Final report of ACO2's WA regional tour

The latter half of ACO2’s WA regional tour was as successful and well received as the first. After a well attended concert at the Margaret River Cultural Centre the orchestra visited music students at Margaret River Senior High School where they demonstrated each instrument. ACO2 players were quizzed by the enthralled bunch, and finished the session with Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nacht Musik.

Bunbury was the next stop with a Combined Schools Workshop and concert on Feb 10. Students came from far and wide to attend the workshop and many of them were playing in a string ensemble for the very first time. The strings program in Bunbury is very much in its infancy so it was great for ACO2 to give it a boost and hopefully spur on some inspired students. This was followed by another all but full concert.

It was then off to Mt Helena, in the Perth Hills, for the final concert of the tour, which was uproariously received by another almost-full-house. The final stop for the musicians was a Combined Schools Workshop at Perth Modern School in Subiaco.

A special thank you, as always, to the ACO players on this tour – to Helena, Aiko, Steve and Julian. An especially big thank you to Helena, who we will miss immensely while she is on maternity leave.

Update from the Wesfarmers ACO2 WA Tours

What a first week of the ACO2's inaugral tour to regional WA! The orchestra has played to sold-out concerts in Narrogin, Katanning, Albany and Manjimup with all audiences shouting for more. After the first concert in Narrogin, the enthusiastic audience were keen to chat to the musicians. There was a little drama before the concert, with some of the musicians getting bogged when exploring a near-by salt lake.

The second stop was Katanning and another appreciative crowd. In fact one audience member from the Narrogin concert drove all the way to Katanning to see the concert again. The next morning the orchestra made a special visit to Katanning Senior High School to play to 180 students in years 8, 9 and 10. The concert featured instrument demonstrations, discussions about the music and some anecdotes from our young musicians about why they love playing music. Afterwards they crowded around the musicians to ask more questions about their instruments and life as a musician.

The reception in Albany was warm to say the least. Albany has an active string community and the town was abuzz with anticipation for the workshops and concert. Both workshops were enormously successful, leaving the students with motivation to achieve their best for the rest of the year.

Next stop was the timber town of Manjimup, and despite being rained out of what was meant to be an outdoor performance, the alternative venue of the Town Hall proved just as lovely. The audience, who had purchased picnic hampers to eat in the park, were quite happy to picnic in the Town Hall before the concert.

Tomorrow we are off to Bunbury and then to our final concert in Mt Helena in the Perth Hills.

Thanks to Wesfarmers for their support!

Interview with Helena Rathbone

How old were you when you started playing & what were some of your early musical experiences?

I was five when I started playing. I started with the London Suzuki Group. Then from the age of nine to eighteen I went to the Royal College of Music Junior Department, all day Saturday basically, so that’s where I had my training in violin, piano, theory, choir and both Symphony and Chamber Orchestras.

Read full interview at http://news.musiqueart.net/2010/02/01/helena-rathbone/

And Helena talks about the Emerging Artists Program here: http://news.musiqueart.net/2010/02/01/aco2-%E2%80%93-the-aco%E2%80%99s-emerging-artists-program/

SMH Review of Resonance

Nostalgic trip back to postwar Europe

TWO octogenarians, two scars from World War II, and two nostalgic glances at the past interlocked in this program of 20th-century masterpieces and a 21st-century piece. Read full review.

Canberra Times review of Resonance

Complexity and depth in a richly resonant program

Bravo to the Australian Chamber Orchestra for programming works of such complexity and depth, providing a rich opportunity to experience and compare works in which their respective composers contemplated how music might rebuild and recreate ideas and philosophies in a world torn apart by the Second World War.

Sculthorpe's Chaconne, commissioned by the ACO to celebrate Richard Tognetti's 20th Anniversary Season, was a fitting opening piece with its lyrical triplet figures and sustained pedal notes preparing the listener for an evening of music calculated to provoke deep thought and stimulate inquiry.

