The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under Jaime Martín presented a programme spanning late Romanticism, contemporary Australia and Russian drama. While finely executed, the evening proved uneven: moments of brilliance alternated with stretches that failed to hold attention.
Opening with Elgar’s In the South (Alassio) was a bold choice, for the composer’s musical language lacks the immediate distinctiveness that grips an audience from the outset. The Melbourne Symphony’s performance was solid, and the shinning power of the brass and the extended viola solo offered real highlights. Yet for all the ensemble’s polish and discipline, the music sometimes drifted in focus, leaving more of an impression of surface brilliance than of sustained dramatic momentum.
Deborah Cheetham Fraillon’s Treaty, a concerto for didgeridoo and orchestra written for William Barton, followed. While the work carried clear cultural significance – a composition by an Indigenous composer for an Indigenous soloist, with themes connected to colonial history highlighted in programme notes – its musical realisation was less compelling than one might hope. The didgeridoo often functioned more as a coloristic accent than as a fully projected solo voice, and for at least half of the work it remained silent, occasionally accompanied by Barton’s vocal lines. Barton’s entrance with multiple instruments suggested the possibility of varied pitches and nuanced timbres, like a Renaissance recorder consort, yet in practice the differences were unnoticeable, producing a mellow sonority, evocative of forest rustlings or bird calls.
Much of the orchestral writing leaned on cinematic gestures: brilliant in effect but comparatively thin in substance, simplifying the full potential of a large symphonic orchestra into a limited palette of predictable textures. The overall impression was at times reminiscent of the flashy but shallow arias Carlo Broschi wrote for his brother Farinelli. By contrast, the subsequent performance of Barton’s Kalkadungu Yurdu proved far more effective: here the balance between didgeridoo and orchestra was clearer, and the solo lines emerged with greater clarity and expressive impact, highlighting the instrument’s unique voice in a way that the concerto itself seldom achieved.
In Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, in Ravel’s orchestration, Martín’s approach was rather too cautious, especially in the recurring Promenade, which did not give the brass much chance to match their brilliance from the first half. Yet the performance’s strength lay in contrasts: each episode emerged with clear character, from the grotesque Gnomus to the delicate Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks. The crescendo in Bydło (The Ox Cart) was especially effective, building unstoppable until the full orchestra thundered. The climactic Great Gate of Kiev carried grandeur, closing the work with energy and conviction. As an encore, Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila overture was performed with irresistible verve.
As a summer festival concert, this programme was imaginative and vividly pictorial, making it a highly entertaining choice.
