Tognetti restrains a rollicking Bach - The Age Review

For their third subscription series, the Australian Chamber Orchestra under director Richard Tognetti takes three Bach choral works and interleaves them with a grab-bag of 20th-century pieces, producing occasionally bracing results.

But you had to wonder what the opening Shostakovich Elegy and Polka had to do with the following G minor Mass BWV 235, which was interrupted by the slow-moving delights of Arvo Part's Summa and the Litanei from Schonberg's String Quartet No. 2, juxtaposing old and new expressions of faith even if neither seemed to offer much intellectual commentary on the other.

For the Mass, the motet Lobet den Herrn and the early cantata Wo gehest du hin?, Bach's taxing vocal lines were negotiated by individual singers: soprano Sara Macliver and mezzo Fiona Campbell with two British guests in tenor Andrew Staples and bass Matthew Brook. The Mass's choral sections fared pretty well with this attenuated personnel although Tognetti and his forces exercised careful dynamic restraint in both the Kyrie and Cum Sancto Spiritu movements. The cantata comprises solos except for a placid chorale, but Bach's rollicking motet was too refined and restrained to convey fully its essential joyful message.

Still, the vocal quartet made an excellent combination in terms of balance and precision, Macliver's sparkling timbre finding a shapely complement in Brook's agile bass, with Campbell holding her own in the choral mix as well as producing two resonant solos. Staples gave much pleasure with his unforced and agile tenor line, an effortless quantity in concerted movements.

The Age | Clive O'Connell | 14 Apr 2010

Composing a reply to Beethoven's melancholy letter

At its final subscription series concerts for 2009, which concentrated on two Beethoven works bearing the number four - the B flat Symphony and G Major Piano Concerto - the Australian Chamber Orchestra under artistic director Richard Tognetti also gave an airing to the revised orchestral version of Brett Dean's Beethoven-inspired Testament.

The juxtaposition produced results, mainly because the Australian composer's construct maintains interest through its intellectual elasticity.

Taking its starting point from Beethoven's sad Heiligenstadt letter, Dean's composition opens with a whispering effect, the violas and eventually all the strings using unrosined bows to generate half-audible sounds to mirror Beethoven's encroaching deafness.

The work is chameleonic in that the events during its length are in a state of flux, even the quote from Beethoven's first Rasumovsky quartet played not quite en clair but leading to an affirmative climax.

After this contemporary response to the composer's disaster-transcending genius, the concerto interpretation with soloist Dejan Lazic proved puzzling. He established his individuality from the opening bars, enunciated with remarkable care, the expanded ACO responding with a persuasive sympathy that was maintained throughout a performance that held revelatory insights as well as irritations, such as large-scale shifts in tempo.

Lazic interrupted the calm tenor of the concerto's progress with two sensational cadenzas, but the final impact was of brilliant patches, the work's torso stretched into unexpected, not-quite-comfortable positions, although the central Andante was a model of control and clear-cut delicacy.

As expected, the players made dynamic inroads into the optimistic symphony with plenty of punch in an opening movement notable for emphatic, full-bodied chords cut short rather than blared into meaninglessness. Tognetti kept the Adagio on the move, establishing a steady progress through the bustling scherzo to a bravura finale. In effect, this was a fine achievement, technically brilliant; all that you missed was a consistent communication of the work's good humour.

Clive O'Connell | The Age | 18 Nov 2009

An aural homecoming

Violinist Pekka Kuusisto tells Anna King Murdoch about his journey of musical self-discovery.

After becoming the first Finn to win the marathon International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition 14 years ago while still only in his teens, Pekka Kuusisto felt that something wasn't right. "I was not really happy playing and I couldn't really tell why because I was on the verge of having the kind of life I had always wanted — gorgeous concerts with great orchestras and playing the Sibelius violin concerto everywhere. I couldn't understand it myself."

Read the full article in The Age.

Learn more about Pekka Kuusisto's tour with the ACO.