This is ideal material to relax to after a tough day at the office. It’s a charm laden compilation that provides unpretentious, laid back interpretations of music from Bach to the present day.
Unruffled calm informs an account of the Sinfonia (Arioso) from Bach’s Cantata BWV156. Deft, delightful pizzicato makes a gem of the Cantilena from Villa Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No 5. Britney Spears’ Everytime is gently lulling material.
Genevieve Lang: step forward and take a well deserved bow for splendid harp playing in O mio babbino caro from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi in an arrangement by Lang and Maer. And in Motzing’s arrangement of Jon Bon Jovi’s Bed of Roses, the backing has a most agreeable yearning, lilting quality. There’s more delight in Handel’s Lascia ch’io pianga from Rinaldo, informed, as the playing is, by a mood of restrained melancholy.
Recorded sound is uniformly fine. And there are eye-catching illustrations as well as an eminently readable essay on the soloist by Martin Buzacott.
Sally Mae spent some time in the cello section of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra as well as playing part time in the cello sections of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra – and she enjoys busking.
The gem of this compilation is Britten’s Ceremony of Carols. The finesse that informs every moment of this exquisite work makes this one of the most satisfying recordings of the work I can recall. It’s a compendium of musical marvels. Whether in evoking the ecstatic interior mood of As Dew in Aprille, the emphatically stated This Little Babe or the rippling note streams that Marshall McGuire coaxes from his harp, this is a performance to cherish.
Britten’s delightful work is often performed, yet there’s nothing here that sounds dull or routine. On the contrary, it comes across with a newly minted freshness which is quite delightful.
McGuire is no less persuasive in Christopher Willcock’s Southern Star. The texts of this song cycle are by cartoonist extraordinaire Michael Leunig. The Trinity College choristers are in fine fettle here, sombre in the introductory Love is Born, intense and ecstatic in Christmas and, in Gul Gul Dja Mardji, the presentation is informed by an emphatically atavistic quality. I liked the bustle which informs What did you get? (a rather delightful piece about Xmas presents) – and in Real and Right and True, McGuire again comes up trumps.
William Kirkpatrick’s Away in a Manger was a joy and Andrew Carter’s Mary’s Magnificat is beautifully essayed.
Maly Drama Theatre – Theatre of Europe – St Petersburg
His Majesty’s Theatre
reviewed by Neville Cohn
This is definitely not for those whose idea of going to the theatre is experiencing a few hours of genial mummery. Life and Fate occupies a very different world. It is a tale of physical and emotional violence, much of it state-sanctioned and so unnerving as to leave the viewer limp. It’s a tale that brands itself indelibly on the consciousness.
But for those who like their theatre pieces to have a clearly defined beginning, middle and end, Life and Fate might well be problematical, even bewildering. It could be thought of as a montage, a series of mainly brief episodes that occur during Wold War II in the cities and gulags of Russia and the death camps of the Nazis.
Like some malevolent serpent slithering through this often brutally confronting production is an ever-present anti-Semitism whether of the German variety (with its sights set on the complete extermination of European Jewry courtesy of the appalling Wannsee declaration which the Nazis were pleased to call The Final Solution) or the Russian version where an irrational, centuries-lomg hatred of the Jews seems an ingrained feature of the national psyche and all the more virulent for becoming state policy.
Periodically and improbably, we hear the strains of Schubert’s Standchen (known throughout the English-speaking world as Serenade). It reminded one that in some of the nazi’s concentration camps, an orchestra of inmates would be ordered to play this or that music as victims of the nazis’ were marched to the gas chambers. Can there have been a more cynical and evil exploitation of music than this?
An all-purpose set is an ingenious construction: a handball net also serves as a concentration camp or gulag fence, there’s a miscellany of cupboards, a battered, tinny piano, beds and chairs. Ingenious lighting does much to heighten mood.
There are no weak links in the cast which is superbly disciplined. For the many who do not understand Russian, there were first rate surtitles flashed onto a lengthy narrow screen above the action.
Tatiana Shestakova is admirable as Ana Shtrum, the family matriarch, diminutive, soft spoken medical doctor who tends to other ghetto Jews before she is gassed and cremated in one of Germany’s nazi death camps, an ever-present spectre.
Nearly all the conversations focus on the war and fleeting moments of tenderness throw the encompassing horrors into even bolder relief so much so that at interval, one left the auditorium with a near-palpable sense of relief.
Life and Fate tells of a Russian nuclear scientist Victor Shtrum (Sergey Kuryshev) who happens to be Jewish – and this places him in a vulnerable, even dangerous, position. But because of Stalin’s desperate need to build an A-bomb, there is breathtaking cynicism on his part in bringing Shtrum out of exile to work on the project.
