Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Mahler)

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Wigmore Chamber Music Series (PIAF)

Winthrop Hall

 

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

In the minds of many concertgoers, Mahler is inextricably associated with the writing of lengthy symphonies often calling for gigantic forces. But he was no less effective, size-wise, at the opposite end of the spectrum. His beautifully fashioned settings of texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn are some of the most enchanting gems of the lieder repertoire.

Twelve of these mini-masterpieces were on offer at Winthrop Hall with Paul Kildea presiding over a chamber orchestra (playing James Olsen’s new arrangement of Mahler’s piano originals). The vocal soloists were New Zealand bass Paul Whelan and British mezzo soprano Pamela Helen Stephen in a sometimes uneven presentation.

Whelan, as concertgoers discovered on hearing him as Jesus in Bach’s St Matthew Passion earlier in the Festival, has a colossal voice – but whereas this powerful instrument was appropriately reined in to blissful effect the other evening in Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, in the first of the Mahler lieder – Reveille – his voice, perhaps due to a misjudgement of Winthrop Hall’s acoustics, tended to over-loudness although the accompaniment brought out the best in most of the 12-strong instrumental ensemble.

But if Whelan’s opening lied lacked some finesse, his skilled and imaginative use of a remarkably supple voice did wonders for St Anthony Preaching to the Fishes. Here, Whelan, a dab hand at vocal acting, struck interpretative gold recounting the tale of the saint leaving an empty church for the water’s edge to sermonise to a swarming congregation of sea creatures who listen intently to his words before fish, crabs, and turtles return to their flawed existences.

It was Mahler, I think, who said that in music it is easy to be interesting but difficult to be beautiful. Here, he succeeds in being both, the sinuousness of the accompanying instrumental lines triggering mind’s-eye images of fish darting through the water. In The Drummer Boy, Whelan was beyond conventional criticism in conveying the terror and despair of one of Mahler’s darkest visions.

A thousand flowers, as the Chinese say, to arranger Olsen whose orchestration of the piano accompaniments was altogether satisfying, not least for its graceful obeisance to Mahler’s own idiosyncratic handling of instruments.

It is perhaps invidious to single out individuals in what was very much a group effort but it would be ungracious not to specially point to Allan Meyer’s consistently fine, immaculately pitched clarinet line, Malcolm Stewart’s enchanting way with the French horn and Michael Black’s discreet but telling artistry at the harmonium, its instantly recognisable, wheezing tone adding an extra frisson to the listening experience.

Although there was much to admire in mezzo soprano Pamela Stephen’s line, not least her meticulous attention to clear enunciation of the words, there seemed at times a focus more on technical finesse than revealing the interior mood of whatever she happened to be singing.

One listened largely in vain, for instance, for the wheedling archness that is the essence of Verlorne Muh – and there was some loss of vocal power in the lower reaches of the range in The Sentinel’s Nightsong. But in Das irdische Leben, the anguish of a mother watching her child succumb to starvation was impressively suggested.

Copyright 2005 Neville Cohn


Kronos Quartet

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Perth Concert Hall

 

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

It doesn’t take long to determine why listening to the Kronos String Quartet is so singularly different to the performances of just about any other high-level, similarly constituted ensembles. The latter tend to specialise in offering beautifully played standard repertoire by, say, Schubert, Mozart or Brahms, music that lulls us with familiar, much-loved sounds, compositions one comes to as if to old and trusted friends. And even more recent, flintier works such as those by Bartok or Shostakovich are welcomed by some who think they are very up-to-the-minute for listening to what some think of, still, as rather daring new music even though most of it has been around for years.

But those who’ve experienced the Kronos Quartet will know that its interpretative approach is often strikingly different to that adopted by its more sedate counterparts. Even to music couched in relatively gentle terms, the Kronos players bring an intensity of expression that jolts the listener into high-level awareness. It’s the equivalent of poking a finger into a live electric socket.

It is absolutely impossible to ignore a Kronos presentation. No one sleeps through its programs. Love them or hate them – and I’m sure there are more than a few who are deeply affronted by the Kronos’ invasion of their comfort zones – they are a force to be reckoned with. You are compelled to pay it the closest attention as in this ninety-minutes-long presentation of works played without interruption, musicmaking that drags the listener, willing or otherwise, into that unique, startling, often abrasive and sometimes repellent sound-universe that is the preserve of musicians who have delighted, awed – and outraged – concertgoers for a generation.

