A MUSICAL AWAKENING
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne
Sunday October 7, 2025
Timo-Veikko Valve
Perhaps the organization was more than a bit optimistic to hope for any awakening in this afternoon's music, especially in the physical sense. After the first ten minutes or so, I was verging on the somnolent, mainly because the opening work, Illuminations, was played in near darkness with a backdrop of soothing electronically-generated bush noises, and the basic music, one of Hildegard of Bingen's Marian acclamations (Ave generosa from about 1158), might tempt towards ecstasy in the right surrounds but not in the well-amplified environment of a tenebrous Hamer Hall.
Something of the same could be said about the Australian Chamber Orchestra's conclusion to their program: an arrangement for string orchestra of the 1825 middle Molto adagio to Beethoven's Op. 132, his Heiliger Dankgesang for relief from illness where the composer stretches his material to weave a focused movement that has aspirations to take us away from the diurnal grind. I believe this finale came as something of a relief to ACO patrons, not least for the ardour with which a truncated ACO pronounced it. Mind you, its provenance as an arrangement remains obscure; Beethoven made no indications of moving it into the extended forces format.
But it was an uneasy concert experience for this listener, chiefly due to a sudden change in the programming order. At some stage leading up to this performance, Peteris Vask's Musica serena disappeared, to be replaced by Jaakko Kuusisto's Wiima - a sort of nature piece from 2011 (in this string orchestra shape) describing a winter wind. Somehow, the replacement meant that the core of our diet had to be moved around, with several problems arising for many of us faced with a set of contemporary pieces and trying to piece together what came where. Not to mention the hurried issuing of this information from a noticeably inexpressive voice murmuring over the hall's speaker system.
Certainly, the opening Hildegard piece came first, the sound world centred on Genevieve Lacey's recorder outlining the chant while the supporting strings made great play with drones and open 5ths in Erkki Veltheim's re-imagining of the piece for modern ears. We couldn't actually see Lacey, who stood in front of the string forces (3-3-2-2-1) and, while they were partially lit-up by desk-lights, she wasn't. Anyway, the piece progressed serenely enough, Lacey left the stage and some lights came up (a practical illumination) to show us Simon Martyn-Ellis holding his theorbo and taking centre-stage for a solo which I assume was carrying on from Lacey's meditations on the Virgin. It ought to be sufficient to say that the general tenor of the music remained roughly the same.
But it's possible that Martyn-Ellis was doing an elaboration on something else. Somewhere along the line we heard Max Richter's On the Nature of Daylight from 2004 which struck me - as so much of this writer's work does - as being based on predictable chords and melodic waverings that occupy a kind of Stasisland. Nothing happens. You can follow the progressions without thinking about it and that's probably what happened because I've got absolutely no recall of the ACO musicians wafting through this miasma of old-fashioned harmonic progressions.
All of a sudden, we were woken from our meditations by the clean sounds of Kuusisto's soundscape which, at last, showed a mind searching for unusual textures and sound-production techniques. Here was a score for our times, speaking a language at once contemporary and harking back to past tone-painters yet not descending to the level of mimicry. The ACO musicians gave us a vivid account of this bracing music, welcome for its bustling activity and allowance for individuality.
Lacey returned to give the world premiere of American composer David Lang's flute and echo, a clever concerto in which the recorder sets up series of solo melodic lines which are imitated by a solo violin (Helena Rathbone, leading the ACO), the content spreading to the orchestral body. This inter-leaving device gradually loses its rigidity and the opposition of woodwind and strings gains in contrast as Lang's work moves to its conclusion. My only problem with this attractively lucid work was the amplification level which was high, and not just of Lacey.
Australian writer Melody Eotvos contributed Meraki to the musicians' offerings; like the Lang work and Veltheim's arrangements, commissioned by the ACO. Eotvos's piece, taking its name from a Greek word, was written five years ago and presented these players with no obvious problems as it too harks back to a simpler time where the aim of communicating involvement or creativity results in a pleasing aural environment where any harmonic shocks (there are no rhythmic ones) register in the work's centre with some pages of chugging discordant chords before everything is righted at the end and we come to a placid quietus.
Lacey and Martyn-Ellis (now sporting a baroque guitar alongside his theorbo)returned for Veltheim's second construction: Imaginary Cities: A Baroque Fantasy which, like Illuminations, featured a soundtrack of noises, in this instance somewhat watery ones as the cities in question seemed to be transmuted into one: Venice. After some preliminary faffing around, we were suddenly hit by Monteverdi's Domine ad adjuvandum from the 1610 Vespers (later the opening toccata to the composer's 1637 opera L'Orfeo and here carried off without the Vespers' choir, of course, and lacking the brass), played straight. This is startlingly direct music, revelling in its monochromatic harmonic outbursts and a sudden delight to experience.
Lacey gave us two Vivaldi extracts: the first Allegro of the Recorder Concerto RV444 and, completing Veltheim's entertainment, the finale to the popular RV 443, both of them coming from 1728-9. To my well-roused ears, these were played as written and the focus naturally fell on Lacey who invested both with her customary precision and clever differentiation of attack across repeated passages - and God knows you can find a lot of those in Vivaldi concertos.
In between, the supporting tape gave us a ney flute solo, a Sephardic song that melded with Strozzi's Che si puo fare aria of 1664, and some faint tarantella dances, along with the rippling water and many other atmospheric noises that have not stuck in this memory. So the exercise catered for both courtier and commoner, just as Venice does today depending on the amount of cash you're prepared to spend in that slowly-sinking marvel.
And then, the Beethoven quartet movement which had the benefit of bringing this musical journey to a sonorously satisfying ending with an impressive strength in the full-bodied chords that punctuate the score, e.g. 21 bars from the end. Nevertheless, the emergence of these noble sounds as a kind of aesthetic summation of the awakening process struck me as taking an easy way out. Some of us might be suspicious that the composer is too overt in his transcendental signals and this adagio needs its original surrounds to give it a suitable framework, a world that treats with the everyday alongside this singular ascent out of it.
Timo-Veikko Valve, the ACO principal cello, curated this event but made an unobtrusive figure onstage. At the end, his selection impressed for its catholicity, even if the opening veered into a highly restrained area of musical experience. I was tempted by my shortcomings in following the chain of offerings to hear the program again on the next night but was constrained by domestic troubles. However. one of the more successful features of this Sunday afternoon experience was the absence of serious coughers; apart from some rumbles during the Beethoven, the occasion was pleasantly free of laryngeal interference. Long may it continue.
No comments:
Post a Comment