Again and again, the craziness of the Soviet system is underlined, memorably by a high official rejecting Albert Einstein’s theories as unacceptable because they conflict with Lenin’s world view!! Nothing so demonstrates the ethical bankruptcy and the mind-numbing, blind acceptance of what is palpable, sheer nonsense.
Precisely how many died, how many murdered, in the name of such idiocy, will probably never be exactly known. Productions such as this are crucial to keeping the memory of the slaughtered millions alive.
Piano music by Gideon Klein, Viktor Ullmann and Zikmund Schul
Francesco Lotoro (piano)
KZ Musik 231786
TPT: 69:05
reviewed by Neville Cohn
It goes almost without saying that any musical composition worthy of the name must be judged on its intrinsic worth irrespective of the circumstances attending its genesis. This can be an almost impossible exercise when considering, say, Gideon Klein’s Sonata for piano. It was written in Theresienstadt concentration camp. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1919, Klein was only 25 years old when, as slave labourer in a coalmine, he died in January 1945.
Francesco Lotoro gives a magnificently authoritative account of Klein’s Sonata. There is a defiant assertiveness in the outer movements – and Lotoro does wonders in evoking this powerful mood in a performance that seizes the attention in a vice-like grip.
Murdered in his prime, Klein’s tragically early death calls that of Schubert to mind. Certainly, the epitaph on Schubert’s tombstone could apply to Klein: “The art of music here entombed a rich possession but far fairer hopes”.
Lotoro is no less impressive in three sonatas by Viktor Ullmann. Sonata No 5, intended as a draft for his Symphony No 1, makes for absorbing listening. Lotoro does wonders with the first movement, seeming to positively relish coming to grips with its trills and strong rhythmic underpinning. The brief Toccatina with its spiky, staccato theme is no less impressively essayed, the finale calling to mind some of Prokofiev’s more engaging essays in pianistic grotesquerie.
Lotoro is wondrously persuasive in the Sonata No 7 with insistent repeated notes in the opening Allegro and a second movement that calls Mussorgsky to mind.
Cadenzas that Ullmann wrote for Beethoven’s 1st and 3rd piano concertos are fascinating inclusions. They are strikingly original, powerfully dense- textured utterances that Lotoro plays as if to the manner born.
Ullmann and his wife died in an Auschwitz gas chamber a day after being deported in October 1944.
The visionary intensity that Lotoro brings to his work cannot be too highly prasied. Certainly, the care lavished on the minutiae of performance is on a par with Lotoro’s ability to convey the grand sweep of whatever work he happens to be playing.
This is a recording that ought to be heard by as many people as possible, not least to marvel at how the creative impulse flourished even in an environment of appallingly murderous cruelty.
As a child growing up in Cape Town, I recall – as if it were yesterday – being taken by my revered music teacher to a chamber music concert at Temple Hall.
It was a thrilling and unforgettable experience. That performance was one of a series of chamber music concerts given under the auspices of the Concert Club which was run by Hans Kramer and his wife Greta.
Fleeing as refugees from Hitler’s Germany, they arrived on South African shores virtually penniless but they brought with them a deep and abiding love for music. And despite the difficulties inherent in founding and maintaining an annual chamber music series, they persevered until the Concert Club became a crucial part of Cape Town’s music life.
When I settled in Australia, I very soon discovered that the Musica Viva series of chamber music concerts had had much the same genesis as Cape Town’s Concert Club. And over more than a quarter century, I have had the good fortune to attend a plethora of ensemble performances brought here by this great organisation. It’s a priceless musical gift for music followers in Perth.
Among the delights coming Perth’s way this year is a program presented by the superb Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge. Founded more than 450 years ago – yes, in 1538! – this peerless vocal ensemble has enchanted listeners and worshippers all across the world not least through a miscellany of fine recordings. Its program for Perth includes music by Byrd and Tallis as well as music written centuries later – in our time, in fact – by John Tavener and Paul Stanhope.
Pavel Haas was a composer who, like so many other Jewish musicians in Czechoslovakia, was murdered by the Nazis. One of the finest ensembles on the international concert circuit has named itself the Pavel Haas Quartet in tribute to a remarkable composer. The program includes works by Dvorak and Haydn as well as by Stanhope, Musica Viva’s composer in residence.
Aficionados of the piano are in for a treat as British pianist par excellence Paul Lewis will give a recital which includes Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata and works by Mozart, Schumann and Liszt.
Another delight is The Harp Consort, an Ireland-based ensemble which brings to its concerts an irrepressible joie de vivre to match its sublime musical skills.
Many Perth concertgoers will relish the opportunity to hear pianist Cedric Tiberghien who has dazzled many listeners here, not least through his superb skill as an interpreter of Messiaen. For Musica Viva, he will team up with violinist Alina IBragimova in sonatas by Beethoven and Schumann.
For booking information, please telephone 1800 688 482.
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