Australian String Quartet

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Australian String Quartet

Perth Concert Hall

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

 

The Australian String Quartet’s memorable account of Beethoven’s Rasumovsky Quartet, opus 59 no 3, presented in a year which has seen a number of similar ensembles from abroad making concert tours of the country, leaves one in no doubt at all that the homegrown product is as satisfying to experience as the imported variety.asq

Certainly, the ensemble’s reading of the Rasumovsky work came across with a flair and drive that made for rivetting listening. And the controlled skill with which the fugal measures of Beethoven’s masterwork were offered as the various instrumental lines coalesced and separated was an object lesson in what fine contrapuntal playing is all about.

Now, when Beethoven turned his hand to contrapuntal writing, it invariably bore his unmistakeable musical fingerprints. The same cannot be said of Mozart’s recourse to counterpoint. And while no-one would dispute the quality, clarity and beauty of his ideas in the Adagio and Fugue in C minor, few, I believe, would claim that it sounds like Mozart at his most original. In fact, at times one is left with the impression that it was the result of Mozart attending a séance to commune with the spirit of the departed Bach, taking some advice from this greatest master of fugue – and hurrying home to get it all down on paper. I like to think of the Adagio and Fugue in C minor as Mozart’s homage to his great predecessor.

Music in very different vein – Dvorak’s String Quartet No 10 – was given a performance that very beguilingly underscored the engagingly folksy nature of the writing.

Copyright 2004 Neville Cohn


Five Sundays in Fremantle Earth Songs pi and Dominic Perissinotto (organ)

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Five Sundays in Fremantle
Earth Songs

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

pi and Dominic Perissinotto (organ)

St Patrick’s Basilica, Fremantle

Aficionados of new music were generously catered for at St Patrick’s Basilica in Fremantle where David Pye’s pi new music ensemble gave us a program of works of such recent vintage that some of it had been completed only days before.

Strictly speaking, Cathie Travers’ Mondrian’s Wood isn’t ensemble music at all. But anyone listening to a recording of it would be forgiven for assuming it was written for, and being performed by, a combo of musicians. In fact, it’s Travers alone and as a very busy one-person band, seated with her piano accordion at a bank of electronic gadgetry that might intimidate Dr Who.

 

It uses looping technology to create a near-mesmeric underlying percussive pattern with additional themes played on an electronic keyboard that are captured and pumped out again and again as required. Overarching this, is Travers’ haunting accordion music, slowly unfolding to the rhythm of a beguine. Perhaps oddly for music presented in a church, Mondrian’s Wood irresistibly evokes images of clinching couples moving slowly across a dance floor in a smoke-hazy tavern. This is a piece with a future.

pi

Prior to this, Dominic Perissinotto at the organ literally pulled out the stops for a thunderous and very nimble account of Graham Koehne’s Toccata Aurora, music in the bustlingly noisy tradition of Widor’s famed Toccata from his Organ Symphony no 5. At its most formidable climaxes, tsunamis of formidable tone burst from the Basilica’s organ pipes.

Cellist Mel Robinson’s premiere account of her piece Surrender (also a one-person presentation that sounded as if more than a few musicians were simultaneously at work) produced slightly amplified, richly resonant sonorities (over a pre-recorded vocalise) that assumed the character of a minor-mode, eastern European song of mourning.

Gossamer-delicate murmurings on the marimba ushered in wood, wind, earth, water, a work jointly composed by David Pye and Lee Buddle. Sound, initially diffuse and quiet, grew very gradually in intensity to assume more definite, dance-like rhythmic patterns and melodic features before fading into silence.

Comments on concert catering rarely figure in music reviews but it would be ungracious to omit mention of Jonathan M Patisserie’s delicious biscuits and excellent, freshly brewed Essenza Coffee provided gratis at interval and perfect as an antidote against the chill of a mid-winter Fremantle afternoon. Certainly, it gave this writer a much appreciated caffeine jolt to sustain him as he hurried along Stirling Highway to arrive in time for A Winter Musical Feast at Perth Modern Auditorium.