On present form, they generate as much energy as ever. Time has not noticeably touched their physical command of their instruments; it is as complete as ever. Their adventurousness, their willingness to go the extra thousands kilometres in search of the new, the untried, the barrier-breaking, is as keen as it ever was.

Much has been made of the visual aspect of many of Kronos’ concerts. But its necessity, let alone its worth, is debateble. Unlike a work such as Tan Dun’s Water Passion where the visual dimension is so integral to the whole that without it, the piece would be seriously weakened as an entity, the images and fancy lighting that come with the Kronos package could, I believe, be entirely omitted without significant loss of impact. The test is simple: listen to some of it with eyes closed; the effect of the music, I suggest, is not one whit lessened by abandoning the visuals.

A fleeting glimpse of Bugs Bunny, the outline of what resembled the Enola Gay on its way to Hiroshima with its hideous cargo or minutes of watching swinging pendulums on a screen did not to any extent that I could judge make an iota of difference to the overall experience. Neither did the lighting which ranged from cool blue to lurid red – or what seemed to be scaffolding for wigwams. Nor was there any noticeable change in performance quality whether the quartet played in front of – or behind – a gauze-look screen.

Compilation-wise, this was rich pickings for those seeking striking variety of sound, mood or technical procedure. Here, the Kronos’ offerings ranged from Nancarrow’s 1942 opus Boogie Woogie #3A with its violently manic, hepcat beat to Scott Johnson’s How it Happens in which we hear a voice declaiming “nothing more unholy than holy war”.

John Zorn’s Cat O’Nine Tails is intriguing fare, too, seemingly geared to what we’re often told is the worrying decrease in humankind’s attention span, music that veers crazily every ten seconds or so from one style to another – a snatch of square dance music, a burst of barbaric magnificence before a soupcon of sentimental soulfulness that ushers in a blast of harsh dissonance that sets the teeth on edge.

Here, as throughout, the sound of the Kronos ensemble is electronically altered, tonal metamorphoses that come cheek by jowl with rarely encountered timbres such as that of the otherworldly theremin which gives to Bernard Herrmann’s music for cult movie The Day the Earth Stood Still a sound dimension that’s now almost a cliché in movies about alien visitations.

Copyright 2005 Neville Cohn


Yuri Bashmet (viola) with W.A.Symphony Orchestra

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Yuri Bashmet (viola)
with W.A.Symphony Orchestra

 

Matthias Bamert, conductor

Perth Concert Hall

reviewed by Neville Cohn

Black-clad from head to toe, his angular features framed by long, jet-dark hair, Yuri Bashmet, eerily resembling the legendary violinist Paganini, cuts a striking, sombre figure.

He stands before a truncated W.A.Symphony Orchestra. It is a most singular sight – the WASO minus all its violins. It is as if the viola, that Cinderella of the strings section, must, for once, have no competition at all from its brighter-toned cousins, nothing to detract from its bleak majesty. In place of the absent violins are three keyboard instruments with Graeme Gilling at the piano, Cathie Travers seated at the celeste and Faith Maydwell playing the harpsichord.

Bashmet, as is well known, is a prince of the viola, a musical magician capable of making it sing in a way that few can emulate – or ever could. It comes alive in his hands. But in Alfred Schnittke’s Viola Concerto, its song is one of almost unrelieved sadness, even despair. The concerto is, in fact, one of the most sombre in the entire canon; for the most part it explores a world of emotional darkness where the chief sounds are cries of pain or anguish or regret.

But it is not always so. Every now and again, there is a brief departure from this claustrophobic gloom – a folksy little dance episode, a lilting snatch of waltz. But these vignettes do little to raise the pall that hangs over the work; they are overwhelmed by its pessimism. And even in the central allegro molto of the concerto, where then music is far busier than in the movements that flank it, the prevailing moods are those of urgency and panic, expressed in tone of astonishing power.

There’s a huge, sustained ovation at concerto’s end for a superbly probing performance; it is thoroughly deserved. Bashmet is a generous soloist; he insists on acknowledging conductor Matthias Bamert and orchestra for a job well done. He is particularly warm in his gestures to his fellow violists in the WASO. And after being presented with the obligatory bouquet of flowers, he gallantly tosses it to Sophie Kesoglidis in the viola section.

