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.

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!

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.

Satu Vänskä and Sibelius

Satu Vänskä plays

We have heard some wonderful playing this week at the Maribor Music Festival, not least Satu Vänskä who played us a violin marathon, the Sibelius Violin Concerto in D Minor.

Seeing a Finn, this Finn particularly, playing Sibelius was a treat.

Richard Egarr, Satu Vänskä and the ACO

Harpsichord waiting for Egarr to appear

Baroque music. Somehow the name sounds so staid, as if the music might be constrained by tight corsets. Women did wear corsets in the 16th and 17th century but there was an exuberance in fashion at that time and if  the baroque concert I heard yesterday is any indication, that is what we should judge the music by.

Baroque music expert Richard Egarr conducted from the keyboard, or keyboards actually because he played three 'old' instruments.

Richard Egarr (from ACO website)

Egarr is a pleasure of a man, explaining to his delighted audience what they should be listening for in the context of the time and teasing the orchestra by his unexpected improvisations which is, he said, exactly what baroque musicians would have done. (In Melbourne a mobile phone went off and Egarr reportedly improvised to include the mobile tune in his playing.) The Australian Chamber Orchestra, who accompanied him obviously enjoyed Egarrs theatrical flourishes and whimsical  improvisations.

Another great pleasure of the concert was hearing ACO Principal Violin Satu Vänskä play the solo lead in Bach's Concerto for Violin in A minor. She  has the most malleable right arm of any violinist I have seen. It flows in a mesmerisingly fluid dance as she plays. She reminded me of a weeping willow in the second movement, swaying and bending as she played. She was supported by the delicate and precise playing of her ACO colleagues and it made me feel like weeping.