Category Archives: Live Performance

Australian String Quartet

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Australian String Quartet

Perth Concert Hall

reviewed by Neville Cohn 

 

 

The Australian String Quartet often leavens its programs with works well off the beaten track – and its first offering for 2004 included two compositions which only very rarely make an appearance on the bill as well as the Perth premiere of Roger Smalley’s Piano Quintet with the composer at the keyboard.

The centenary of Dvorak’s death in 1904 is being marked worldwide by performances of his music. Throughout 2004, the ASQ will be programming a number of his works. Cypresses was originally conceived as a set of love songs, and the ASQ gave us a re-working for string quartet of four of the eighteen songs. Unsurprisingly, they are strong on melody, tenderness and ardour and, despite the youth of the composer, they already provide incontrovertible evidence of Dvorak’s instantly recognisable style; his musical fingerprints are all over it. This set of four miniatures was presented with trade-mark beauty of tone and precise intonation.

As well, we heard Stravinsky’s Three Pieces of which Canticle was especially memorable not least for its evocation of mysterious, creepy, mist-shrouded vistas. And Eccentric, inspired by famed clown “Little Tich” was, at times, reduced to almost Webernian proportions.

Beethoven’s Rasumovsky Quartet, opus 59 no 2 is one of the glories of the chamber music repertoire and the ASQ rose magnificently to its challenges. Adapting chameleon-like to its every nuance, they breathed life and meaning into this masterpiece.

For sheer expressive range and depth, smoothness of corporate tonal sheen and fidelity to the notes,the ASQ are clearly frontrunners in international terms. For lengthy stretches of its performance, the playing was of such lofty standard that it was beyond criticism in conventional terms and needing little more than an acknowledgement of highest interpretative – and technical – excellence. Offerings at this level explain the golden opinions garnered by the ensemble during its tours across China, Hong Kong, Germany and Britain last year.

The program presented at the Concert Hall has been toured through Australia in the company of Roger Smalley who played the keyboard part in his recently completed Piano Quintet,
given its Perth premiere on Tuesday. In common with some of his earlier work, Smalley has taken inspiration from a Chopin mazurka, in this case opus 68 no 4 in F minor, fragments of which appear, phantom-like, in the scherzo. Much of the latter is informed by a sense of urgency; the mood is rather dark, even threatening, with its peremptory knockings as if demanding entry at a door that remains firmly closed.

The overture movement, on first encounter, comes across as an essay in musical turmoil, with note streams that rush this way and that with strongly emphatic statements from the strings. And in the finale, the players presented a series of variations that include a charming, Viennese-type waltz, a scherzo with rapid, high-treble tinklings, a little barcarolle with an intriguing rhythmic lurch and a rather jolly polonaise. But, on first hearing, some of the variations seemed rather too brief, and not allowed sufficient time for their individual characters to register as satisfyingly as might otherwise have been the case.

Copyright Neville Cohn 2004


Australian String Quartet

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Australian String Quartet

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

Perth Concert Hall

23.3.2004
The Australian String Quartet often leavens its programs with works well off the beaten track – and its first offering for 2004 included two compositions which only very rarely make an appearance on the bill as well as the Perth premiere of Roger Smalley’s Piano Quintet with the composer at the keyboard.

The centenary of Dvorak’s death in 1904 is being marked worldwide by performances of his music. Throughout 2004, the ASQ will be programming a number of his works. Cypresses was originally conceived as a set of love songs, and the ASQ gave us a re-working for string quartet of four of the eighteen songs. Unsurprisingly, they are strong on melody, tenderness and ardour and, despite the youth of the composer, they already provide incontrovertible evidence of Dvorak’s instantly recognisable style; his musical fingerprints are all over it. This set of four miniatures was presented with trade-mark beauty of tone and precise intonation.

As well, we heard Stravinsky’s Three Pieces of which Canticle was especially memorable not least for its evocation of mysterious, creepy, mist-shrouded vistas. And Eccentric, inspired by famed clown “Little Tich” was, at times, reduced to almost Webernian proportions.

