Beethoven's 1st, 2nd, 3rd Symphonies with the ACO.

Beethoven is everywhere this year and I have no complaints at all. I can listen to Beethoven any time, anywhere. Today I heard Beethoven's Symphonies 1, 2 and 3 played by the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Anna Melville, Head of Programming with the ACO gave the introductory talk. I am not alone in enjoying her talks and the small presentation room was packed, with people sitting on the floor to listen. She talks about the context in which the music was written and adds a thing  or two about the music that we might otherwise not hear.

Anna Melville presents

ACO members were augmented by wind instrumentalists from the world over, and by students from the Australian National Academy of Music, ANAM. It was heart warming to see each of the young musicians playing beside their mentor. The ACO works extremely hard but they are a happy crew and I can't think of a better way to be introduced to the playing life than as a member of this band.   They were all playing on gut strings, perhaps a first for some of the students, and several disappeared to get strings mended when they broke. (Melville had told us that there is an expert in re-stringing instruments back stage.)

They all played magnificently and the audience was rapt. What a pleasure to know that these young folk have chosen classical music as their career choice. Or perhaps music has chosen them. Right in my line of sight sat ANAM student James Morley with his cello shining yellow in the hall lighting. I couldn't resist making a little sketch as he played.

James Morley with his cello

Celebrating Mozart with the ACO

Whoops, foot stomping and whistles echoed through the Angel Place concert hall last night. It is not really the sort of response Haydn and Mozart pieces normally elicit, but this Australian Chamber Orchestra concert was not the normal ...it was the exceptional. 

Richard Tognetti and pianist Dejan Lazić played solos that made us all feel as if the conversation was with us individually. They were ably supported by the orchestra, augmented by a group of equally good  wind instrumentalists.  How lucky we are in Australia having this exceptional group to play to us.

Bach's Goldberg Variations :

Bach's Goldberg Variations played by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, a concert I heard live then watched several times online. This was one of those uplifting concerts, memorable for their ability to express emotion. One of those concerts you'd love to hear multiple times.

Such concerts are difficult to put into words - thus the nearly four week gap between seeing and writing. Do see it if ever the Australian Chamber Orchestra play it in a hall near you.

Nicole Car and the Australian Chamber Orchestra

 

Nicole Car: songs of suffering

If you sing songs of desperation and despair, and so many opera arias are, you look like this even when, like Nicole Car, you have a winning smile and graceful deportment.

Today Nicole sang songs of Mozart, von Bingen and Beethoven in a very cleverly curated Australian Chamber Orchestra program that included not only the three composers mentioned but Handel, Puccini and Verdi. It was a real treat.

Nicole  got a very enthusiastic reception as did Satu Vänskä who played a short solo on her new violin which has the most remarkable clear sound. I am sure you have to be a virtuoso to elicit this sound from a violin but I was captivated and astonished by this instrument in her hands.

Emmanuel Pahud and the ACO

The hall was dimmed ... just a pinkish light at the back - and then a flutist started playing CPE Bach's Flute Sonata in A minor. It was a lovely way to start a concert.

What was even better was the next piece,  JS Bachs Ricercar a 6 from The Musical Offering played by flute and orchestra.

I have just looked up ricercar:

ricercar

ˌriːtʃəˈkɑː,ˈriːtʃəˌkɑː/

noun

Music

noun: ricercar; plural noun: ricercars; noun: ricercare; plural noun: ricercari

1. an elaborate contrapuntal instrumental composition in fugal or canonic style, typically of the 16th to 18th centuries.

It was a fun and fabulous piece of music and hearing it for the first time I wondered why it is not played more often. Bravo Richard Tognetti for putting it in the program and to the ACO playing it with such verve.  Yes, it was an ACO concert and the flutist was the brilliant Emmanuel Pahud.

Kraggerud and the ACO

Kraggerud in Sydney

There is just something about seeing a musician playing music written by a composer from his/her own country and this week I saw/heard a Norwegian violinist, Henning Kraggerud, playing Grieg with the ACO. It was a fine concert and it made me wonder why nationality makes a difference. A complex question that probably has several answers.

Kraggerud took the opportunity to explain exactly what he and the orchestra were playing to the audience. He got a good reception.

Their last piece, Grieg's String Quartet No 1 in G Major is a piece I know well as I made a movie called Dancing Violins featuring this piece in 2010 at the National Art School in Sydney. When you make an animated movie like this you start from the soundtrack and listen to it, or bits of it, over and over and over again - much as  musician does when practicing a piece.

I used the soundtrack from the Engegård Quartet, a Norwegian Quartet I had just heard at the Maribor Music Festival and who graciously consented to me using their soundtrack.

Dancing Violins

Kraggerud and the ACO played Grieg much as the Engegård Quartet played Grieg, with that indefinable touch that makes you feel as if this is really how the composer heard this music in his own head. 

