Orchestrated Brilliance
August 2012
Founded in 1975, the Australian Chamber Orchestra is still relatively young compared to Australia’s other larger orchestral ensembles. It has evolved, however, into one of the most secure and well run, both financially and artistically.
This security has enabled the orchestra to adopt a pattern of adventurous curatorial-style programming of a kind that is increasingly eschewed by its cash-strapped cousins. The ACO’s 2013 season is one of their very best – offering up a season blending contemporary and historical works that, if nothing else, put paid to the idea that an orchestra is merely a sonic museum, with little to say to contemporary Australia.
A nominally conventional program like their opening concert in February next year is, on closer inspection, anything but. Here long-standing Artistic Director Richard Tognetti performs his self-described ‘favorite’ Mozart Concerto (no.3), but precedes it with a new work by Brett Dean for electric violin (entitled ‘Electric Preludes’). This is followed later in the month by what might best be described as a ‘concept-concert’. Conceived by Tognetti, ‘The Reef’ is the third of a series of works that pay homage to the ocean and consists of a number of mainstream pieces intermixed with grunge rock and music from Aboriginal musicians, accompanied by footage by filmmakers Mick Sowry and Jon Frank.
Barry Humphries, this time in the guise of himself, is the inspiration for, and focus of, the concerts on May 5 and 6. As a young man growing up in suburban Melbourne, Humphries had been drawn to the quirkily rebellious but also melancholic sounds of jazz-inflected music from Weimar Germany, sounds that had been brought to Melbourne (along with good coffee, and a love of chamber music) by Jewish émigrés escaping Nazi persecution, but subsequently ignored. The music that was lost to us all as a result of the cultural (as well as humanitarian) catastrophe in Europe between 1933 and 1945 is at last being restored to the concert platform.
Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja returns for her third tour with the ACO in July with a program of works by Mozart and Ginastera and Bach that concludes with Mendelssohn’s rarely heard Violin Concerto in D minor (written when the composer was only 13). Bach also features the following month in an arrangement by Tognetti of fourteen canons built on the first eight bass notes from the aria of the Goldberg variations. This intriguing musical mind-game was only discovered in 1974 in Strasbourg as an appendix to a copy of the first published edition of the Goldberg Variations owned by Bach himself.
Here it is performed by American pianist Jeremy Denk alongside works by Nancarrow and Charles Ives. Denk then joins members of the orchestra to perform Brahms’ Piano Quintet, the finale of which channels Bach at his most chromatic through the spirit of late Beethoven.
The ACO remains in reduced numbers for its partnership on October 7 with renowned German countertenor Andreas Scholl – an artist who has similarly dared to break the conventions, if not pretentions, of his medium. Works by Vivaldi open and close a program that otherwise features the music of three contemporary masters – the late Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, and Philip Glass. On Friday of that same week, the full orchestra partners with members of the Australian National Academy of Music to produce another of Tognetti’s ‘concept-concerts’, called ‘The Crowd’, which explores what it means to be one among many, performed (it is no doubt hoped) also to many at the Palais Theatre.
The third concert in Melbourne that month sees the orchestra tackle Brahms’ Symphony no. 4. As with their recent performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, this is daring programming for a chamber orchestra that arguably pushes the sonic limits of the medium. Brahms was nothing, however, if not a composer who approached the symphonic medium with a chamber-music like precision, and this will be a musical experiment well worth hearing. It is preceded by the great British cellist Steven Isserlis performing Antonín DvoÅ™ák’s oft-overlooked first Cello Concerto in A major.
Swedish clarinetist Martin Fröst headlines the November program with a performance of Mozart’s Clarinet concert, alongside works by his brother Göran, and renowned Melbourne composer Brenton Broadstock.
The season concludes with the first visit to Australia since 1989 by Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his Monteverdi Choir performing Bach’s cycle of six cantatas for the Christmas season we know as his ‘Christmas Oratorio’. The cantatas have something of the narrative power and musical weight of the great Passions – indeed the final cantata concludes with an arrangement of the so-called ‘Passion Chorale’ – but this is Bach at his most joyous. It is music that deserves to be as well-known as Handel’s Messiah, but performances are rare. Here again, the ACO are leading from the front, and we are all the beneficiaries.
Peter Tregear has recently taken up the post of Professor and Head of Music at the ANU School of Music in Canberra, where he is charged with delivering an innovative new curriculum and performance program.
Australian Chamber Orchestra Melbourne Season 2013 – concerts at Hamer Hall, The Arts Centre Melbourne and Melbourne Recital Centre
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