Wednesday, 8 July 2009
Our ACO community is expanding
To make sure you stay up-to-date on all that is happening with the ACO join us on ACO community: www.aco.com.au/community, Facebook, and Twitter: http://twitter.com/A_C_O.
ACO2, our regional touring orchestra, undertakes its most extensive tour ever in July, with concerts and schools workshops across Victoria and NSW.
Led by Helena Rathbone, ACO2 connects the next generation of talented young Australian string players with the stars of the ACO, creating a combined ensemble with a fresh, energetic performance style.
For more information and booking details please visit http://www.aco.com.au/Default.aspx?url=/ACO2-RegionalTour
Led by Helena Rathbone, ACO2 connects the next generation of talented young Australian string players with the stars of the ACO, creating a combined ensemble with a fresh, energetic performance style.
For more information and booking details please visit http://www.aco.com.au/Default.aspx?url=/ACO2-RegionalTour
Monday, 22 June 2009
2008 Annual Report
If you're in need of some good news, take a look at our 2008 Annual Report. It was an amazing year. Subscriptions and donations grew and single ticket sales increased 42%. The Bach recordings won a third consecutive ARIA Award and Musica Surfica won three Best Picture awards at film festivals in Europe and the USA.
Friday, 19 June 2009
Great Romantics Review from Herald Sun
Chamber works for unusual instrument combinations often suffer shabby treatment because there are no permanent groups to play them. Musicians come together for one-off performances, then disband before they've had time to develop a common artistic understanding.
ACO's Great Romantics program offered the perfect solution: three string sextets performed by principal players who work together all the time. These musicians have long since forged a mutual sense of balance and ensemble, leaving them plenty of scope for detail and expression.
Black is the Night was written by Ian Munro to celebrate Richard Tognetti's 20th year as ACO leader and artistic director. It's achingly beautiful: lyrical, expressive and flattering for strings. The ACO sextet combined sweetness with intensity. Tognetti created a rich palette of
colour through his choices of bow speed and vibrato. The quasi-improvised sections of his solo line trailed in and out like someone thinking aloud.
Brahms' String Sextet in G had a refreshing, almost classical clarity. There was none of the heaviness that often dogs performances of Brahms' chamber works but, instead, a transparent sense of balance where every voice could be heard. The ensemble moved and breathed as a whole through a clearly unified vision. First violist Christopher Moore was in particularly fine form, his sound and note shapes well compatible with Tognetti's.
Schoenberg's Transfigured Night was the afternoon's most passionate performance, its potent emotions ebbing and flowing with compelling sincerity. It wrapped up a concert of spectacular playing with an expressiveness from the musicians that seemed truly heartfelt.
Anna McAlister | Herald Sun | 17 Jun 2009
ACO's Great Romantics program offered the perfect solution: three string sextets performed by principal players who work together all the time. These musicians have long since forged a mutual sense of balance and ensemble, leaving them plenty of scope for detail and expression.
Black is the Night was written by Ian Munro to celebrate Richard Tognetti's 20th year as ACO leader and artistic director. It's achingly beautiful: lyrical, expressive and flattering for strings. The ACO sextet combined sweetness with intensity. Tognetti created a rich palette of
colour through his choices of bow speed and vibrato. The quasi-improvised sections of his solo line trailed in and out like someone thinking aloud.
Brahms' String Sextet in G had a refreshing, almost classical clarity. There was none of the heaviness that often dogs performances of Brahms' chamber works but, instead, a transparent sense of balance where every voice could be heard. The ensemble moved and breathed as a whole through a clearly unified vision. First violist Christopher Moore was in particularly fine form, his sound and note shapes well compatible with Tognetti's.
Schoenberg's Transfigured Night was the afternoon's most passionate performance, its potent emotions ebbing and flowing with compelling sincerity. It wrapped up a concert of spectacular playing with an expressiveness from the musicians that seemed truly heartfelt.
Anna McAlister | Herald Sun | 17 Jun 2009
Thursday, 18 June 2009
Great Romantics Review from The Australian
In the coldest Canberra week in decades, the spectre of darkness hung over the Australian Chamber Orchestra's latest touring program. Images of night, death and sundered love enveloped three related works, but the playing was glowing and luminous as ever.
This bare-bones ACO was tailored especially to two late-romantic pieces for string sextet with a new Australian work setting the tone. Too often these sextets are performed by a string quartet plus friends. The six ACO principals, with their intimate knowledge of each other's techniques, proffered an illuminating and integrated experience.
Ian Munro's Black is the Night is the latest in a series of short commissions celebrating Richard Tognetti's twenty-year stewardship of the ACO. Much loved as the Australia Ensemble's pianist, Munro is emerging as a singular voice, his neo-Bergian lyricism providing the palette for the setting of a Judith Wright poem. Originally for voice and piano, Munro's reworking sounds close to being a transcription, but is none the less for that. It engages the heart and soul with its profound
sincerity.