Satu Vänskä and Locatelli

Today I heard the most extraordinary piece of music. Satu Vänskä played the Locatelli Violin Concerto in D Major at Angel Place Concert Hall in Sydney. It was wonderful inspiring playing of a fiendishly difficult work (I think you have to see it performed to appreciate the achievement) and I would have gone to a second concert just to hear it again but unfortunately today was its last performance. I hope she revives it and tours it elsewhere in future. 

Ruth Crawford Seeger (left)
with sketch of Satu playing her music.

In my opinion Satu is changing  the way people view female performers by scheduling and playing a work such as this. The first piece on the program was the Crawford Seeger's Andante for Strings which somehow underlined the message. Ruth Crawford was creating marvellous music when she married Charles Seeger, became Pete Seeger's step-mother, had children of her own and was then consumed by 'other duties'.

After the Locatelli piece the woman sitting next to me said she was lost for words and I am sure she spoke for many in the audience. 

Go Satu!

Bach Violins Concertos (and Haydn) with the ACO

Playing Haydn

Packed hall, mouse-quiet intent audience, immersed musicians, warmly-felt rousing applause.  This week's evening of Bach and Hayden with the Australian Chamber Orchestra was a winner and the audience was glowing as they left the concert hall.

The Bach Concerto for two violins (Richard Tognetti and Helene Rathbone) and Concerto for three violins (Richard Tognetti, Helene Rathbone and Satu Vanska) were examples of instruments/musicians playing in absolute accord ... but then the whole of the ACO does this with aplomb.

Horns, oboes and bassoon (baroque bassoonist Jane Gower) joined the orchestra for the Haydn. Haydn has to be played really well for me to enjoy it, and this was played really well.

Murder, Redemption and King Roger

One would not normally compare a chamber orchestra with an opera company, but I happened to see the Australian Chamber Orchestra and an Opera Australia production within days of each other this month, so here is my take on them both.

In the nineties OA put on a wide variety of operas from a wide variety of composers with wonderful singers, mostly Australian. It was an exciting company. Then the management changed and every production seemed to be a reality TV show. Perhaps someone thought it was the way to win a younger audience but avid opera fans drifted away. I got a subscription to the Australia Chamber Orchestra instead and discovered a vibrant  band of passionate players who have so enriched my life that I can only thank OA for sending me in their direction.

I had chosen to see Opera Australia's production of King Roger because it was billed as 'something different' but I probably wouldn't have gone to the ACO Murder and Redemption concert if I had not had a series subscription because it included American folk songs and I couldn't imagine how they could be combined successfully with a classical offering. So I expected more from one concert than the other.

Unfortunately I found King Roger underwhelming. The music itself is worth hearing, but I found the production too similar to other over-sexualised or pop-culture OA offerings. The program notes described how the composer Szymanowski struggled with his homosexuality, so a reference to this would have been understandable, but the surfeit of writhing and thrusting male dancers that was presented made me feel as if I was watching an American sitcom where every facial gesture is overdone. My seat-neighbour was similarly under-impressed, telling me he had seen the Edinburgh version which interpreted the opera as the struggle of transformation. It sounded like the one I would have preferred to see. I have seen several concert performances of opera since I gave up my AO subscription and find them much more satisfying than overblown productions.  I read however that the current La Traviata is a winner, so perhaps I shall have to give OA another try. 

In comparison, Murder and Redemption with Finnish violin-wizard Pekko Kuusisto leading the ACO way overshot my expectations. Folk songster Sam Amidon sang his songs with becoming naturalness (in  the best American folk song tradition) but what surprised me was how they complemented the classical pieces by Janacek and John Adams.

I am not sure why exactly, but Amidon's songs gave the ACO's passionate version of Adam's Shaker Loops a special zing.

The ACO has exceptional curatorial skills and  this program was just another example.

I sat there wishing I had brought my 17 year old music friend with me.  If you want to induce that generation to go to a classical concert, this was the sort of music you would choose.

Music with Aiko Goto and ACO musicians

A weekend listening to Australian Chamber Orchestra musicians is a weekend to appreciate.

On Saturday last Aiko Goto gave a violin recital with pianist Ian Munro. This is the third Goto solo recital I have heard and I think she only gets better. Not only is she a whizz on the violin, she is a little package of charm and much loved by her audiences.

Ex-convict prison: the marks where the stairs went up to
higher levels are visible on the end wall.

 Then on Sunday I attended a Mozart/Beethoven concert given by five ACO members in the former women's convict prison, now National Art School lecture theatre.

I studied there a few years back and heard a lot of lectures there but I never 'saw' the prisoners in my mind's eye as I did last Sunday. The building has massive sandstone walls and must have been a dark forbidding place when the internal walls were still there. They were removed and a new roof installed when the building was rescued from dereliction after WW2.

