FLAUTIST Sharon Bezaly has commissioned several concertos for her own use, one of them featuring in her appearances for the latest round of Australian Chamber Orchestra subscription concerts.
To an impressively well-populated hall, Bezaly gave the Melbourne premiere of conductor-composer Jose Serebrier's Flute Concerto with Tango, which allowed the soloist to display breath control and rapid articulation. She also displayed her expertise in Carl Vine's Pipe Dreams. This Australian composition requires extensive stretches of legerdemain from the soloist, with lashings of rapid-fire passage work that impress with their virtuosity more than their actual content.
Like the Serebrier concerto, this work has an angular vocabulary, spiky in impact yet without confrontation.
ACO artistic director Richard Tognetti is celebrating 20 years as the ensemble's head. Concerts this year have featured works written for the occasion, but none as extensive as Peteris Vasks' Vox Amoris, a wearingly long fantasy that gives its principal exponent a worthy challenge in terms of powerful expression, especially in its two gripping cadenzas.
The Latvian composer's love voice is both passionate and consistent, not so much repetitious as lacking variety.
These three works written over the past six years were encased by readings of Handel's concerto grosso Op. 6 No. 7 - its final hornpipe performed with the ACO's refreshing brand of whiplash vigour - and Tchaikovsky's String Serenade, which has rarely sounded better, with some splendidly burnished phrasing to once again show the excellence of this richly talented ensemble.
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