophone Concerto of 1934.   All in one movement, the work has no trace of jazz suggestions or the seedy world of Weill and the contemporarily composed Berg’s Lulu; indeed, the composer treats his soloist like any other woodwind, although one with a dominant voice. What strikes you, in fact, is that the soloist has so few moments of rest, as though Glazunov wants the interpreter kept busily at work in such a short-framed construct, and so the saxophone makes all the running, apart from some obvious interpolations during the last movement’s progress when the soloist takes a few bars break while the strings articulate the themes’ basic elements.

This solo-domination was just as well as the ensemble laboured in the faster-moving tuttis, some of the violins not quite getting on top of their notes and the texture liable to thin out as things got tricky.  However, Kenealy made a fine exponent of this rarity – well, rare in local exposure terms although it features large in the instrument’s repertoire – with a cogent outline of the central cadenza and a pretty jaunty approach to the outer sections of this free-flowing last flower of the composer’s solidly Tory talent.

To finish, conductor Pam attempted to flesh out the Russian side of this program with the Shostakovich Sinfonia, a string orchestration of the composer’s String Quartet No. 8 Op. 110 organised by the American double-bass expert Lucas Drew, rather than the traditional version transcribed by Rudolf Barshai..  An ambitious undertaking, this score was often beyond the players’ competence.  Even during the opening Largo, the uniformity of articulation was suspect, the upper strings’ overall attack tentative.

Matters improved in the following harsh Allegro molto where the slashing accents and driving thematic insistence came close to acceptable.  But the last Largo was a mess;  I don’t know where but someone jumped the gun – hard to do in this slow-moving elegy – and, to finish the afternoon with some coherence, Pam had his players repeat it.  Rather than an emotionally wrenching experience, I think many of us were relieved to get to the Sinfonia‘s end and then look forward to the next program from this band on Sunday July 17 at MLC: those tried-and-true familiar entities the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4 and Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4 provide the main elements.

Jokey American, sombre Czech

cliveoconnell

BRAVE NEW WORLDS

Sutherland Trio

Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

November 24, 2015

Sutherland Trio

Pairing the Ives Piano Trio with Dvorak’s  F minor No. 3 presented something of a surprise in this latest recital at the MRC from an estimable ensemble of Melbourne musicians: violin Elizabeth Sellars, cello Molly Kadarauch, piano Caroline Almonte.   While the Czech composer pours out a chain of luxuriant melodies tinged if not infused with folk-song suggestions, the American’s one essay in the form leavens his love of dissonance with a strong melodic current running through its outer movements, atypically diatonic in the concluding Moderato con moto where the spectre of 19th century Romanticism looms unexpectedly large.

It wouldn’t be Ives without contrasts and the trio’s central Presto makes a relentless, eventually unnerving amalgam of non-original melodic fragments that lead to a critical climax which exhausts the ears through simple informational overload reinforced by forceful dynamic levels.  Ives might have intended a brand of levity by naming the movement TSIAJ (This Scherzo is a joke) but the humour is fierce, a case of piling Pelion upon Ossa where the references to hymns and popular tunes weld into a massive complex, extraordinarily dense given the small sound resources employed.

Dvorak’s trio  stands as one of the master’s more dramatically consistent chamber music constructs, particularly for its substantial first movement’s grandiose sweep and developmental density.  Despite many caveats, the influence of Brahms remains consistent throughout; open to a page of the first Allegro‘s development and the actual physical aspect of the score makes you look twice.  Yes, you can also point to irregular metrical structures that the older writer would not have used but the textural variety offers many grounds for complementary comparison. Further, the writing for piano is often as clangorously dominant in effect as in an early-to-mid period Brahms chamber work.

The Sutherlands made fine exponents of the Ives trio,  Kadarauch giving the first movement’s opening duo section plenty of wide-ranging eloquence, followed in similar form by Sellars when her turn to outline the 27 bars of material came around.  For that helter-skelter scherzo, the effect was of diving in with suspenseful energy, the players beavering at their responsibilities without drawing breath.  This is the Ives sound as many people find it – ignoring the lashings of broad, singing simplicity to be found in the symphonies, violin sonatas, string quartets and tone sets sitting alongside the polytonal, polyrhythmic, poly-polyphonic, multi-textural collages of the Three Pieces in New England or the jagged piano writing of the Three Page and Concord Sonatas.  Here the impetus came from Almonte’s keyboard which, as required, often threw the two strings into low relief.

Ives moves into a less frenetic world for his finale, the language kept simple and accessible with lengthy paragraphs of interwoven mesh, the whole reaching the composer’s individual vision of the transcendental in a sequence of concluding variants on Rock of Ages, a meditation here played with care and requisite placidity: a passage that you wished could go on and on.

The Dvorak trio also enjoyed more of a clenched-teeth style of interpretation,  Almonte finding plenty of resonance in the outer movements, which featured passages where Kadarauch’s cello was kept well-recessed.  Still, you would be hard to please if you found the focal Poco adagio deficient: Sellars and Kadaurach combining in the canonic melody-lines with fine sympathy, all performers at their most persuasive in the B Major middle segment where the dark tenor of the work dissipates for a time.

In fact, the main problem with this interpretation came from an underlining of its already sombre character.  While the Ives presented sonorous challenges and consolatory ease in turns, this Dvorak impressed as over-determined, so that the twists into and out of action in the concluding Allegro lacked a balance between heft and lightness, the impact  more of a relentless drive.  Dvorak was living through emotional stress at this time but I think that this interpretation hammered that historical  message with excessive vigour in the score’s two supporting outer pillars.