ACO musicians play Mozart

I hope the time/space warp makes it possible for lovely music to travel backwards and lighten the burden of the poor women who were incarcerated there. Theirs must have been a sad existence indeed.

ACO and Sollima: Sequenza Ilaliana

Impassioned, fun, fabulous, mesmerizing. Yes, all of those things describe the Sequenza Italiana concert given by musicians of the Australian Chamber Orchestra with visiting cello-virtuoso Giovanni Sollima. I sat in the concert wishing everyone I knew could be with me watching this passionate and competent group of people.

Maxime Bibeau (Double Bass) and Satu Vänskä (Violin) played sequenza by Berio, pieces written specifically for their instruments and intertwined by the players to make a fascinating whole. Bravo Max and Satu! Satu later played a piece by Paganini, relaxed and happy and with her flying fingers showing us just how lucky we are to have her here in Australia. 

Giovanni Sollima plays cello like no other

When Sollima played I wished all the under 20's of my acquaintance could be with me. They would

have learned in a single concert the fun and joy of classical music.

Sollima plays every part of his instrument, not only the strings but the wood and even strut that holds his cello from the floor. I think he'd play the music stand if he had one. The interesting thing is that it doesn't seem contrived. The sounds he produces from wood and metal are different from those produced by the strings and are an essential part of his composition. By the time his piece finishes it doesn't seem strange that he is playing the instrument as a whole, wood, metal and strings.

I wrote yesterday about my pre-concert experience and to have it followed by a captivating concert such as this, well you can see why I was lost for words. All I can say is that it was a day I shall not forget.

Riveting playing by the Australian Chamber Orchestra

The Australian Chamber Orchestra is a phenomenon.

Last week I saw them play a concert of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven's Grosse Fuge and was reminded anew that a passionate, technically brilliant and astutely lead group of musicians can translate masterpieces into listening experiences that give one a glimpse into eternity. Music is one of the ways we can reach outside of our world, so I don't think it is hyperbole to talk of eternity.

As I sat listening, I felt so very grateful that this group of consummate professionals is willing to subordinate their other pleasures to a life of practice and study, enabling their audiences to travel outside of themselves, see meaning where they thought there was none and take courage to live. If you think I am using extreme language, go and see them and hear for yourself.

Chamber Music in Melbourne

Rebecca Chan  is a remarkable musician whom I had heard as part of the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) which she was a member of for five years and then as the violin part of the Australia Piano Quartet which I think is one of the best young classical groups in Australia.

When I knew I would be in Melbourne last weekend I looked to see what classical concerts were on and discovered that Chan would be playing as part of the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra virtuosi series in Moonie Ponds which is on a direct train line not far from inner Melbourne.

Moonie Ponds was Dame Edna Everidge's home town and on Friday it did her proud. The music was fabulous, but I found it hard to concentrate in the first half because my neighbour shared her hand cream with her mother just before the lights dimmed and the coconut scent became very overpowering as the cream warmed on their hands. After interval I took a seat towards the back, unfortunately too near a couple of women who didn't realise their comments could be heard over the music.

The only thing to do after frustration like that is to hear some more music as soon as possible and luckily for me the ACO was performing a program called 'Cinemusica' on Sunday afternoon. The ACO always seems to be able to stretch our imaginations and yesterday they were performing with Synergy Percussion, a group billed as being Australia's oldest and foremost contemporary music ensembles. It was a well curated program played with panache .... and no one near me applied hand cream or talked during the performance. I knew to appreciate it.

ACO celebrates with Mozart

Richard Tognetti is celebrating 25 years
as artistic director of the ACO*

If you want to hear an inspired Mozart played by an inspired orchestra, go and hear the Australian Chamber Orchestra celebrate their 40th birthday. They are touring Mozart's Last Symphonies.

I went to the concert yesterday and it's a winner.  Three symphonies in one concert (two you have certainly heard before and one I wish we heard more often) and all of them foot-stompingly good!

* the photo is from the ACO program (slightly altered - I added a little colour to the sparkler ... )

\

Ravel, Ravel

I discovered on Friday at the ACO concert that Ravel's music puts me to sleep.  The concert was well played and well sung but pre-interval was all Ravel and I had difficulty suppressing yawns. I usually sit with baited breath in classical concerts and leave on a high that takes hours to recede, so it was a novel experience to hear classical music through other ears. 'This', I thought, 'must be what classical music sounds like for those who say they don't like it.'

After the interval Susan Graham sang Respighi and I am very glad she did as it was more dramatic and suddenly I was awake and listening properly to her beautiful voice. I would have like to have  heard more, but it was not to be, as a Piano Quintet by César Franck followed (which I also enjoyed).

