Showing posts with label Resonance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Resonance. Show all posts
Wednesday, 19 August 2009
Resonance review from a blog
This was again a very expertly selected program and rewarding to hear. Life is well spent with Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Read full review.
Tuesday, 18 August 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, 12 August 2009
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
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
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
Wednesday, 5 August 2009
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