In music, as in so many other things, quality counts. Over time a number of purely ad hoc ensembles have made their mark, like the opera orchestra at Bayreuth, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra or the John Wilson Orchestra. Included in this select bunch is the Australian World Orchestra, founded in 2010, which draws its personnel from the cream of Australian players worldwide. Their individual and corporate musicianship was magnificently on display in their Proms debut under the baton of Zubin Mehta.
This concert had been intriguingly programmed to make connections between the First and Second Viennese Schools but also to give expression to the fin de siècle mood present in much of late 19th-century music. Now in his 87th year, Mehta sees the Second Symphony of Brahms through sepia-tinted spectacles. To be perfectly frank, this was not a performance to set the heart racing, with little evidence of the invigorating lakeside surroundings in Pörtschach where it was composed in 1877. No element of the giocoso in the oboes that launch the Scherzo and no generator on stand-by to give vigorous electrical charges in the Finale. Instead, the work was suffused with a feeling of serenity, of being at peace with the world, with tenderness from the woodwind and tinges of sadness in the opening movement, the heartache which had earlier dominated the first half of this concert never completely banished. This was Brahms with a supremely autumnal glow, already stealing the thunder from that composer’s Third Symphony. Mehta’s conception was underpinned by the blend of superlative playing from the AWO: supple strings, mellifluous woodwind, trombones and tuba growling softly in the background and the wonderfully burnished horn solos.
Mehta’s wide musical sympathies were reflected in the first half. He is an extraordinarily fine and fastidious interpreter of the music of Webern. The Passacaglia, Op.1, that opened the evening already commanded attention. This is a piece which seems to well up from subterranean depths, explode in fireballs of energy and then subside into the developing gloom. Gleaming strings, daubs of colour from trumpet, baleful trombone and cymbals tantalised the ear from the start, and in the central climax Mehta did not for one moment stint on the cry of anguish, aided especially by the razor-sharp brilliance of the brass.
Webern’s Six Pieces, Op.6, were no less impressive. Stravinsky once described them as “dazzling diamonds”. To all intents and purposes they are like off-cuts from late Mahler, the music often hanging in the air, redolent with all kinds of echoes and pre-echoes. The tip-toeing effects in the third piece drew an immediate line towards the final scene of Berg’s Wozzeck; in the fourth and longest piece, seizing inspiration from Mahler’s funeral marches, tam-tam and bass drum conveyed the essential gloom, with a shrieking piccolo that Shostakovich repeatedly utilised later and fat brass chords spat out with absolute venom.
The discovery of the evening were the Ariettes oubliées, composed by Debussy in the mid-1880s, given here in a finely detailed orchestration by Brett Dean. Mehta in his accompaniment to these “forgotten songs” wove a richly diaphanous tapestry of sound, the two harps and cor anglais adding distinctive hues in the colour-wash of chromaticism which already foreshadows Pelléas et Mélisande. Siobhan Stagg was a choice soloist, giving full voice to the suffering and torment that inhabit the lines of Verlaine’s poetry, most tellingly in “And the worst pain of all must be not to know why… my heart feels such pain.” Her variety of tonal colouring, combined with a creamy upper register and excellent French diction, made for compelling listening throughout.
