THE SOUL OF THE CELLO: TIMO-VEIKKO VALVE
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Melbourne Recital Centre
Saturday May 3 at 7:30 pm
After an out-of-town try-out at the Gippsland Arts Centre in Warragul the previous night, the Australian Chamber Orchestra's principal moves to a same-but-different sphere with this Election Day program which reminds us of the cellist's main arena of operations because both major works are arrangements for string orchestra and it's only the MSO strings that will be heard tonight. Timo-Veikko Valve begins with a solo in the Prelude from Bach's E flat Suite, which is followed by one of Mozart's arrangements of Bach - suitably, an E flat Fugue. But I don't know whether this is a version of The Well-Tempered Klavier's Book 2 No. 7, or the Trio Sonata No. 2's fugue. Speaking of Mozart, Valve then presents his own arrangement of the String Quartet in D minor No. 15 K. 421, one of the set dedicated to Haydn. A touch of modernity appears with brother-of-Pekka Jaakko Kuusisto's Wiima of 2011, a 13-minute landscape which Valve has promulgated since its composition in 2011. We finish with Schumann's Cello Concerto without the original woodwind, horn and trumpet pairs and lacking timpani; I assume this is the transcription by F Vygem (Florian Vygen?) and a. Kahl (Andrea Kahl?). Remaining tickets at this venue for adults are from $57 tp $67, while; the young get in for $20. I assume that a booking fee is imposed but you can't tell without putting your money down. If not, this would be a major advantage over where I've spent the last 5 1/2 years.
FOUR BASSOONS
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Iwaki Auditorium, ABC Southbank Centre
Sunday May 4 at 11 am
Necessarily, we're talking arrangements again, given this unusual front-and-centre combination of Jack Schiller, Elise Millman, Natasha Thomas, and contrabassoonist Brock Imison; all escorted along their way some of the time by an MSO string quintet of violins Anna Skalova and Philippa West, viola Fiona Sargeant, cello Rohan de Korte, and double bass Ben Hanlon. Mozart starts the morning with an unspecified 'suite' arranged by Imison for bassoon quartet. Then, an abrupt jump to Wynton Marsalis and his Meeelaan for bassoon and string quartet: a fusion piece now about 25 years old and which lasts between 13 and 16 minutes. Imison revisits his arranger status, this time of Giovanni Batista Riccio's brief Sonata a quattro, here organised for a quartet of bassoons. Australian writer Gerard Brophy scores with his Four Branches of 2015, dedicated partly to Imison and lasting about as long as the Riccio. Last comes Dutch bassoonist/composer Kees Olthuis' Introduction and Allegro of 2006 for bassoon, contrabassoon and string quintet; at 20 minutes in length, this promises to be the focal work of the program. The Mozart apart (perhaps), these pieces are completely unknown to me but that has been an occasionally welcome surprise factor in these recitals by musicians who are rarely heard together in intimate converse. As for prices, you might as well forget it because this recital is sold out, thanks to the plethora of bassoonists in Victoria. Bad luck, unless you have high-level double-reed connections . . .
HOLLYWOOD SONGBOOK
Musica Viva Australia
Melbourne Recital Centre
Tuesday May 6 at 7 pm
Soprano Ali McGregor collaborates with the Signum Saxophone Quartet, a group I heard in Brisbane on their last tour supporting Kristian Winther in an arrangement of Kurt Weill's Violin Concerto. Here, the participants' combined efforts are centred on film music from the legendary American Dream Factory. We've heard of the Great American Songbook and know that this could refer to any collection of songs that your average schmuck could put together and then call his/her collation by that name; a con trick to equal Trump's repeated clams to singular greatness. But the Hollywood Songbook was a reality: a compilation of 47 songs by Hanns Eisler to poems by Brecht, Holderlin, Goethe, Viertel, Eichendorff, the Bible, Morike and himself - all written in 1943 when the composer was an unhappy refugee in Los Angeles. McGregor and her colleagues will present selections from this liederbuch as well as some scraps by Weill, Porter, Berlin and Harold Arlen's Over the Rainbow. Mind you, the Signata share the limelight with a few of Schulhoff's Five Pieces for String Quartet from 1924, a set of numbers eviscerated from Prokofiev's 1935 Romeo and Juliet ballet, a respectable composite in Three Dance Episodes from Bernstein's On the Town musical of 1944, and then back to selection land for some chunks hacked out of Copland's Rodeo ballet score, dating from 1942. Tonight will be the second in a series of eight performances and you can attend as a full adult for seats ranging between $65 and $125, with student rush places available for $20. But never forget the $7 transaction fee added on for a reason that no reasonable entrepreneur can explain.
