Category Archives: Live Performance

Opera-in-the-Park

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oitpW.A. Opera Company and Chorus
W.A.Symphony Orchestra

Brian Castles-Onion (conductor)
Supreme Court Gardens

 

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

In years of attending Opera-in-the-Park performances, I cannot readily recall weather conditions as ideal as at the weekend when thousands attended this annual gift to the people of Perth. Balmy with the merest hint of a breeze and barely an intrusive sound from traffic along Riverside Driver – and a program compilation a cut above the usual fare offered at these events – made for an unusually satisfying evening.

Instead of the usual bits-and-pieces program – a higgledy-piggledy collection of operatic odds and ends: an aria here, a duet there, an orchestral interlude or two with little or no unifying theme – there was a real effort to provide a program that made musical and programming sense.

There were, for instance, brackets of selections from Gounod’s Faust and from Bellini’s Norma (including the exquisite Casta Diva), both works to be offered in full in the Opera Company’s 2004 season. As well, we heard The Lord’s Prayer from Richard Mills’ Batavia which is shortly to be mounted at His Majesty’s Theatre as part of the Perth Festival. Also on an attractive bill were extracts from Mozart’s Magic Flute (with baritone Andrew Foote splendid, as always, in Papageno’s famous aria Der Vogelfanger bin ich ja. And for once there was almost no noise intrusion from traffic along Riverside Drive.

Brian Castles-Onion is not your run-of-the-mill conductor. Certainly, at the weekend, his linking commentary, the likes of which I have never before encountered in decades of concertgoing, included revelations about his liver cleansing efforts (followed by “I can’t believe I said that”) which suggest that if, at any point, Castles-Onion decides to hang up his baton, he could to advantage have a go at being a stand-up comedian.

His patter, zany and often anarchic, was at times less tongue-in-cheek than foot-in-mouth as he fired vollies of often astounding commentary (reflecting, inter alia, on the corpulence of tenors) that would surely have had some of the political-correctness brigade foaming at the mouth.

Of necessity, electronic amplification had to be used so that listeners – and there was a turn-out of thousands – sitting well back from the stage could listen without straining. At times these arrangements were not entirely satisfactory; at climaxes, notably from the brass section, sound tended to distort.

It was good night for tenor Aldo di Toro who sounded entirely convincing. His diction is impeccable and, almost invariably, he succeeded in adapting, chameleon-like, to the changing moods of whatever he happened to be singing. And soprano Elisa Wilson was a glamorous, gold-gowned presence in a variety of arias – and in Casta Diva, that most touchingly poignant of all Bellini arias, quick thinking got it back on the rails after a brief weakening of concentration – as well as a deeply felt account of the national anthem that brought one of the Opera Company’s best-yet outdoor events to an impressive close.

May I say yet again that having, over years, attended many outdoor presentations of this nature in a number of cities around the world, I have yet to come across audiences as courteous, tidy and orderly as those that gather for these opera presentations. Certainly, police officers and State Emergency Service volunteers had nothing to do other than provide discreet evidence of their presence.

© 2004 Neville Cohn


Gavin Bryars Composer-in-residence (PIAF)

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Composer-in-residence (PIAF)

St George’s Cathedral

Reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

 

Gavin Bryars is a burly, black-clad figure with a shaven cranium who might be mistaken for a night club bouncer but is a cove of a very different stripe. The music that pours from his pen is the antithesis of his physical appearance. Most of that offered at St George’s Cathedral at two well-attended concerts is couched in often hushed terms, music of mainly gentle, very gradually evolving ideas which, on paper – and this goes to the crux of his output – might seem a sure recipe for tedium but instead, in a way difficult to define, engages the attention totally.
Most of his output experienced at these two cathedral concerts sounds entirely in accord with Bryars’ fascination with the nature of ‘musical slowness’ and what he calls ‘innovative simplicity’.

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Bryars, too, has an ability to see creative potential in what others might dismiss as expendable rubbish, as exemplified in his inspired musical treatment of a strip of recording tape containing a single line from Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me sung in a thin, quavering voice by an elderly hobo, now dead. Bryars wrote the simplest of orchestral accompaniments to the vocal tape played over and over again. But what might, on the face of it, seem a sure recipe for tedium is, in fact, an utterly engrossing listening experience which, in its poignancy, places it in a special category of excellence.

At this Tura New Music event, we also heard Daniel Kossov as soloist in Bryars’ Violin Concerto with Roger Smalley a meticulously prepared conductor. Kossov’s exquisitely hushed, finely drawn violin line, to an often muted accompaniment, called water-colour images of mist-enshrouded landscapes to mind, an essay in tranquillity.

