Twenty-five years of interchanges between the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto mean that he is almost a match for the ACO’s Artistic Director Richard Tognetti in his leadership of the band. And one suspects that his Norwegian Chamber Orchestra has developed the same flexibility and dynamism that Kuusisto discovered when he played Mozart here in 2001 in a concert entitled ‘The Big Finnish’! Not coincidentally, this week’s concert featured Finns leading violins, violas and cellos.
But the only nationalism on display was when Kuusisto filled programming gaps with gentle Finnish polska as he sheathed his Stradivarian swordsmanship to go folksy with a couple of traditional pelimanni. You can take a boy out of Finland, but not Finland out of the boy.
However his programmed music for this concert was old Germanic and new American. And both the Mozart and the Mendelssohn required adaption for this string orchestra. The Magic Flute may have been missing voices, but matched them with theatrical interplay between different sections. And then there was the opportunity for arias to be played more speedily and precisely than possible when leaving space for text. I didn’t even miss the flute.
A string quintet with doubled violas could have been a balance problem for a standard string orchestra. Fortunately, the ACO had violinists who could move down a string to contribute to a workmanlike performance of the Second String Quintet, a composition that Mendelssohn himself dismissed as “an exercise in forms”, never published during his lifetime. Kuusisto called it “glorious fun” and justified his selection with whole-hearted bowmanship that inspired his fellow bowmen and women to bring a weight to the Lento that gave it great intensity.
Nico Muhly’s concerto Shrink was written for Kuusisto in 2019 and premiered with the ACO in Melbourne. Many performances since by him and two other violinists – it arrives in London next October – suggest that its three movements emphasising intervals of ninths, sixths and a set of anxious gaps between unisons and fourths are not just exercises in form. For they demand an intricate balance between the often hyperactive soloist and the band. Perhaps only the ACO and an experienced soloist could manage this without a conductor? For as discords (and syncopation) built inevitably in the smaller intervals of the third movement, the performance seemed inexhaustible – then stopped dead!
That was not quite the achievement of Ellen Reid’s West Coast Sky Eternal, which meandered, lost intensity and just faded away. But this Californian landscape had opened with an evocation from on high of a physical scene not unlike Australia before zooming down on to a jazzy world of entertainment, a hint of brash individualism and finally the deliberately discordant sounds, particularly harsh cellos, of human lives in struggle. Which all suggested an energetically balanced evening as the music travelled from Mozart’s delicacy through Muhly’s bravado to Mendelssohn’s fun, a journey that will get eleven more performances as it tours Australia’s capitals.