This is no run-of-the-mill concert for Kesoglidis; she is on study leave in Melbourne but makes the trip back to Perth just for the experience of playing in an orchestra that accompanies this most august exponent of the instrument.

Bashmet’s gallant gesture is a charming, light-hearted move which dissipates the gloom of what had gone before like the sun peeping over the rim of a black cloud.

Earlier, we heard the WASO in a transcription for orchestra by Stokowski (with whom Bamert had worked as a young conductor gaining valuable experience) of Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV582. It unfolds with commendable style and taste; it is one of Stokowski’s less vulgar and violently coloured orchestrations and makes a fine curtain raiser. And after interval, Bamert presides over an account of Brahms’ Symphony No 4 paying as much attention to detail as conveying the grand sweep of the work.

Copyright 2004 Neville Cohn


AUSTRALIAN CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

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ROMANTICS
PRAGUE CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

 

 

 

Perth Concert Hall/Octagon Theatre

 

reviewed by Neville Cohn 

 

 

As we’re often told in newspaper, radio and TV advertisements, the homegrown product is often superior in quality to the imported variety.

This was very much the case when considering the relative merits of the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Prague Chamber Orchestra, both of which featured in the 2004 Perth International Arts Festival.

Consider the ACO. Listened to in the air-conditioned comfort of Perth Concert Hall, which made this splendidly refurbished venue and its near-perfect acoustics all the more welcoming after a savagely hot and humid day, the Australian Chamber Orchestra staked yet another claim – quite irrefutable in my view – to be recognised and acknowledged as the nation’s foremost chamber orchestra and a major player on the world stage.

From the cluster of microphones suspended above the ACO, it could be presumed that its performance was being recorded. I very much hope that this was the case because, in decades of listening to live performances, I cannot recall a more satisfying account of Haydn’s Symphony No 49, know as the Passione.

Not the least of the pleasures of listening to the ACO is the precision of its intonation. Tuning backstage before making its entrance, the ACO is invariably spot-on, pitch-wise. This, in turn, enhances one of the ACO’s other strong points which is the care it lavishes on phrase-shaping. And the uniformity of tonal sheen in string playing was yet another fine feature of the performance.

Literally from bar one, this meticulous attention to moulding the various instrumental lines, and the resulting quality of harmonic tissue, yielded listening dividends of the most satisfying sort, not least in relation to beautifully realised tonal light and shade that added significantly to the tension generated in the opening Adagio. And how splendidly the second movement took off with its bracing attack and follow-through that did not so much attract the attention as seize it.

Horns and oboes were unfailingly stylish in the third movement. And in the finale, the joie de vivre with which these youthful players embraced the music, offered at an
unfaltering pace, thoroughly warranted the gales of applause that greeted its conclusion.

As always, Richard Tognetti kept the performance on track with the utmost economy of gesture. Certainly, with this intense focus on the minutiae of presentation together with an ability to present the ‘big picture’, as it were, yielded phenomenal listening dividends. And for this critic, in the presence of such musical distinction, there was little to do other than to sit back while acknowledging artistry of the highest order.

Emma-Jane Murphy, who has had a long association as principal cellist with the ACO, made a rare appearance as soloist in Tchaikowsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme.

In the accommodating acoustics of the Concert Hall, the Prague Chamber Orchestra, playing in ensemble with the Australian Intervarsity Choral Societies Association and four vocal soloists, seldom sounded less than adequate in Dvorak’s Stabat Mater. But in the far more unforgiving, dry acoustic of the Octagon Theatre, the PCO fared significantly less well.

Because of an acoustic that robbed string tone of much of its bloom (an effect made the more obvious when listened to from as close to the stage as the fourth row), small lapses in intonation and ensemble became glaringly obvious. And with little lift to the phrase as well as a tendency to clip phrase ends made this all-Mozart program a less than satisfying listening experience.

Prague, of course, was the city which, more than two hundred years ago, hosted the world premiere of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. So there had been an added frisson of anticipation as the PCO launched into this curtain-raiser. Sadly, the players’ presentation of the overture faltered on a number of grounds, not least due to an unwanted raspiness as bows bit strings.

