I have managed to attend a few live performances hitherto unnoticed here.
1. Australia Ensemble 9 April
With P to this. The program, strung together rather tenuously from composers with various anniversaries in 2022 (entitled “An Anniversary Bouquet,” was:
DEBUSSY | Première rhapsodie
STRAVINSKY | Three Pieces for solo clarinet
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS | Quintet in D
FRANCK | Piano Quintet in F minor Op.14
In a nod to covid, there was no interval.
I’ve left it a bit long to compile a detailed account so these are fugitive recollections.
The Debussy is for clarinet and piano. What I particularly remember is the delicious pedal-washed carpet that Ian Munro laid down beneath the clarinet once the opening section got going, and the similarity of the ending to the Debussy violin sonata.
The Stravinsky pieces were for solo (ie only) clarinet. David Griffiths played them brilliantly. I feel they are rather pieces for clarinet afficionados. They didn’t for me expose any particular poetic quality or association of the clarinet in the way that (Debussy was probably still on my mind) Debussy’s Syrinx does for the unaccompanied flute.
Robert Johnson on horn joined David Griffiths and piano trio for the Vaughan Williams. It is an early work and predates RVW’s Tudor turn. You could say it was Brahmsian, with a touch of Cecil Sharp. P was unimpressed by it. I enjoyed it more than she did, but I doubt that we would be hearing it if it were not by a composer better known for other works. The combination of instruments is an awkward one.
The big ticket for the night was the Cesar Franck. I feel I must have heard it before, if only because it was one of the set works for the Sydney International Piano Competition chamber music round. It’s a potent brew, full of semitonal-slide chromatic harmony which tends to get labelled “Wagnerian.” I really enjoyed it.
2 SSO 4 May 2022
I was lucky to get to this. I had been thinking of swapping some other concert for which I have tickets to get to it, but had let it slide. Then at 5.30 I got a call from Lx, Dulwich-Hill-gangster and my onetime High School English teacher. His invited guest for the evening had bowed out as not yet recovered from covid. Would I like to come? He was planning to meet friends out the front of the Town Hall at about 7.30. The concert began at 8.00. Actually, I knew that.
Would I ever. I even managed to squeeze in a short nap. I caught up with Lx on the train on the way in.
This will probably be the last Town Hall concert I attend for a while. They have been fun in a retro way and it certainly is a bonus that the train takes you straight to the door. It’s a pity that the great virus ended up pretty well wiping out our few years’ retro interlude away from the Concert Hall.
The program, conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya, was:
JESSICA WELLS Uplift (Fifty Fanfares Commission)
BRAHMS Piano Concerto No.1 Simon Trpčeski
TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No.4
It looked as though the original allocation of seating was on a covid-safe basis. For such an attractive program, attendance was still decidedly modest.
I enjoyed the Brahms. Trpčeski took what I characterised to Lx (in an allusion he perhaps understandably missed to a 1977 school production of Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion which he directed and for which I provided the music for the scene where Androcles dances with the lion) as a “velvet paws” approach to the first movement. I was glad to see that in the Tchaikovsky Harth-Bedoya observed the traditional approach of staying in tempo between the third (pizzicato) movement and the final movement. It’s not always done and it really works.
For an encore after the concerto, Trpčeski was joined by Andrew Haveron Tobias Breider and Catherine Hewgill and they played the slow movement from Brahms’ piano quartet in C. I’m all in favour of this kind of encore. It’s a nice touch of collegiality between the visiting soloist and the local orchestral players.
The concert will be broadcast on ABC “Classic” FM on 18 June and I hope to listen to it again then or online afterwards.
Before the concert, Lx caught up with his friend, PP. We scattered to our respective spots, and at interval Lx went to join PP and her friend in the foyer. I sought relief from mask-wearing by heading outside to consume my frugally brought from home apple. When we reconvened after interval, Lw told me PP had asked where I was. Lx told her I was outside eating an apple. PP asked “What is it with [Marcellous] and apples?” This was a reference to an apple-rolling incident at Angel Place in 2018 for which I was responsible. I had forgotten this. I guess it’s a “you fuck one goat” kind of thing.
3. Australia Ensemble 21 May
With P to this. Masks were still worn by all – not sure if that was by decree or simply a high rate of compliance. Interval was restored though no refreshments were on sale. Fortunately, I’d taken an apple. They’re particularly good and cheap at this time of year.
The program was:
Ludwig BEETHOVEN | Trio Op.87 (1794) for flute, clarinet & bassoon
Peggy GLANVILLE-HICKS | Concertino da Camera (1946)
Stuart GREENBAUM | Easter Island (2008)
Johannes BRAHMS | Piano Quartet no.3 in C minor Op.60 (1875)
Lisa Osmialowski replaced the advertised Geoffrey Collins on flute (will he ever be back to complete his farewell?). Andrew Barnes on bassoon made up the numbers in the Beethoven and the Glanville-Hicks.
The Brahms was the main fare for me, my appetite whetted by Trpčeski et al playing the slow movement at [2] above. Even after such a short period I can’t say I felt equipped or even motivated to make evaluative judgment between the two renditions. The circumstances were too different.
So it’s probably just as well I am not a critic.
Fortunately for posterity, critic and “emerging writer and composer,” Stephen McCarthy, was there and published a review. My title to this post is in his honour.
He writes (judiciously)
The players worked well to create a genuine sense of ensemble in Beethoven’s Trio Op. 87 in the challenging acoustic of the John Clancy. Sizeable wooden panels which surround the stage and part of the auditorium create a peformance space which is resonant but lacking in warmth. This makes it challenging for the blending of bigger ensembles, let alone smaller ones.
I’ve always quite liked the John Clancy Auditorium acoustic for chamber music. Mostly I sit close but I’ve sat further away if I’ve arrived late. It seemed fine when, circa 1993, I sat in the middle for Olaf Baer singing there with Geoffrey Parsons (a memorable occasion – how did this concert come to be held there?). I wonder if McCarthy may have been an undergraduate at UNSW and endured too many performances at the JCA by student massed forces.
As presbyopia kicks in I find I am a less religious reader of program notes, so I encountered the Greenbaum unguided by any programmatic prompts. I had forgotten even the title. In hindsight, I think I would have got more out of it if I had been paying more attention to the program. Isn’t that what program music is about? McCarthy takes a sterner, Hanslickian view:
While the music depicts this [the rise and fall of civilisations on the eponymous island] with some success, the piece when considered on its own, is not quite satisfying. The programmatic elements depicting the settling of Easter Island and its subsequent overpopulation, whilst a powerful message, should not distract from the importance of evaluating the music itself.
It has become quite the rage for concerts to be given titles. These can be a hook for publicity and sometimes offer some kind of justification for the items assembled. I don’t know that the justification necessarily involves a very high truth claim – how aesthetically significant could it be (as in April’s Australia Ensemble concert) that every composer had some kind of round-number anniversary with 2022? McCarthy is more thorough than I am. This is his final paragraph:
Leaving the auditorium, it struck me that the concert title “Cycles” was only tenuously linked with the programming. Some established, truly cyclical works, from composers at the peak of their powers, more broadly representative of what the ensemble’s website called “cycles of time and nature with the associated themes of regeneration and vitality” might have created a better thematic fit. The night was nonetheless a display of solid, skilful ensemble playing, of music which was interesting if not an unqualified success.
He’s a hard marker.