The Australian Review of Resonance

Richard Tognetti string together an authoritative, adventurous journey

RESONANCE is the title for the Australian Chamber Orchestra's tour that began in Canberra on Saturday evening, prefaced by another miniature from octogenarian Peter Sculthorpe to celebrate Richard Tognetti's 20 years as artistic director. The plaintive, almost Russian mood of Sculthorpe's Chaconne is saved from turning to syrup by straining towards a climax. Despite being contemporary, the piece sounds like a ghost from the late 19th century.

Tognetti's authority was on display with a program as adventurous as it was coherent, with the splendours of his band, and with his commitment to securing funds to tour eight beneficiaries of the ACO's emerging artists scheme as work experience, thereby augmenting the string sections in pursuit of resonance.

Ralph Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia (1909) received the measured mastery apposite for its orgasmic musical language. Only playing marked by grace, jocosity and restraint can convey its immanent grandeur, and all this the ACO delivered.

Tognetti, however, disregarded the spacing essential to the third item, Bela Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936), where two string orchestras are to be positioned on either side of the drums and keyboards. Instead, the latter were strung along the back and the divided strings bridged by cellos and bases. Emphasising the strings defied the antiphonal heart of the composition, making it impossible to evaluate how well the ACO performed because they were not playing Bartok but another of their director's rearrangements.

Following interval, the audience encountered Shaar (1983), Hebrew for gate, by Iannis Xenakis, who was more consciously mathematical than Bartok, and even less afraid of noise, whether as whines, drones or yaps. For the ACO to convince with material so outside its normal repertoire is proof of how their standards must have lifted the capabilities of the young associates. Even with only half the number of strings stipulated, their attack compelled attention to the majesty of the structures that support the screeching and pounding.

After the democratic temper of the four previous works it was perhaps inescapable that the intensities attained by the ACO could do no other than expose Strauss's Metamorphosen (1945) as a lyrical confection intent on universalising evil to deflect attention from his persistent complicity with the Nazis.

Humphrey McQueen | The Australian | 10 August 2009