ACO avoids pitfalls in opening out Bach splendour - Sydney Morning Herald Review

A recent approach to concert programming that has gained some traction is to interleave the movements or sections of a canonical work by an established composer with something contemporary or relatively unknown. The theory is you strike sparks through incongruities and unlikely connections: the practice is that you sometimes violate an old art work while placing the new ones in an unfavourable context.

By intermixing Bach's Missa Brevis, BWV 235, with music by Arvo Part and Arnold Schoenberg, the Australian Chamber Orchestra avoided the pitfalls. The original context of Bach's liturgical works is strongly bound to his particular devotional mindset and historical situation and always needs some opening out in a modern concert setting and, on balance, the imported works experienced neither net gain or loss.

Setting off Part's spare, minimalist spirituality with the glorious complexity of Bach's counterpoint slightly deprived Part's textures of the stillness they seem to seek, but made a point about the range of spirituality nevertheless. While it was jarring to detach the third movement of Schoenberg's String Quartet No.2, with soprano soloist, Litany, from its original four-movement narrative context, the intensity and expressive range of Sara Macliver's searing performance of the soprano part gave this moment expressive weight. Macliver was so good in this repertoire one hopes the ACO returns to the complete quartet with her at some stage.

As for the Bach, the four excellent soloists, Macliver, Fiona Campbell, Andrew Staples and Matthew Brook, who sang both choruses and solos, brought thrilling limpid clarity to Bach's miraculously crafted textures, never more joyously than in the closing chorus, Cum Sancto Spiritu. After the interval, between Bach's Motet Lobet den Herrn and the Cantata, Wo gehest du hin?, BWV 166, came a strongly willed work by the British composer Diana Burrell, Das Meer, das so gross und weit ist, da wimmelt's ohne Zahl, und klein Tiere.

Inspired by the rhythm of tidal movements, the piece is framed with vigorous untamed rhythmic gestures, with a more static central section though still interlaced with smartingly astringent highly pitched chords.

The concert began with a Polka and Elegy by Shostakovich.

Peter McCallum | Sydney Morning Herald | 19 April 2010

A giving thing is terrible to lose

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Philanthropy should survive the financial meltdown, writes Clare Morgan.

It has been billed as the $11 million concerto. When the Australian Chamber Orchestra takes the City Recital Hall stage tomorrow night to perform Brahms's Double Concerto, all eyes - and ears - will be on Richard Tognetti's Giuseppe Guarneri Guarneri "del Gesu" violin, worth $10 million, and Timo-Veikko Valve's cello, made by the father, Giuseppe Guarneri Guarneri filius Andreae, worth $1 million.

Read the rest of the article.

RT and the ACO in the News

Next year marks Richard Tognetti's two decades of orchestral leadership, writes Clare Morgan.

Such was the weight of expectation on Richard Tognetti before his stint as guest leader of the Australian Chamber Orchestra in 1989, it would have been no surprise if he registered excess baggage on his flight from Switzerland. Read more.

Visit the site for info about the ACO's 2009 Season, launched just last night.