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