DISCOVER SIBELIUS: SIDE BY SIDE WITH MYO
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne
Thursday May 8 at 7:30 pm
Yes, you can discover a sort of Sibelius tonight with newly-created stars from the Melbourne Youth Orchestra featured alongside MSO regulars. But what conductor Benjamin Northey and his forces offer is a Reader's Digest version of the Finnish master; a little bit here, a morsel there, and perhaps enough to titillate - hopefully. But then, who needs this sort of itty-bitty introduction to one of the 20th century's most individual and approachable voices? The night opens with Finlandia, the composer's 1899 not-so-open act of anti-Russian propaganda that still thrills to this day with its combination of power and lyricism. Then comes the first movement to the 1902 Symphony No. 2, which is excellent but pales into the background when compared to the score's sweeping finale. Likewise, we get the last movement of the Violin Concerto of 1904 (with an unknown soloist), but this acts as roughage when compared to the work's preceding pages which give a fairer picture of the composer's moody emotional environment. We then hear the Valse triste of 1903, one of the composer's most frequently performed scraps, and about as useful a musical piece of information as Elgar's Salut d'amour. To end this brief procession of delights, we come to something more mature in the Symphony No. 5 in E flat, written in 1915. Its grinding. inexorable ending tolerates no grounds for complaint as it simply carries all before it. Sorry, but I'd rather spend my cash on a full performance of either symphony or the magnificent concerto. If you're under 18, you get in for $20; any older and you have to cough up $39. There's no fee, unless you want your tickets delivered non-automatically, where you fall victim to the fiscal demands of supplying human contact; it's not much, but enough to generate a slight feeling of sourness.
AN EVENING OF FAIRY TALES
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne
Thursday May 15 at 7:30 pm
You'll get to enjoy your other-worldly experience here without a soloist; the main interest in a pretty pedestrian program comes from conductor Alpesh Chauhan, a British musician who began by playing cello, then sank to the level of directing orchestras - first in Birmingham, then Italy and Scotland, before landing back in Birmingham with side-trips to Dusseldorf. Tonight he expands our awareness with the 1892 Prelude to Humperdinck's ever-welcome dose of gemutlichkeit, the opera Hansel and Gretel. We are then taken to Prokofiev's 1944 vision of Cinderella, although nothing is definite here in the land of 'selections'. Speaking of which, we enjoy more bleeding chunks of extrapolated pleasure in some extracts from Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty of 1889 which admittedly lends itself to filleting. Not sure about such a night where you're faced with extracts from two ballets and an opera and you have to do a lot of extrapolation and supplementary imaginative work to get much out of the whole exercise. Still, for all I know Chauhan has a magic baton that directs such music with brilliant transformative power. You pay full-price $139 in the stalls and circle of Hamer Hall, with a minor reduction to $127 for the balcony. Sit further back and you're up for $81 or $93 respectively.
This program will be repeated in Costa Hall Geelong on Friday May 16 at 7:30 pm and in Hamer Hall on Saturday May 17 at 7:30 pm.
