Watching the Australian Chamber Orchestra has always been a unique experience: we have come to expect diverse programmes with carefully thought through interpretations, played by violinist/director Richard Tognetti and a group of 16 musicians with tightness and incisiveness that other ensembles cannot approach. Therefore, with their ranks doubled in size by the addition of musicians from the Guildhall School, one couldn’t expect their playing to be every bit as tight and incisive as we’re used to. But that’s exactly what we got in last night’s concert, entitled Indies and Idols, the third and last of the ACO’s Barbican residency.
The programme was imaginative. Each half centred on a work by a contemporary composer with a major career in Indie rock: The National’s Bryce Dessner for the first, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood for the second. Each centrepiece was bookended by works by 20th-century Polish composers, including those that inspired them.
The first half closer was sensational: Wojciech Kilar’s Orawa. It opens with an urgent motif on two violins in an insistent rhythm which is constantly changing in minimalist style. The texture thickens steadily as each instrument group is added, interrupted by big rhythmic fault lines and eventually reaching ecstatic heights. The harmony also constantly shifts, leading your ears in a meandering direction as a Bach prelude does; eventually, we return home in a deeply satisfying way.
The concert started with the Prologue to Witold Lutosławski’s Musique funèbre, written in memory of Bartók. It’s also a piece that gradually expands in texture, but an altogether darker creation, starting with the growl of low strings and maintaining a steady tread as the other instruments join in.
Dessner’s Réponse Lutosławski starts with an extraordinary section entitled Resonance where half the stringed instruments become tuned percussion, players beating the strings with their bows while others produce eerie glissandi. As the work progresses, we become lost in meditation in a dream-like landscape, then thrilled by more percussive effects in Des Traces. As in all the pieces in this half, we’re hearing heavily layered music – Dessner’s music is not so different from Lutosławski’s or Kilar’s in principle, but it's full of effects that are unfamiliar, but never weird.
The Guildhall School musicians had just two rehearsals together with the ACO. Extraordinarily, in that limited time, the enlarged group was able to achieve precision and intensity every bit as high as the ACO’s usual exalted standards – it’s a tribute to the ACO as teachers and the Guildhall students as learners, as much as to their musicianship.
I wasn’t as taken by the repertoire in the second half, played with the ACO back to its normal numbers. The Aria from Krzysztof Penderecki’s Three Pieces in Baroque Style was a pleasantly old-fashioned lament. But the opening to his String Quartet no. 1 was simply a study in how many different noises can be made by hitting all parts of stringed instruments in different ways with hands and bows. Wagner’s complaint about “effects without causes” was unfair on Meyerbeer but would have been appropriate here. Greenwood’s suite from his film music for There Will Be Blood contained much to interest one, but I’m not convinced that worked as well in concert as it undoubtedly does in the film. Szymanowski’s String Quartet no. 2, arranged by Tognetti, contained some beautifully lyrical moments, but didn’t approach the excitement of Kilar.
For the encore, another old-style lament on a descending scale, Albion by Thomas Adès, with a heartfelt thanks by Tognetti for them being allowed out of Australia for the first time in three years. May they return here often.