Beethoven’s Rasumovsky Quartet, opus 59 no 2 is one of the glories of the chamber music repertoire and the ASQ rose magnificently to its challenges. Adapting chameleon-like to its every nuance, they breathed life and meaning into this masterpiece.

For sheer expressive range and depth, smoothness of corporate tonal sheen and fidelity to the notes,the ASQ are clearly frontrunners in international terms. For lengthy stretches of its performance, the playing was of such lofty standard that it was beyond criticism in conventional terms and needing little more than an acknowledgement of highest interpretative – and technical – excellence. Offerings at this level explain the golden opinions garnered by the ensemble during its tours across China, Hong Kong, Germany and Britain last year.

The program presented at the Concert Hall has been toured through Australia in the company of Roger Smalley who played the keyboard part in his recently completed Piano Quintet,
given its Perth premiere on Tuesday. In common with some of his earlier work, Smalley has taken inspiration from a Chopin mazurka, in this case opus 68 no 4 in F minor, fragments of which appear, phantom-like, in the scherzo. Much of the latter is informed by a sense of urgency; the mood is rather dark, even threatening, with its peremptory knockings as if demanding entry at a door that remains firmly closed.

The overture movement, on first encounter, comes across as an essay in musical turmoil, with note streams that rush this way and that with strongly emphatic statements from the strings. And in the finale, the players presented a series of variations that include a charming, Viennese-type waltz, a scherzo with rapid, high-treble tinklings, a little barcarolle with an intriguing rhythmic lurch and a rather jolly polonaise. But, on first hearing, some of the variations seemed rather too brief, and not allowed sufficient time for their individual characters to register as satisfyingly as might otherwise have been the case.

Copyright Neville Cohn 2004

 


Equinox Quarry Room, Joondalup Resort

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Equinox

 

Quarry Room, Joondalup Resort

reviewed by Olive Mountbatten

On a stiflingly hot day, one of the most oppressive of a summer that’s been around too long, concert organisers wisely opted to change the venue for Equinox’s concert from outdoors to the blissful, air-conditioned comfort of the Resort’s Quarry Room. And even if 11:30am is perhaps a less-than-ideal time of day to present a program largely devoted to tangos (music that for many, if not most, followers is inextricably associated with the night), the ensemble – Cathie Travers (accordion), Jessica Ipkendanz (violin), Mark Shanahan (guitar) and Pete Jeavons (double bass) – set to with a will.

This was a generous compilation that was largely devoted to the music of tango meister Astor Piazzolla (whose music Travers has done more than anyone locally to make available to a large audience) but included items by other composers, including Zequinha Abreu whose Tico Tico, the 1943 evergreen piano hit that seems never to have lost its charms for both musicians and listeners (and is considered in some quarters to have its source in a section of the finale of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 1!).

Of the Piazzolla pieces, I particularly liked the Equinox tango band’s account of Milonga del Angel, unfolding, as it did, in an introverted, dreamy way that irresistibly evoked images of couples drifting languidly across some inner city dance floor. And in Adios Nonino, Ipkendanz’s violin sang with great feeling and warm tone; this was some of the most haunting, bittersweet music of the recital. Michelangelo at 70, too, held the attention with its rushing violin glissandi that sounded like cries. I liked, too, Richard Galiano’s New York Tango, given altogether appropriate, blazingly intense treatment ­ and the near-mesmeric throbbing of Piazzolla’s Libertango.

This concert was given in the context of the Joondalup Festival.

Copyright Olive Mountbatten 2004


Songs of Love and Death (Olivier Messiaen)

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Gweneth-Ann Jeffers (soprano)
Cedric Tiberghien (piano)

                                                                Winthrop Hall

 

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

Messiaen’s Songs of Love and Death is ideal festival fare. It is a towering masterpiece. But it is hardly ever heard ‘live’ outside the world’s more important music centres. At any one time, there would not be more than the merest handful of musicians able to cope meaningfully with its immense physical and interpretative demands. So there was a very real sense of occasion at this performance of the song cycle by Gweneth-Ann Jeffers and Cedric Tiberghien at Winthrop Hall. And those hardy souls who braved one of the hottest, steamiest days of the year to attend this lunch-time even were well rewarded. By even the most most stringent of critical criteria, Jeffers and Tiberghien gave us a recital to remember – and for all the right reasons.

