Tognetti's band can do no wrong

Review from Central Sydney of Resonance

The Australian Chamber Orchestra elicits such fulsome praise from so many quarters that it’s difficult for this reviewer to find a weakness - there simply doesn’t seem to be one.

They seem capable of playing anything superbly. Take their latest tour, under the brand of Resonance, which features “five masterpieces for string orchestra”.

Swollen almost to symphony orchestra size by combining the main ensemble with the up-and-comers from ACO2, they also redefined the “chamber” element of their title to include a large and varied array of instruments for Bartok’s Music for strings, percussion and celesta.

I have heard this work performed several times over the years. None of them has been finer than this reading under artistic director Richard Tognetti. This complex and marvellous work unfolded beautifully from its quietly insistent fugal opening to the febrile cross-rhythms of Balkan and Hungarian folk tunes which punctuate the tumultuous finale.

Tognetti’s triumphal passage through his 20th season as leader continues with Australia’s best composers paying tributes to him - in this case Peter Sculthorpe with a specially-commissioned Chaconne, a gentle and melodious nod to both Sculthorpe’s and Tognetti’s favourite composer, J.S.Bach.

This simple work, exploiting with long singing lines the glorious tone of Tognetti’s $10 million fiddle, laid the groundwork for the next piece, Vaughan Williams’ glorious and lush Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis.

Its first performance was given in the vast, resonant spaces of Gloucester cathedral. This was hard to recreate on the small Angel Place stage, but by the judicious placement of a mini-orchestra at the back, Tognetti and his band managed well.

The second half of the program opened with a change of mood and pace with a harrowing work, Shaar, by Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, a resistance fighter against the Nazis and then the British who lost half of his face in a skirmish with an English tank.

Painting a nightmarish picture with the use of stabbing bowing, strong dissonant chords and sliding glissando passages, this performance was notable not only for the power of the playing but Tognetti’s meticulous direction, mouthing the beats in the bar amid a seeming maelstrom of colliding tempi and harmonies.

Richard Strauss’s tragic and beautiful memorial to his beloved Munich and the shattered treasures of Germany and Austria, Metamorphosen, closed the evening on a sombre but ultimately peaceful note.