Copyright Neville Cohn 2004


A Winter Musical Feast

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A Winter Musical Feast

 

Perth Modern School Auditorium

 

reviewed by Neville Cohn 

This was a splendid feast of fine music as, in the happiest of arts re-unions, former stalwarts of the Conservatorium of Music returned, too briefly, from their homes in Hungary, the United States and Canberra, to re-create the sort of chamber music excellence that was the norm for Perth in those halcyon days.

But the pleasure of listening to this high-level musicmaking was tempered by the realisation that shortsightedness on the part of those who directed the destiny of the Conservatorium of Music at the time deprived not only the city’s concertgoing community of an abundance of musical riches but, sadder still, Perth’s tertiary music students – our professional soloists, orchestral players and teachers of the future – of musical guidance beyond price. Certainly, since the disbanding of the Stirling String Quartet, Perth has not had a resident ensemble of this sort – and it is the poorer for it.

Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A (to mark the centenary of the composer’s death in 1904) was given the sort of treatment that made one hope it was being recorded for posterity. Some minor blemishes aside, here was a performance in which each of the participants took up an interpretative position at the emotional and stylistic epicentre of the music. John Roberts was in magnificent form, drawing on a splendid range of tonal colourings with comparable contributions from husband-and-wife violinists Pal Eder and Erika Toth as well as Alan Bonds (viola) and Suzanne Wijsman (cello).

One of the most satisfying offerings came in a superbly assured account – for two pianos and percussion – of Gershwin’s An American in Paris. If the composer’s shade had hovered over the proceedings as pianists John and Jean Roberts in ensemble with Gary France, that portly wizard of the mallets and parping automibile horns, made an inspired way through this most idiosyncratic of American scores, it would surely have saluted artistry of the highest order. I’d gladly have listened to it all over again.

Music of a very different sort came in the form of the W.A.premiere of Perth composer Sandra France’s 3 Miniatures for Piano Trio, presented by Eder and Wijsman with Jean Roberts at the piano. This made for thoroughly agreeable listening.

Although the compositional devices and procedures resorted to – such as placing a writing pad over the strings of the piano or plucking them with the fingers – are hardly novel, the overall effect was agreeably engaging. The pieces came across as absorbing little essays about the darker emotions.

There is a violently argumentative quality to You’re Sitting on My Thoughts. The cello line in Playing in the Shadows is informed by a mood that is both sinister and melancholy, an atmosphere reinforced by eerie, high-register harmonics in ensemble with plucked piano strings. And in Stravinsky’s Book, violent pizzicati sound as if ripped from the violin and cello while the paper-damped piano strings produce a strangely spectral range of sound.

There were also miniatures for violin and piano by Tchaikowsky and Kreisler in which Eder was partnered by pianist Pauline Belviso, both breathing fresh life into these rather tired, encore-type bonbons, music that can so easily lapse into schmaltz. I’m happy to report, however, that in their use of rubato and lift to the phrase, Eder and Belviso gave us a performance of impeccable taste. As well, we heard Mozart’s Piano Quartet in E flat, K493 with Jean Roberts in top form in the important keyboard part.

Other musical delights in miniature were Koechlin’s Four Little Pieces for Horn Trio, a slight but charming quartet of musical frivolities given most pleasingly musical treatment by Darryl Poulsen (horn), Jean Roberts at the piano and Erika Toth who was visually striking in an unusual black and mauve jodhpur-style trouser suit.

Copyright Neville Cohn 2004


John Chen (piano) Perth Concert Hall

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John Chen (piano)

 

Perth Concert Hall

 

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

Like some absurdly young musical Caesar, the teenage John Chen, laureate of the most recent Sydney International Piano Competition and currently on a lap of honour around the country, came to Perth to play and conquer a cheering audience. And there was a great deal worth getting excited about. Because with ten fingers that can do no wrong, superb wrist flexibility and an ability to maintain the pace through some of music’s most rugged terrain, John Chen is ready to take on the world. And there is every reason to believe that beyond the confines of Australia – and New Zealand, his adopted home – this youthful pianist will have as much of a success as he has already experienced locally.