This was Tiberghien’s first festival appearance – and he came through with flying colours. His command of the piano is phenomenal, his ability to adapt to even the subtlest aspects of Jeffers’ vocal line a source of wonder.
Becomingly gowned in pale turquoise, Jeffers, whose versatility is astonishing and who, in technical wizardry, could fairly be described as the vocal equivalent of a Vladimir Horowitz, steered a near-immaculate way, without any visible or audible strain, through one of the most ferociously difficult musical obstacle courses ever devised.

But if Messiaen’s epic is tough on musicians, it is no less so, in a different way, of course, on listeners. Songs of Love and Death is not easily absorbed, not the sort of work to relax to after a tough day at the office. Just as a crowd-scene painted by, say, Breughel, needs focussed attention to absorb its swarming detail with all the satisfaction that that entails, so, too, does Songs of Love and Death in its very different way, music profoundly influenced by the mediaeval legend of Tristan and Isolde, most widely known in Wagner’s operatic treatment of the story. But compared with the demands made on the listener by Messiaen’s work, Wagner’s opera, relatively speaking, is a walk-over because if, in Songs of Love and Death, focus is allowed to weaken (on the part of the listener), if attention is allowed to wander, the thread to can easily be lost and difficult to retrieve and the result can be bewildering rather than enlightening. But how rewarding this can be if the eye is kept on the ball, so to speak. This was an immensely satisfying performance.

Songs of Love and Death, written in 1945, has many of Messiaen’s musical fingerprints, such as fantastically clever notation of bird song which Tiberghien delineated faultlessly as his hands moved up and down the keyboard as nonchalantly as if dusting the furniture And with what confidence and brilliance of tone he played Messiaen’s trade-mark coruscations of notes, including note-clusters that so wonderfully suggest the glitter of stars, bursts of light or various states of ecstacy. And in Doundo tchil, the fourth of this cycle of twelve songs, the piano accompaniment sounds uncannily like the music of Debussy – and Tiberghien played it with all the authority and fluency one associates with Gieseking in his prime.

Jeffers was no less impressive in Montagnes, producing a stream of finely fashioned, velvet-smooth sound from the lower register of the vocal range. The text, incidentally, while mainly in French, also has lines in Quecha, an ancient South American language. Here, and throughout, Jeffer’s ability to focus on swarming, felicitous detail without losing sight of the cycle as an over-arching entity was hugely impressive. The same could certainly be said of Tiberghien who strikes me as the most superbly equipped of pianists interpreting Messiaen I have ever encountered since last hearing Thomas Rajna’s account of Vingt Regards, that other colossal Messiaen opus.

© 2004


BATAVIA (Richard Mills)

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W.A.Opera Company and Chorus (in association with Opera Australia)

His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth

 

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

Visually spectacular, bristling with violence, seething with sexual undercurrents of the ugliest sort, Batavia, on these counts, is a largely successful essay in verismo opera. The purists, of course, may object to a story line that does not follow the historical record precisely. But, in the operatic canon, there are innumerable precedents for this bending of the truth in the interests of dramatic impact.

Certainly, the production, from these points of view, is offered in such engrossing terms that it might well prompt those coming new to this story to seek out more about one of the most horrific maritime occurrences of the mid-17th century.

And for those who, such as myself, grew up in South Africa, the Batavia tale would have resonated strongly; all schoolchildren there would routinely and rigorously be taught how intrepid Dutch mariners led by Jan van Riebeeck, established a fruit and vegetable garden (in what would eventually become Cape Town) as a stop-off point for taking on water and fresh food by Dutch vessels rounding the Cape of Good Hope on their way to the Indies to collect cargos of spices. Certainly, the VOC emblem, initials for the Dutch East India Company which financed these voyages of discovery and commerce, was everywhere apparent onstage.

The story line of Batavia is, very briefly, this: on its way to the Indies, Batavia is shipwrecked off the west coast of Australia. Most on board survive. The authority of the ship’s captain, disabled by illness, is usurped by a clique who resort to sexual violence and murder while a small group of survivors sets out in a tiny boat to seek help which eventually arrives – but too late to save the lives of murdered innocents. The ringleaders are tried and there is terrible judicial retribution.

