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

FOLK MUSIC AND A NEW CELLO

Folk music is not lost on our audience – if anything Brahms seems to be more so. The Bb string sextet no.1 is surely one of the purest pieces of music: its underlying drama subdued by euphonious melody. Over the years we have performed it many times and the end response is always somewhat subdued. Is this a reflection of the music?

Passions are not natural to humankind; they are always exceptions or excrescences…the ideal, genuine person is calm in joy and calm in pain and sorrow. Passions must pass quickly, or else they must be driven out.
-Brahms writing to Clara Schumann from Detmold (11 Oct 1857)

These are strange and confusing words to come out of a “Romantic” composer. Maybe they are in response to the madness of his friend Robert Schumann who was anything but calm in joy, pain or sorrow.

The work is very challenging to perform, least of all due to the subtlety and restraint of its emotional language. The more one gets into the power of this music, however, the more one finds the underlying drama (the passions?) disturbing that “ideal calm”.

You can feel the audience lulling into the “calm” of the first movement only to be re-awakened by gypsy passion in the second. A Schubertian dance movement follows, raising the pulse before the complex and almost unnerving calm of the last with the “seamlessly woven reappearances of the opening theme barely contrasting with the intervening episodes (an aspect of the composition which drew a negative comment from Joachim, but which Brahms-this time-did nothing to rectify!)”

Richard Specht, perhaps sums up best the overall effect of the Sextet in 1928: ‘Never before have such luxuries of sound been enticed from a handful of string players’.

Taciturn and droll, country fiddler Mike Kerin is a great addition to any orchestra. He stands up the front and with a humble strut (if that’s not contradictory) producing a raw and ready sound more heartfelt than many a top-notch classical soloist. This kind of fiddling is far preferable to the slick Irish fiddling perfection often treading the boards these days.

Danny Spooner is the crooner from soil, industry, ships and unions. He can bellow, caress and weep. His brain holds more than 1000 songs and his recall is phenomenal. It’s been a pleasure arranging these songs and I hope to put some sounds up soon.

Vuillaume

For the first time in the ACO’s history, we have spent some money on a capital purchase (apart from office furniture): we (the ACO company) now proudly own a beautiful Vuillaume cello.

Melissa Barnard, who is acting principal in place of Tipi, will play the cello for the foreseeable future. Like the recent purchase of the del Gesu violin, this evolves the sound of the ACO and of course inspires the player fortunate enough to use the instrument.