Chen was impressive in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata opus 31 no 3. A curious amalgam of grandeur and insouciance, it’s difficult to bring off convincingly. Chen certainly managed to do so. His account of the first movement had more than a dash of poetry to it – and the way he ushered in, shaped and tapered phrases in the Minuet (as well as steering a blisteringly rapid but always controlled way through the “hunt” finale) augur well for a career in one of the most ruthlessly competitive of occupations.

This young pianist’s memory is phenomenal; he seems incapable of a lapse in recall. And, hardly a shrinking violet, he can generate decibel levels to astounding effect when required. Certainly, the vigour and white-hot intensity he brought to Bartok’s savagely aggressive Sonata was a stunning achievement, reminiscent of the young Andor Foldes in full flight.

And in music of a vastly different character – but just as daunting for the technique – Chen, with astonishing virtuosity, romped through Balakirev’s Islamey. And while rather brighter notational definition at speed might have been preferable here, there is no gainsaying the extraordinary fluency that this teenager brings to the keyboard – evident again only moments later when, in response to a tidal wave of applause and a huge floral bouquet, he tossed off an astoundingly nimble account of Chopin’s Etude of the arpeggios from opus 10 as encore.

In was only in Chen’s account of two pieces from Brahms’ late period – the Romance in F opus 118 no 5 and the Rhapsody in E flat opus 119 no 4 – that one felt that, although completely within his grasp in purely physical terms, these profoundly probing pieces are still a rather distant universe in interpretative terms. But on the evidence of the rest of the program, there is every reason to believe that it is only a matter of time before these and other Brahms pieces of the period are conquered.

Earlier, we heard Ondine from Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, the fearsome difficulty of which makes it a closed book to just about every pianist other than a tiny handful who can master its appallingly difficult measures. Chen, coaxing beautifully controlled pianissimo murmurings from the instrument, played Ondine as if it had been written for him. Much the same could be said of Gordon Kerry’s Figured in the Drift of Stars, composed specifically as a test piece for the Sydney Competition. With Chen as its champion, this scintillating work is likely to find its way into the repertoire of other heroic pianists.

Copyright 2004 Neville Cohn


Keyed-Up series Stephanie McCallum (piano)

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Keyed-Up series
Stephanie McCallum (piano)

 

 

Octagon Theatre

 

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

 

Reclusive, eccentric French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan departed this life in a way that was as dramatic and noisy as much of his music. Trying to prise a book from a high shelf, he brought the bookcase, laden with volumes, down upon him. Exit Alkan.

His music is often so terrifyingly difficult that hardly anyone can play it. And of that small band of intrepid pianists, fewer still are game enough to play it in public.

Australian pianist Stephanie McCallum belongs to that tiny group of virtuosos. She devoted the first half of her program to a single work – Alkan’s massive Symphony for Solo Piano.

From the opening measures, McCallum established her credentials as an Alkan interpreter of distinction. She
sounded entirely in her element, not least in the finale with its powerful demonic quality. Here, she maintained a blistering pace as she marshalled floodtides of notes and focussed fiercely on keeping on track as she powered to a triumphant end, for all the world like some musical Michael Schumacher. True, at the height of some of the many climaxes that dot the score, one would have hoped for rather greater tonal power but this detracted only minimally from overall listening pleasure.

Earlier in the work, McCallum essayed the funeral march impressively, its stark, pared-down figurations evoking images of naked branches of elms in mid-winter. Here, her left hand was exceptionally articulate. The Minuet was given rich-toned treatment.

McCallum scaled the heights once more in Saint Saens’ Toccata, based on a theme from his Egyptian Piano Concerto. Here, her hands moved up and down the keyboard as nonchalantly as if she were dusting the furniture as she near-flawlessly outlined intricate, high-treble traceries. It was an astonishing achievement.

In three of Liszt’s responses to Petrarch sonnets, she explored the composer’s idiosyncratic inner world in a largely satisfying way even if, in purely notational terms, the presentation was not entirely without error.

Copyright Neville Cohn 2004