ACO UNLEASHED
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne
Sunday June 22, 2025
Satu Vanska
Something of a grab-bag, this program. That's understandable since the original guest director, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, bowed out due to an injury of some kind and the Australian Chamber Orchestra had to come up with something else that appealed to its clientele. Pushing forward the ensemble's personnel in another celebration of the organization's 50th birthday, artistic director Richard Tognetti absented himself from this particular felicity and gave three violinists and the principal cello a generous exposure in two concertos, as well as granting Satu Vanska the opportunity to outline her interpretation of Ravel's Tzigane of 1924 with a reduced orchestra of strings, celesta and timpani/percussion.
As well as flaunting some front-line talent, the ACO demonstrated its collective skills in two arrangements: one by Tognetti of Beethoven's String Quartet in F minor of 1810, the other the C minor Quartettsatz by Schubert from ten years later which was string-orchestrated by an anonymous musician. Both are short but the players attacked them with that carefully honed brusqueness which is a characteristic of this body when confronted with composers of this stature in curt mode. And Tognetti obviously takes pleasure in transcribing masterworks of this level for his forces who usually make them seamless accomplishments.
But you come across a different creature when you move from the single line to the many, no matter how determined and aggressive the groups of five violins, for example, in Beethoven's opening Allegro. The first violin octaves leaps that start in bar 3 lose bite, as does the all-in-together menace of bars 18 to 20 when four whip-cracks become a sound-wall. The listener can sense the communal determination of output in the string orchestra format but you sacrifice an individuality of character that generates the main interest in string quartet recitals.
Well, I've made this comment before and it probably borders on the pointless, particularly because it could be worse. We could be hearing arrangements of music that relies on large-scale and diffuse orchestral timbres, like Rimsky's Scheherazade, the Pines of Rome, or Berg's Op. 6. Actually, no: we couldn't: that's several bridges too far. But there's nothing to stop a spread into the Schubert Quintet which I've heard in full orchestra format; or the Brahms sextets which have also been converted for the larger string-rich palette.
And on you could go. But this predilection for regular and familiar quartets by Beethoven, Janacek, or Bartok is all more than a little disappointing as the repertoire for string orchestra is large. And, if you're going to faff around with the pre-existing, I'd welcome a bit more adventure - like reducing Penderecki's Threnody for your available forces, or doing the same for Boulez's Livre pour cordes, or expanding the Schoenberg quartets, especially No. 2.
In any event, much of this afternoon's activity comprised arrangements. We started with Bach's Concerto for three violins, a reconstruction of a work using three keyboard soloists. Vanska, Helena Rathbone and Anna da Silva Chen (the ACO's latest full-time member) performed the individual lines with an agreeable self-appreciation of their function in the complex, yet not slavishly imitating each other in the frequent staggered entries with which Bach peppers his work. Vanska gave us a firm exhibition across the opening movement, including two striking exposed solos (bars 63 to 72, bars 115 to 119), while Rathbone and Chen made exemplary complements, to the gratifying point where you could experience three differing styles of attack and release.
Still, the intriguing movement of this concerto is its finale with the potent solo for Violin 1 from bar 141 to bar 174, although not before some eloquent exposed passages for her partners. By the time we arrived here in this second public rendition of the program, the ensemble showed at its best through a forceful oscillation between ritornello and solo, all three of them vaulting into action with gusto, especially Chen who exercised an attractive personality here, both earthy and buoyant.
Vanska bowled into Tzigane without waiting for the greeting applause to die away, making fierce work of that vigo4rous opening of 27 bars on the G string only. You were left in no doubt that this player had the mastery of the thing as she handled its challenges with a precise ferocity and demonstrated for one of the few times in my experience how cimbalom-like that moment of left-hand pizzicato could be. Yet, behind the bravura and theatricality, I couldn't help wondering if the player was showing us how satirical this piece of Gypsy music is with its fits and starts, not to mention its employment of all those Liszt-to-Sarasate Romany tropes that Ravel was utilizing to construct such a clever exercise in brittle musical frivolity.
Bernard Rofe, the ACO's Artistic Planning Manager, carried out the arrangement of this exuberant gem and gave a large part of its colour spectrum to the celesta, here handled by regular ACO violinist Ike See. I suppose nobody in the ACO doubles as a harpist; that instrument sees far more action in the original than the 16 bars of light colour contributed by the celesta between Nos. 14 and 15 in the Durand score of 1924. Not that this imbalance in the back-drop matters that much when the spotlight shines almost uninterruptedly on the soloist and Vanska showed plenty of flair and apparent enjoyment in her work right up to the rather brutal three pizzicato quadruple-stop chords that finish the piece.
If you accept the character change of the string quartet arrangements, then you would have been impressed yet again by the ACO's outlining of the Beethoven and Schubert program components. As you might have expected, the most persuasive section of the Serioso came in the Allegretto where the key is to keep the piece in fluid motion. I think the texture cut down at one point to a series of solo entries - the fugato at bar 34? - but the quiet, filled-out nature of the movement's harmonic movement with its sideways slips gave us a welcome tranquillity between two driving sets of pages.
I enjoyed the Schubert movement because of its innate qualities that seem to lend it more easily to the orchestral framework, like the oscillation between bustle, as at the start, and the sudden soaring aspiration of the second subject in bar 27. Later, the rapid outward and inner surges between bars 77 and 80 proved striking in their unanimity of production and dynamic management, as were the transparent first violins' step-by-step gradual descents across bars 105 to 124. It's a striking fragment in its mode of address, making a virtue of simplicity . . . which is probably why it seemed more suitable for an expansion of forces.
To end, Timo-Veikko Valve fronted the Australian premiere of his compatriot/relative Jaakko Kuusisto's Cello Concerto of 2019 which is scored for an orchestra of strings, timpani (here played by Brian Nixon) and percussion (the evergreen Daryl Pratt). This proved to be a gracious, expansive construct in an orthodox three movements, its progress outlined with exemplary earnestness by the soloist. The most lasting impression from this new (to us) composition is of a lyrical fluency coupled with harmonic sophistication, but Kuusisto's vocabulary impresses as conservative: there are no disruptive signs in this work which takes its place in a long chain of such concertos which offer expressive gifts for their soloists while the orchestral support holds some challenges. Will we hear it again? Possibly, I suppose, but in my gut I think that this concerto might remain a local rarity.
Nevertheless, it was refreshing to hear an unmediated composer speaking his original tongue without reconstruction from any other source. Further, it brought this celebration to a satisfying conclusion, giving the ACO the opportunity to engage with a contemporary voice, sadly stilled before reaching its full complement of years, yet fortunate in these exponents who take up their work with exemplary devotion and relish.
No comments:
Post a Comment