Where Munro takes six minutes to leave a lasting impression, Brahms, in his second String Sextet, took 40 minutes to farewell his distant beloved, Agathe von Siebold, whose name is encoded throughout. That journey is a maelstrom of emotions rugged, tender, exhausting, ambiguous and the ACO sextet abandoned themselves to it.
Tognetti and his crew often excite their performances by exaggerating dynamics: their fortes are sometimes brutishly loud, their pianos exquisitely soft. Here there was a tendency to overplay to the point of preciousness. As a wise man once said, the secrets of German romanticism can be found in the strudels of Munich, not in the pastries of Vienna.
It was both wise and brave to schedule Schoenberg's Transfigured Night after intermission. In other circumstances, a half-hour of Schoenberg would be enough to half empty a hall. Here there was no discernible evacuation; on the contrary, the audience stayed and
cheered. Deservedly so, for the performance was simply stunning.
Transported to Oscar Wilde's "perfumed garden", we were in the world of Mahler and Freud, Aubrey Beardsley and Kandinsky. Late in life, Schoenberg cautioned his listeners to forget the overblown Richard
Dehmel poem that inspired his music, surely among the most erotic in the entire canon. Still, one can hardly fail to sense its sexual torment, those ejaculatory surges and that detumescent afterglow.
This ACO performance confirmed the might of Schoenberg's masterpiece, reducing Brahms's agonising to self-indulgent long-windedness.
Vincent Plus | The Australian | 15 Jun 2009
This bare-bones ACO was tailored especially to two late-romantic pieces for string sextet with a new Australian work setting the tone. Too often these sextets are performed by a string quartet plus friends. The six ACO principals, with their intimate knowledge of each other's techniques, proffered an illuminating and integrated experience.
Ian Munro's Black is the Night is the latest in a series of short commissions celebrating Richard Tognetti's twenty-year stewardship of the ACO. Much loved as the Australia Ensemble's pianist, Munro is emerging as a singular voice, his neo-Bergian lyricism providing the palette for the setting of a Judith Wright poem. Originally for voice and piano, Munro's reworking sounds close to being a transcription, but is none the less for that. It engages the heart and soul with its profound
sincerity.
Where Munro takes six minutes to leave a lasting impression, Brahms, in his second String Sextet, took 40 minutes to farewell his distant beloved, Agathe von Siebold, whose name is encoded throughout. That journey is a maelstrom of emotions rugged, tender, exhausting, ambiguous and the ACO sextet abandoned themselves to it.
Tognetti and his crew often excite their performances by exaggerating dynamics: their fortes are sometimes brutishly loud, their pianos exquisitely soft. Here there was a tendency to overplay to the point of preciousness. As a wise man once said, the secrets of German romanticism can be found in the strudels of Munich, not in the pastries of Vienna.
It was both wise and brave to schedule Schoenberg's Transfigured Night after intermission. In other circumstances, a half-hour of Schoenberg would be enough to half empty a hall. Here there was no discernible evacuation; on the contrary, the audience stayed and
cheered. Deservedly so, for the performance was simply stunning.
Transported to Oscar Wilde's "perfumed garden", we were in the world of Mahler and Freud, Aubrey Beardsley and Kandinsky. Late in life, Schoenberg cautioned his listeners to forget the overblown Richard
Dehmel poem that inspired his music, surely among the most erotic in the entire canon. Still, one can hardly fail to sense its sexual torment, those ejaculatory surges and that detumescent afterglow.
This ACO performance confirmed the might of Schoenberg's masterpiece, reducing Brahms's agonising to self-indulgent long-windedness.
Vincent Plus | The Australian | 15 Jun 2009
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Great Romantics Review
While the image of Brahms as a turbulent and highly sensitive ‘Great Romantic’ is easily understood, Arnold Schoenberg is perhaps not the first composer to come to mind when we think of Romanticism in music. But Schoenberg’s string sextet Transfigured Night, written during his tonal, High Romantic period of composition, represents the height of this era’s fascination with intensified human emotions and feelings. Read the full review.
Australian Stage Online
Australian Stage Online
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
Interview with Helena about the current tour
WHEN Helena Rathbone was recently asked what it was like being the only female in a touring sextet, one of her fellow musicians answered for her.
"He said: 'Well, she's the most blokey of all of us so it should be OK'," Rathbone says with a laugh. Read the full interview in the Courier Mail.
"He said: 'Well, she's the most blokey of all of us so it should be OK'," Rathbone says with a laugh. Read the full interview in the Courier Mail.
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