Percussion ensemble Tetrafide gave us an account of One Last Bar Then Joe Can Sing, yet another of Bryars’ fascinating experiments in musical gentleness. I felt strongly drawn to this, as the five percussionists created hushed auras of sound by bowing crotales and vibraphones which combined with marimba murmurings and delicate use of windchimes to produce some of the most soothing music imaginable.

I found Bryars’ Viennese Dance No 1 bewildering as was Bryars program note that Mata Hari (Dutch, her real name was Gertrud Zelle) was one of the three most celebrated dancers in the world. Really? I could not, in all frankness, discern anything about this work that could persuade me that it unequivocally suggested either Vienna or the dance.

But Bryars’ String Quartet No 3 was very much more satisfying musical fare. Deeply felt, often throbbing with ardour, its most passionate moments called Schoenberg’s Verklaerte Nacht to mind and held the attention throughout despite the irritating intrusion of traffic roaring along St George’s Terrace. This was yet another excellent contribution by the Cremona Quartet which has been one of the glories of PIAF 2004.

© 2004


Symphony under the Spanish Stars

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W.A.Symphony Orchestra

Pioneer Women’s Memorial, Kings Park

 

reviewed by Neville Cohnslava

 

If, at a performance given by the W.A.Symphony Orchestra at Perth’s acoustically perfect Concert Hall, a number of concertgoers brought picnic hampers with them from which they extracted platters of rice salad, cheese and tomato sandwiches, a bottle of champagne loudly popped and slices of rock melon which they proceeded to variously devour and drink, it would cause an outcry and a request to leave the venue immediately.

But if the same scenario plays out on the beautifully grassed, gently sloping grounds around the Pioneer Women’s Memorial in Kings Park while listening to the WASO, no one would raise an eyebrow. And that was very much the case when an audience of some three thousand had their picnic dinners as twilight fell over this idyllic setting and the local ducks waddled importantly around the grounds in the hope of a free feed. The weather (which can make or break an evening of this sort) was near-perfect.

 

As an hour-long prelude to the program proper, we heard Guapo, an instrumental ensemble that focusses primarily on the music of Piazzolla, more of which would be heard later in the evening. It was a thoroughly professional presentation.

Music amplified by electronic means seldom sounds entirely satisfactory, certainly not as it would reach the listener in, say, the Concert Hall with its wondrously fine acoustics. And having a near-constant, if relatively muted, input from an open-air concert being given at the WACA ground by Fleetwood Mac was not a welcome contribution to the proceedings. But, these reservations notwithstanding, there was more than sufficient evidence that the WASO is getting back to the form that made so many concerts memorable in 2003.

Extracts from Manuel de Falla’s El Amor Brujo did not fare well, though, largely due, for much of the time, to conductor Benjamin Northey’s relentlessly rigid rhythms which lent a mechanical quality to the performance. Later, there was rather more rhythmic give and take in a rare airing of Gershwin’s Cuban Overture.

A brief weakening of concentration and an occasional slip of the finger aside, guitarist Slava Grigoryan did well in Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, although in the opening pages of the concerto, guitar sound was overly amplified. But it was in an arrangement for guitar of Albeniz’s piano piece Sevilla that Grigoryan came fully into his own in playing that was stylish and, in its more virtuosic episodes, nimble, controlled and accurate. And I liked the expressiveness and beauty of tone with which he essayed the slower passages of the piece.

Cathie Travers, whose musical versatility is a byword, contributed to the concert not only as accordionist but also as arranger. I very much liked her re-working of Piazzolla’s Milonga del Angel which, to a notable extent, conveyed that haunting, bittersweet quality that lies at the core of so much of Piazzolla’s music. Most of the Argentinian tango-meister’s music was conceived for small groups of musicians; it’s seldom heard in arrangements for symphony-size orchestras. Certainly, it was a new – and engaging – listening experience for me.

There was more Piazzolla but in more intimate mode in Romance del Diablo with Travers playing a veteran Titano accordion in ensemble with Grigoryan, Graeme Gilling (keyboard), Daniel Kossov (violin) and Boguslaw Szczepaniak (double bass). Here, too, the essence of Piazzolla’s tango-based ideas were captured like a moth in the gentlest of hands.

Both these arrangements deserve to be heard under better acoustic circumstances.

In passing: there were roars of good-natured laughter (doubtless due to Western Power’s lamentable handling of the power crisis a short while ago) when an offical from that utility drew the winning ticket from a barrel to give a lucky concertgoer $500’s worth of electricity.

 

Copyright 2004


WAGNER, SCHNITTKE & BRAHMS

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Cremona Quartet
Gweneth-Ann Jeffers (soprano)
Andrea Katz (piano)

 

Fremantle Town Hall

 

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

Soprano Gweneth-Ann Jeffers came to Fremantle Town Hall from Winthrop Hall, where she’d sung Berlioz’s Nuits d’Ete only days before at the opening of the Wigmore Chamber Music series.