It’s a story of horror that cries out for operatic treatment. And for much of the time – and notwithstanding a libretto that at times sounds curiously stilted – there’s little to tone down this violent tale of shipwreck, death, survival and revenge. There is, in fact, such emphasis on horror that the presentation at times appears more an essay in grand guignol than grand opera. This was so much the case that one turned, as if to a refuge, to brief episodes of tenderness, most of these to the strains of a small baroque ensemble – moments that registered all the more strongly for their brevity. These were in stark contrast to scenes involving the deliberate drowning of a crew member and the cold blooded murder of two children, not to mention wanton rape of defenceless women.

How gratifying it must have been for the musicians of the W.A.Symphony Orchestra to play, for once, in the expanded pit of His Majesty’s instead of, as has more usually been the case, having to squeeze into its cramped confines like sardines in a can. This would surely have been a factor that positively influenced the way it performed. The brass section, in particular, was much on its mettle, not only in the pit but, from time to time, taking up positions at opposite ends of the dress circle which brought a neat stereophonic quality to the proceedings.

Richard Mills has produced a technically skilled score, unsurprisingly, because over time he has developed a fine understanding of instrumentation. There is little in the form of set-piece arias here, little in melodic terms, little that could be described as catchy. And for all the care with which it was listened to, I cannot say – this on the basis of a single hearing – that any of the opera’s musical ideas imprinted themselves so strongly on the consciousness that they lingered on to any significant degree after the conclusion of the work. This reinforces a view that it was the visual dimension of the work with its fine re-creation of 17th-century Dutch clothing, Rory Dempster’s excellent lighting design as well as the directorial skill, everywhere apparent, of Lindy Hume, not least for her imaginative and effective deployment of her forces, that left the most enduring impression. Certainly, the visual element was so overwhelming that, for a good deal of the imte, it overwhelmed the music and monopolised the attention. But, for those for whom lavish spectacle is important, Batavia will not disappoint, not least for an epic shipwreck scene as the ship disintegrates in heavy seas off the Abrolhos Islands. For sheer spectacle, this was an episode of which even Cecil B. de Mille would have been proud.

No less successful is Dan Potra’s inspired design of the ship’s interior that brings a striking sense of time, place and atmosphere to the proceedings.

I dare say the work will eventually be placed on compact disc – and this, divorced from visual distraction, would allow the music to be listened to the exclusion of all else; it would be the acid test from an aural perspective.

In purely vocal terms, soprano Emma Matthews was perfectly cast, clearly fulfilling the rich promise of early years. She takes top honours, entirely convincing as Zwaantie Hendricx. Persuasive in technical terms – her rapid, high register arabesques were an object lesson in how to do this sort of thing impressively – she could hardly be faulted. And she was no less convincing in acting terms as a wanton, lascivious woman getting her kicks from schadenfreude at its worst. Another excellent contribution in both vocal and histrionic terms, was Anke Hoppner as Lucretia; the probity of the latter character was finely evoked in both vocal and theatrical terms. As the evil Jeronimus, Michael Lewis’ portrayal of a feral, amoral man creating horrific havoc was spot on. So, too, was Jamie Allen as the violent and murderous Conraat van Huyssen, Jeronimus’ dastardly co-mutineer. Quite unintentionally, I am sure, Allen and Lewis, in stage make up and costume, looked so strikingly alike that at times it required close attention to determine who was playing whom. As ship’s captain, Bruce Martin brings customary seriousness of purpose to his role. As the predikant (minister), Timothy DuFore gives a richly rounded performance as a man in turn anguished and opportunistic, whose moral standards are questionable. Elizabeth Campbell, reliable as always, does well in the role of the predikant’s wife. And Barry Ryan as Wiebbe Hayes, cuts a rather stiff figure but sang commendably.

In the rapidity with which civilised norms corrode, how the veneer of so-called civilisation can crumble to be replaced by barbarism, the Batavia tale has striking parallels with Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s novel about the descent into savagery by a group of school boys marooned on an island.

© 2004 Neville Cohn