BACH TO THE BEACH BOYS AND BEYOND
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Melbourne Recital Centre
Saturday May 17 at 7:30 pm
Carolina Eyck is the centrepiece of this night's work. She is a theremin player, mistress of that primal electronic instrument that provides the focus for so much of Messiaen's Turangalila-symphonie. Richard Tognetti leads his ACO and includes among his forces ABC Radio celebrity pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska. As for what this combination gets up to, the program is as wide-ranging as its title proposes. We start with Bach's Air on the G String from the Orchestral Suite No. 2, and we end with a compendium of music from Miklos Rosza's soundtrack to Spellbound (1945), Jonny Greenwood's background for There Will Be Blood (2007), Star Trek (Alexander Courage's opening credits theme for the original series of 1966, you assume), Morricone's 1966 score for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, as well as Jim Parker's title music for Midsomer Murders that actually used the theremin and which also dates from 1966. In between come Brian Wilson's Good Vibrations (you wouldn't believe it - released first in that vintage year of 1966), Offenbach's Can-can (originally from 1858), all Five Pieces for String Quartet of 1924 by Schulhoff, some off-cuts from Saint-Saens' 1886 Carnival of the Animals as well as his Danse macabre of 1874, Rimsky's 1900 bumblebee, Glinka's The Lark romance from A Farewell to St. Petersburg written in 1840. And we'll have a few samples of local content with the 2005 commission by the ACO of Brett Dean's Short Stories: IV. Komarov's Last Words, plus a world premiere from Holly Harrison. Alongside these works, Eyck gives the Australian premiere to her own 2015 Fantasias: Oakunar Lynntuja for herself and a string quartet, and there'll be an outing for Jorg Widmann's 180 beats per minute of 1993 for two violins, a viola and three cellos. Well, they say it's the spice of life. Entry costs $49 to $158 for an adult, $75 to $128 for concessionaires, $35 for those under 35, and $30 for a student. There's an extra fee of 'between $4 and $8.50' if you order online or by phone - which pretty much involves everybody in what amounts to an unabashed grab for extra cash.
This program will be repeated on Sunday May 18 at 2:30 pm in Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne, and back at the Melbourne Recital Centre on Monday May 19 at 7:30 pm.
STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS IN CONCERT
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne
Thursday May 22 at 7:30 pm
Nothing's changed, then, in the past 5-plus years. Our chief orchestra sticks to a sure-fire dollar spinner with the old live soundtrack exercise although, to my mind, there's little to commend this episode of the saga, the first of the third trilogy that I dutifully saw in the theatre, bought the DVD, then never looked at again. Visually startling and quite devoid of character-interest, the film once again features music by an incorrigible John Williams which on first hearing sped past my ears at warp speed. But that's what the MSO, under Benjamin Northey, will be resuscitating tonight under the big screen. Are they still using subtitles so that the actors can be heard over the orchestral sub-text? Let's hope so because, even in the original cinema screening, parts of dialogue bolted past, incomprehensible and unable to be relished. Still, another viewing is almost worth it just to see Han Solo killed by his psychotic son. Standard adult tickets range from $81 to $150; concession card holders and children enjoy a cut rate of a few dollars less. Makes you salivate, doesn't it? As well, you have to cough up an extra $7 for a 'transaction fee', although I can't find mention of that when I tried booking. To be honest, I find the MSO ticketing process to be all over the place - something like the entertainment on offer here.
This program will be repeated on Friday May 23 at 7:30 pm, and on Saturday May 24 at 1 pm.
GRIEG'S PIANO CONCERTO
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne
Thursday May 29 at 7:30 pm
While it's hard to plumb securely the dim recesses of the past, this popular concerto was probably the first of its Romantic kind that I became aware of, thanks to an LP recording by Dinu Lipatti that I was somehow forced to buy while in a state of early-teen innocence. Still, the reading proved memorable enough to colour several later renditions - and there were many of them as the Grieg proved popular with entrants in the ABC's Concerto and Vocal Competition staged during the 1950s and 60s. For all its renown, this is one of the easier examples of the Romantic barnstormer; little wonder that Liszt was able to sight-read it for the composer as it's right up his virtuosic Hungarian alley. Tonight, Alexander Gavrylyuk makes another welcome Melbourne appearance to invest this familiar score with his considerable skill and insight. Surrounding this, Hong Kong-born conductor Elim Chan leads the MSO through British/United States writer Anna Clyne's This Midnight Hour of 2015 which takes its kick-off from poems by Juan Jimenez and Baudelaire and serves as an aural feast for about 12 minutes - or so they say. To end, the orchestra will struggle through Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, a voluptuous and still-testing feast from 1888 that celebrates repetition and instrumental colour in a brilliant exhibition of capture and release. One of the acting concertmasters, Tair Khisambeev or Anne-Marie Johnson, is in for a wild ride. To get in, you need between $75 and $142 for a standard ticket; concession card holders get a $5 reduction. A child is charged $20 but there's a $7 transaction fee applied to each booking. Mind you, this information comes from the MSO website, so it should be right, right?
This program will be repeated on Saturday May 31 at 2 pm.