Call Vaughan Williams a Cowpat Composer if you must, but I will always love those expansive chords announcing the opening of his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. I am instantly transported to some imaginative, elevated place to gaze upon the vast expanse of the South Downs with a towering cloud-mass, silver-rimmed against a summer sky. I'm sure there were many personal landscapes, spaces and moods conjured by those notes in the Llewellyn Hall. The orchestra was split into two ensembles creating really successful sound exchange patterns and the young Emerging Artists in the back left corner brought impressive professionalism and a special intensity to their playing.

Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta had the audience and several of the musicians counting for their lives, keeping hold of the rhythmic complexities of the piece. Each musician was locked into a focused personal engagement with their part in the weaving counter-rhythms and this added a frisson of excitement. The dramatic percussion opening and the splendid viola entry of the second movement led into a delicate section of what I've come to think of as "Martian music", because of the distinctive modality, played by celesta and harp. Smiles were exchanged by the cellists in a passage of expertly executed pizzicato notes. An energetic dance punctuated with col legno thwackings and wonderfully strident, unison scalic passages brought the work to a triumphant conclusion.

Xenakis's Shaar was the intriguing centrepiece of the evening. What an amazing experience it was to hear this live sound produced by the unique motion of horse hair across taut strings, and how sensational to be in the orchestra producing these sonic patterns! The music reflects the time in which it was written and represents the tension within the relationship between individual elements and the overall structures of which they are part. It explores the process of negotiation between individual elements, in this case musical tones and musicians, determining how form is created.

While Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen was in many ways a fitting end to the thread of musical investigation, I wonder if the Vaughan Williams Fantasia played last would have provided a better balance in the programming. That aside, it was a deeply moving performance of this melancholy work of "confession and atonement". The poignant second thence stated by the viola remains etched in the ineniory as a kind of distillation of the striving hope for renewal at the heart of each masterpiece for string orchestra in the ACO's Resonance concert.

Jennifer Gall | Canberra Times | 11 August 2009

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

News from the road

The ACO2 tour has begun very successfully with enthusiastic audiences in Newcastle, Parramatta and Sale. The orchestra received rave reviews from their performance at Parramatta Riverside, with comments describing the concert as an “enchanting showcase of musical mastery” (Vanessa Lahey, Australian Stage). Musicians from ACO2 also relayed their expertise to the young players of Western Sydney and Sale, in two intensive workshops for talented local school students. Each workshop ended in a extraordinary performance, with amazing results achieved from just three hours of rehearsals and tutorials. These workshops are a fantastic way for the orchestra to meet some of the members of the community, and to share their knowledge during their visit.

A highlight of the tour so far has definitely been the stop off yesterday to Whittlesea Secondary College. The orchestra performed a short schools concert to students affected by the recent Victorian bush fires. With a small auditorium filled to the brim with students, so many of whom have lost loved ones, it was lovely to be able to bring a bit of music to the area, and to contribute in our own small way. We were all touched when one of the music teachers in the school told us with tears in his eyes of how wrapped the music class was, who had lost both students and teachers in the fires, to have heard such an amazing performance. We would also like to thank the Australian Children’s Music Foundation for making this visit possible.

With the weather sunny, if not a bit chilly in regional Victoria, the band has now landed in Echuca to perform the 4th of its 9 concerts at the Paramount Theatre. Our hotel is cosy and rustic and the historic port town of Echuca is a delightful place to spend the day. The musicians will have tutorials this morning and they are holding a techniques class this afternoon, in which all members of the orchestra will share their ideas, as many of them have recently studied with leading overseas performers.

Vicki Stanley, Education and Emerging Artists Manager

ACO2 Review from Australian Stage Online

ACO2 is by design an ensemble created to give up and coming young classical musicians the opportunity to hone their skills by playing alongside veterans in the industry. This trans-generational group of wandering minstrels certainly gave new life and energy to some age-old pieces of music in their robust performance. What became evident from the very first note struck was that these musicians have already emerged! It was impossible to discern who the new recruits were in this select team of superb performers. Read full review.

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