Showing unusual restraint for Sydney Chamber Opera, Giya Kancheli's monodrama Exil became a performance with an undeniable power and poignancy in the hands of this young company.
Giasone was the most performed opera of the 17th century, but this was no dry, reverent exhumation. This was something much better from Pinchgut Opera: a joyous, animated resurrection.
The Australian Chamber Orchestra is undoubtedly one of the nation’s strongest classical music “brands”, although trying to pin down the forces that make up this protean ensemble is difficult.
The eagerly awaited second Sydney concert in Angela Hewitt’s current Musica Viva tour began with the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, one of Bach’s most popular individual keyboard works. Both the improvisatory first section and the fugal section proper make extensive use of notes not found in the D minor scale, hence the description “chromatic”, meaning “coloured”.
Pairing music from the 18th and 20th centuries is a common programming strategy, one which can bring out interesting parallels between the musical preoccupations of two very different eras. Some 20th-century composers looked to the more distant past as a way of engaging with traditions before the emotionally coercive 19th century.
At the end of yesterday’s concert, there was a lot of hugging on stage. This was only to be expected. The high-quality music-making to which the audience had been treated was, for the players, a brief and unrepeatable experience, for some of them a nostalgic pilgrimage back to their homeland.
It is a sign of the times that a celebrated Bach interpreter like Angela Hewitt should have begun her recital with a series of arrangements of Johann Sebastian’s music.
Musica Viva claims to be the largest presenter of chamber music in the world, and in the last few years, they have brought world-renowned ensembles to Australia such as the Takács and Tokyo Quartets, as well as many exciting newer groups such as the Pacifica Quartet.
‘To lose one singer, Mr Terracini, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two, one of them in the title role, looks like … a disaster’. Such were the thoughts running through my head when the Artistic Director of Opera Australia made the pre-performance announcement.
I left the Sydney Opera House last night feeling vaguely dissatisfied, and yet a bit puzzled at my dissatisfaction. La Traviata is chock-full of Verdi’s most glorious music, and well though I know the score, I wasn’t feeling in the least jaded to begin with.
I’ve never been to a sing-along Sound of Music, but apparently audience etiquette requires pantomime booing of the Nazis. More than a few attendees at the opening night of Opera Australia’s new production of Tosca responded in a similar fashion at the curtain call, and it had nothing to do with a generally excellent performance. For yes, there were Nazis.
Destiny, Fate, Providence: different ways of describing the sense of an external agency shaping our ends. Verdi’s La Forza del Destino, based on a Spanish play by Angel de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas, is a sprawling tale in which the characters’ lives are irrevocably shaped by a fatal accident.
For the second of their two Sydney programs, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra pretty much replicated the layout of the first: a short modernist work, a concerto featuring a string instrument, and, in the second half, a big romantic symphony.
“Europe’s answer to the ACO” was how composer Brett Dean described the Mahler Chamber Orchestra before its first concert in Sydney. Despite the similarity in names, the two are very different ensembles.
When one sees the word “Erotica” in connection with classical music, one is usually safe in assuming that it’s a misprint in the title of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. And yet, at the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s concert on Saturday, it was no Freudian slip: Erwin Schulhoff’s Sonata Erotica, which the composer suggestively marked “nur für Herren” (for men only), was on the program.
Three days after seeing the Metropolitan Opera’s broadcast version of Wagner’s Parsifal, I attended Climbing Toward Midnight, Jack Symonds’ compositional response to this same opera, directed by Netta Yashchin.
At one point in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the narrator is listening to a sonata for piano and violin by the fictional Vinteuil, when “at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he tried to grasp the phrase or harmony – he did not know which – that had just been played and that had opened and expa