Wagner provided the curtain raiser. The Bayreuth Master is, of course, best know for his colossal music dramas. But when he turned his mind to it, he could produce musical miniatures to woo the ear.

His settings of six poems by Mathilde Wesendonck (with whom the composer was having an affair at the time) are very fine – and Gweneth-Ann Jeffers with Andrea Katz at the piano were more than up to the challenge of these deeply probing songs to which they responded with a depth of understanding that invariably sounded entirely right.

Stehe Still! was memorably treated, its sense of urgency convincingly evoked. Whether in revealing the high emotion that informs Schmerzen (Anguish) or evoking the melancholy of Im Triebhaus (The Greenhouse), the two could hardly be faulted. I particularly liked the piano postlude to the latter; it was finely crafted

Later, Andrea Katz joined forces with the Cremona String Quartet in Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F minor. In the two opening movements, much was made, quite properly, of the lyrical aspects of the writing and this was confidently brought across. But although the Cremona players were splendidly virtuosic in the scherzo and finale (which is music in the grandest of grand manners), the same could not be said of the presentation of the piano part where more muscular tone, greater clarity and flamboyance as well as a significantly more emphatic attack (notably in the drumming motif of the scherzo) were needed to complement string playing of often blazing intensity. In this sense, the closing movements of the quintet were uneven and unsatisfying.

In their own right, the musicians of the Cremona Quartet were gloriously in their element in Schnittke’s String Quartet No 3. Schnittke, something of a musical magpie,is second to few in his ability to fashion meaningful music statements making use of the most unlikely ideas, procedures and styles. In fact, listening to the Cremona Quartet here was rather like peering through the peephole of a slowly revolving kaleidoscope cylinder containing not only the usual shards of coloured glass but a miscellany of odds and ends, some quite unexpected, such as, say, peppercorns, as well as a few cogs from the innards of a pocket watch. The Cremona Quartet was in dazzling form here, producing the most inspired and compelling playing of the afternoon and – after their superlative reading of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet – leaving one in little doubt that this formidable foursome is as versatile as it is gifted.

Copyright 2004

Israel in Egypt (Handel)

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Israel in Egypt (Handel)

 

St George’s Cathedral Chorus and Sinfonia
St George’s Cathedral

reviewed by Neville Cohn 

Unlike the bad old days when choirs singing Handel’s oratorios would routinely outnumber the accompanying orchestra five or so to one, we heard Israel in Egypt at St George’s Cathedral where, give or take a few, there were about as many in the choir as the orchestra. These would have been roughly the numbers Handel had in mind when writing the oratorio – and, some reservations aside, this worked well. But in so large a space as the cathedral, one sensed a need at choral climaxes for some modest beefing up of choral numbers to more adequately ride the crest of the accompanying orchestral wave which, in turn, could have done with some strengthening of the strings to underscore the grandeur of the oratorio’s more spectacular choruses.

In the minds of many oratorio fanciers, Israel in Egypt, qualitatively, ranks higher even than Messiah which has been Handel’s top box office draw for centuries. I dare say that because Handel’s take on the Old Testament Exodus story concentrates primarily on choral items, it is less attractive to concertgoers for whom Handel’s solo arias are the chief appeal. The loss is their’s because Israel in Egypt brims with some of the Master’s happiest inspirations.

“He gave them hailstones”, for instance, is magnificent music – and, under Simon Lawford’s direction, the trumpeters and choristers responded to it with commendable attack and follow-through. And Tim White’s thudding kettle drums added significantly to the choir’s response as they sang “But the waters overwhelmed their enemies”. Earlier, in “But as for His people”, vocal lines coalesced and separated in a consistently musical way. But in some of the less-convincing choral contributions, some weaknesses of the inner voices tended to blur details.

It was a particularly good night for the brass with trumpets adding a memorable dimension to “The Lord shall reign”. But if strings sounded dismayingly scrappy in the introduction to “The Lord is my strength”, they were much on their mettle in rapid passagework simulating the buzz and whine of flies, lice and locusts in the chorus about those plagues visited upon the Egyptians. I admired, too, the sturdiness of the striding accompaniment to “The Lord shall reign forever”.

Vocal soloists were drawn from the choir – and of these, Jonathan Daventry shone with an echt alto quality and clear diction that gave point and meaning to his account of “Their land brought forth frogs”. There was also an impressive offering by bass Andrew Moran. And if there was some forcing of the tone in Stuart Haycock’s aria “The enemy said”, his recitatives were uniformly polished.

Hopefully, this imaginative alternative to yet another airing of Handel’s Messiah will set a trend towards more enterprising oratorio choices for Perth. What about Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ which hasn’t been mounted here in years – or Handel’s Samson?

© December 2003