Music review: Australian Chamber Orchestra’s A Musical Awakening
With many hands on deck but not artistic director Richard Tognetti himself, this was one of the ACO’s more boldly adventurous concerts in a long while.
It is always mildly concerning when Richard Tognetti isn’t there on stage directing his hand-honed band of musicians. Whether he is away on leave or just taking a break, the task of directing Australia’s foremost orchestra sometimes has to fall to one of trusty colleagues.
When that person happens to be Timo-Veikko Valve, as it did in their touring concert ‘A Musical Awakening’, any questions lurking about how the ACO can keep up its high standards in Tognetti’s absence tend to vanish rather quickly. This Finnish-born cellist has what it takes, and audiences have seen numerous times before how he is right up to Tognetti in terms of musical intelligence and ability.
Directing from the cello is not always easy, but an undaunted Valve stepped up to the role with total assuredness. All eyes were glued on his bow, and the 12-member ensemble was pleasingly as tight as ever. It needed to be given the assignment that lay ahead: even for the ACO, this was one of their most eclectic programs.
‘A Musical Awakening’ was carefully assembled tapestry of music from across the ages, and it also proved to be more complex team effort than one may have thought.
It was especially good to see recorder player Genevieve Lacey on board and taking centre stage. Thriving on spontaneity and astounding as she always is, hers is the kind of musicianship that forms an easy, natural symbiosis with the ACO.
Hildegard von Bingen’s Ave, generosa (Hymn to the Virgin) emerged from a soundscape that began even while patrons were taking their seats. Environmental sounds heard over the speakers might have been recordings of surf or wind – one couldn’t be sure. Then the ACO strings, who had by now appeared on stage, supplied drone effects in open fifths as a prelude to Lacey herself. On a very dulcet-toned tenor recorder, she seemed to summon the natural elements with an upward reaching melody. Her expression was eloquent, and even if it felt more like a hymn to nature than to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the effect was arrestingly beautiful.
One might have guessed that with a centuries-crossing program such as this, Max Richter might be represented. His neo-Baroque On the Nature of Daylight is a kind of musical prayer composed in 2003 following the Iraq War. In this, the ACO’s clever linking idea here was to add theorbo, recalling an earlier age – or perhaps all ages. Simon Martyn-Ellis’s lovely rolling chords through this piece’s cyclic harmonies distantly reminded one of Pachelbel’s Canon.
With a last-minute swap of two pieces in the program, the concert’s complexities still seemed to be not quite fully sorted out. But the results worked well enough. Taking the place of a work by the Australian-American composer Melody Eötvös, was a piece by the Finnish composer Jaakko Kuusisto: his Wiima introduced high drama with strident outlines that gradually melting into a soulful melody.
The stand-out item was American composer David Lang’s new composition entitled flute and echo. Actually for recorder and strings, it sounded like another call to the wild with improvisatory-like flourishes from Lacey and close answering by Helena Rathbone on solo violin. Concerto-like, this piece is transparent in the simplicity of it materials and intriguing in its close interplay between the two solo instruments. Just occasionally though, Lacey was hidden under the surrounding strings in its louder passages.
The NSW-born composer Melody Eötvös has come up with an intensely personal piece in Meraki. Drawing its title from the Greek for ‘essence of oneself’, it begins with something akin to the hushed warmth of Barber’s Adagio for Strings but then seems to relate internal stories through a succession of changing episodes.
One had to read between the lines to realise that another of this concert’s contributing architects was Erkki Veltheim. This Finnish-born Melbourne composer supplied the recorded soundscapes at the beginning and also in the second half in a curious bracket entitled ‘Imaginary Cities: A Baroque Fantasy’. All the arrangements in this bracket were of his making, too, and the items themselves consisted of excerpts from Monteverdi (the opening of his Vespers), Vivaldi’s Recorder Concerto in C, Barbara Strozzi’s aria Che si può fare’, and Veltheim’s own Intermezzo I.
Subscribe for updates
In this Fantasy, it was a bit strange seeing Lacey standing sill and mute while the speakers played a recording of her improvising; and it was stranger still when she started duetting with herself. Nevertheless, this bracket proved to be brilliantly vivacious. Lacey exudes a natural energy that ignites musicians around her, and top of that she showed again that she is a player of the brightest virtuosity and cleanest tone. Now strumming vihuela, Martyn-Ellis added wonderful colour and zest to this mini-Baroque entertainment.
The ACO often include an arrangement of a Beethoven string quartet, namely the slow movement from Op.132, and this time they saved it for last. This is the movement that the ailing German composer wrote in gratitude for recovering from what he feared might have been a fatal intestinal illness. It really is impossible to perform this most introspective music on anything other than a string quartet, yet with the ACO’s fine purity and tuning, it turned out to be satisfying in an alternative way.
The intersecting worlds Valve brought together in an exceptionally diverse program, along with the varied personnel he gathered, made this a particularly rewarding concert.
The Australian Chamber Orchestra performed ‘A Musical Awakening’ on Friday September 9 at Adelaide Town Hall