Maurice Ravel

Ottorino Respighi

César Franck

I was a bit dumbfounded by my reaction to Ravel's music so I did a bit of research to see if it is a musical period that fails to inspire me. Ravel wrote in what is now called the Impressionistic period (late 19th, early 20th century) but Debussy is also an impressionistic composer and I like his piano tinklings.

Although I don't dislike Debussy's music I don't play it when I paint. Bach, Beethoven, Wagner or Britten's music are conducive to painting for me. There is something in the structure of the music that seems to help the painting process. I find Vivaldi and Handel neutral but I cannot paint to Mozart or Debussy. (Mozart's Idomeneo is the exception - I love the music and would happily paint while it is playing.)

There is a lot written about colour and what it does to our psyche; perhaps we need some scholarly articles about music and it's effect on our emotional balance as well.

Old wood and music

Matai 

Walnut

My father loved wood and eventually became a wood turner. At the bottom of each piece he wrote the species of wood he had used. You could often guess the species as the colour of the wood was similar to the fruit, for example apricot wood has an orange hue.



I thought of that on Friday as I watched Maxime Bibeau play his new honey-coloured double bass. I think must have been made by bees. Bibeau says it was made in the late sixteen century but that some of the wood in the instrument can be traced back to 1266. My Dad would have loved that idea as a lot of people brought him wood for turning and he had a large selection, some of it very aged (though not 750 years). 

Bottesini (above)
Bibeau sketch (below)

Bibeau's new 'old' double bass is not only beautiful, it has the vocal range of a whole orchestra. We are used to hearing the double bass as bass, baritone or sometimes perhaps as tenor. On Friday we heard her soprano range and it is quite extraordinary.

The ACO Mostly Mendelssohn concert included the Grand Duo Concertante for Double Bass and Violin by Bottesini (1821-1889). You could tell Bottesini must have been a bass virtuoso himself as only an accomplished bass player would know how to produce the high notes required in this piece. Stefan Jackiw played violin and at times it was difficult to tell which instrument was playing which part. Watching these two virtuosic musicians play extraordinary music, accompanied by the always-able ACO was a real pleasure.

ACO and Gallipoli

ACO Gallipoli concert (from ACO website)

The latest Australian Chamber Orchestra concert, Reflections on Gallipoli, depicts the horrors of first World War so graphically that is is hard to sit through. Soldier's letters are read by two actors, one of them an Australian with Turkish background. (Congratulations Director Neil Armfield.)

The Western and Turkish musical selections accompanying the readings are inspired as is the singing of soprano Taryn Fiebig.

A series of photos from the conflict is projected on a huge screen behind the musicians and as you watch one face after the next, both allied troops and Turkish forces, you can't help remembering the diggers and their refusal to take part in the glorification of war, much to the chagrin of modern war mongers.

We are continually told that the Anzac spirit defines Australia's national identity and we  remember and revere Gallipoli heroes each Anzac day. As a recent twitter post pointed out, it is ironic that we are now told that the current crop of  passionate men who want to fight in foreign lands are a threat to us all.

ACO, Four Seasons, Joseph Tawadros

The Australian Chamber Orchestra has released a new CD - The Four Seasons. Why would you want another four seasons CD you ask yourself? Well, listen to this one and you may decide you do.

Joseph Tawadros plays Oud

I heard the ACO Four Seasons concert yesterday and it is a beaut; a collaboration with Joseph Tawadros who composes for and plays the Oud (Egyptian string instrument) and his percussionist brother James Tawadros who played the Riq', which is like a small tambourine.

Put a group of virtuosic players in a room together and this concert is what you get. It is energetic and obviously fun for all participants. That makes it even more fun for the audience who leave the hall smiling and humming.

The concert is touring Australian east coast cities through February ... catch them if you can.

Anthony Marwood's Serenade in Sydney

Anthony Marwood playing Enescu

A concert hall was a good place to be in Sydney yesterday with temperatures of 33-38C forecast and listening to star-violinist Anthony Marwood play with the ACO was a particular pleasure.

They played Stravinsky, then a very beautiful Serenade for Strings in E Major by Dvořák. Truly a serenade.

The second half of the program was the Octet by Enescu. Marwood is championing music by Enescu and when you hear the Octet you understand why. It is romantic and dramatic and well worth a place in the repertoire.

Marwood and the ACO are playing around Australia until the end of November.

Sollima and the ACO

Giovanni Sollima
Sketched while he played at the
Maribor Festival, 2011

The ACO is touring with crack cellist Giovanni Sollima. I saw them last week and they give a concert you will never forget. If you have a chance to see them, then do go.

Sollima and his cello are the most extraordinary phenomenon, welded together they sing and cry and poke fun. You watch and listen, laugh and cry and fall into a swoon.

If you need more convincing, here is a link to Sollima playing a piece he wrote and plays with Monika Leskovar.