At a performance, only days earlier of Messiaen’s dauntingly complex Harawi, there was a phenomenal display of musicianship and musicality on the part of French pianist Cedric Tiberghien. He faced another great challenge in Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A, K414, a challenge fully risen to only from the beginning of the cadenza of the slow movement.

Although, up to that point, he had brought notational accuracy and clarity to the piano part, Tiberghien’s playing on this occasion lacked that elusive X factor, difficult to define but instantly recognisable when it manifests itself, that had made his Messiaen offering such magical listening.

Trills were not quite evenly spun, the opening Allegro’s mood of blithness was not compellingly evoked, there was more than a little bass-register humming along on the part of the soloist – and that dreaded acoustic again ensured that some of the gloss was removed from the tone Tiberghien generated at the keyboard of a Steinway which would surely have sounded more satisfying in a more acoustically sympathetic environment.

But, after his retrieval of the initiative towards the close of the Andante, Tiberghien gave us playing that, notwithstanding extraneous features over which he could have had no control, was stylistically convincing and commendably expressive.

Listening to Mozart’s Symphony No 40 in G minor from the rear of the hall was a happier experience compared to what had earlier been heard from close up. The Octagon’s acoustical dryness sounded less ferocious from that vantage point. But one longed for rather more elegance to the shaping and tapering of phrases and a more uniform tonal sheen, especially on the part of the higher strings in the slow movement. Certainly, more might have been made of the serene and melancholy theme that makes this one of Mozart’s most beguiling essays in tranquillity. There was robust treatment of the minuet and the woodwinds (which had sounded unattractively blurred from close up in the Don Giovanni overture) came up trumps in the trio section of the minuet. And in the finale, the grittiness of string sound worked to the advantage of the performance, enhanced by strong, even fierce, rhythmic emphases.

© 2004

Artemis Quartet Perth

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Artemis Quartet

 

Perth Concert Hall

reviewed by Neville Cohn 

Insofar as Australian composer Brett Dean’s Eclipse for string quartet is concerned, it was a case of information overload.

In the printed program, there was a perfectly satisfactory explanatory note about the work, the writing of which had been triggered by Dean’s outrage at government treatment of the Tampa refugees. Then Chris Sears dealt with the work at some length in his pre-concert talk in the foyer of the Concert Hall.

So, when Volker Jacobsen, violist of the visiting Artemis Quartet, took to the microphone just before the performance of Eclipse, to tell us about the work all over again, covering much the same ground as before, it must have tested the restraint of many members of the audience, including some concert anarchists who, here and throughout the evening, clapped loudly at inappropriate moments.

For all the talk about the genesis of, and the background to, Dean’s Eclipse (not, incidentally, to be confused with another new work – Ellipse – which is being performed currently by the W.A.Ballet Company at His Majesty’s Theatre), the acid test for the piece is whether its musical merits can stand up to close scrutiny in their own right – whether those coming to Eclipse without knowing WHY it was written, will still find it a satisfying listening experience. And after giving it the closest attention at its first performance in Perth, I would have to say that it leaves a most positive impression as a stand-alone work. It’s written by a composer who clearly has a very real understanding of the potential of string instruments. (Dean, incidentally, was for some time a violist with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.)

With its plethora of memorable ideas and moods that veer from the elegiac to a barely contained hysteria, Eclipse irresistibly calls Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night to mind.

The Artemis Quartet is the last word in ensemble excellence; the sonorities it generates are, at their most substantial, reminiscent of those of a fine chamber organ. Its essaying of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, that most lofty of contrapuntal Everests, was staggeringly fine.

Lesser ensembles cope as best they can, endeavour to play the notes correctly and leave it at that. These efforts are usually as unsatisfying for players as listeners. But when – and this is happens only very rarely – the work is tackled by four musicians who not only have the physical skill to steer an accurate way through the notes but also the ability to break through its intellectual barriers and pierce to the heart of the music, the result can be overwhelming – and this was very much the case here in a reading that, at climaxes, bordered on the ecstatic.

Not the least of the pleasures of this performance was the quality of corporate tone which, at its most substantial and glowing, seemed almost palpable. It would have been worth attending this Musica Viva performance if only to hear this stunning account of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge for which one was, in the best sense, prepared by the Artemis musicians’ quite splendid reading of opus 130.

Copyright 2004 Neville Cohn