Keitaro Harada thrilled the Adelaide audience this week as he conducted a colourful program of Stravinsky and Mussorgsky along with an impressive world premiere. Harada is an ‘all-of-body’ conductor, his movements on the podium somewhere between music, dance and shadow play. His gestures are sharply etched, both fluid and muscular, with important rhythmic cues delivered with an almost physical urgency. The effect on the orchestra seems liberating rather than controlling, urging the players to respond and allowing them to propel the music forward, encouraged by their dynamic concertmaster Kate Suthers. In this Adelaide Symphony Orchestra programme titled Framed in Sound, that combination of energy, enthusiasm and musical trust proved particularly well suited to three very different scores in which colour, rhythm and theatricality are inseparable.
Stravinsky’s Jeu de cartes made an immediate case for Harada’s approach. This ballet score is a game of musical identities, its three ‘deals’ constantly shuffling styles, rhythms and quotations around the central figure of the Joker. Harada kept its syncopations taut and its changes of direction agile and cleanly sprung. The ASO’s playing had plenty of bite: brass interjections were bright rather than heavy, the percussion gave it crisp edges, and the woodwind exchanges had the sprightly quality the score requires. Importantly, Harada did not overstate the comedy; this was a considered account of Stravinsky’s playful music that made it sound almost contemporary.
Harada showed a different kind of attention in conducting Katia Beaugeais’ Piano Concerto no. 1, "Bells of Time", in its world premiere performance. Written for the Australian pianist Stefan Cassomenos, the concerto foregrounds the bell as both sonic material and a recurring motif, associated by the composer with hope, solidarity, unity and peace. It opens with the soloist playing haunting bell sounds, high on the piano and reminiscent of church bells or those in a town square, before the orchestra comes in. He plays with his forearms as well as his hands, an unusual technique in the concert hall.
A composer and saxophonist, Beaugeais has an ear for resonance and instrumental juxtaposition, setting the piano against sonorities that shimmer, pulse and sometimes seem to hover almost out of range. Cassomenos played with formidable assurance, bringing out the colours in the piece and finding a fine balance between soloist and orchestra. There are some really lovely passages in this new work, especially as the bells emerge from the quieter textures, the piano moving between strength and resonance, and some beautifully luminous moments. This is a piano concerto written and played in unexpected ways, and Beaugeais deserves credit for trusting her own musical instincts. She was in the audience for this, its concert debut.
Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is always an audience-pleaser, and this performance did not disappoint. Each bite-sized piece sees a change in mood and tempo from the melancholy of The Old Castle to the weight of Gnomus, the scurrying strings in the delightful Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks to the busy marketplace in Limoges, and on to the massive sonority of the dramatic Great Gate of Kyiv.
Harada judged these contrasts well, bringing out mood, colour and lyricism. The quieter moments were allowed to hang in the air and breathe, building to an expansion in scale and power, not just more and louder. The intervening Promenades gave a unifying thread through the changing tableaux, leading us on our poetic journey.
Harada’s strength as a conductor of rhythm and texture was evident across the three pieces, and the ASO responded with playing of considerable precision and colour. That balance between authority and freedom is fascinating. In pieces as diverse as these, the result was an orchestra that sounded alert to every change of colour and pulse. Framed in Sound offered a colourful portrait of a conductor whose vivid physical presence gives the orchestra confidence and clarity.
