Settling Into A Leisurely Stride
The Age
Monday April 10, 1995
MUSIC.
Quartetto Beethoven di Roma, Concert Hall, Tuesday.
Twilight Chamber Music at Rippon Lea No. 1: Pianists Robert Chamberlain and Daryl Coote, Rippon Lea, Wednesday.
Astra Concert Series No. 1, St Mary's Star-of-the-Sea, West Melbourne, Saturday.
ABC Great Performers Series No. 1: Bach's St Matthew Passion, Concert Hall, Sunday.
BY THE TIME the second of its two Melbourne concerts came round, the visiting Italian piano quartet had settled into something near its usual high standard. There was nothing questionable about the ensemble's synchronicity, but then it was hard to fault in that respect on the previous Sunday.
On Tuesday, however, there were fewer moments when concern centred on the overall lack of vitality and bite. For the second program, the Quartetto Beethoven di Roma set its sights fairly high.
It began with Mozart's first quartet in G minor, a work that leaves every executant exposed. Then came Martinu's only piano quartet, with Richard Strauss's mammoth early work in C minor more than filling out the evening's second half.
About the Mozart, there is little to report. The reading made good sense of this strangely disconcerting amalgam of three disparate movements, mainly by giving it an impressive degree of weight.
The Martinu rarity showed us the composer in typically split- personality vein; supple and cleverly inflected rhythms followed by unrelieved ostinatos; folk-style melodies that disintegrated into harshness and then moved back to their original transparence; an alternately engrossing exploration of the instruments' potential colors alongside passages of tedious insistence.
Strauss was 19 when he wrote the C minor quartet, making it a homage to Brahms. Some of the older composer's trademarks are pronounced particularly the use of triplets in melodic lines and a penchant for heavy, bass-rich textures but every so often there come touches of lightness, prophetic of Der Rosenkavalier and its consonant-rich musical world.
This is taxing music for the performers, if only because the composer keeps them very active at one stage, even that faultless pianist Carlo Bruno was nonplussed by the stream of notes he was expected to produce. But the performance came over as committed and infectiously energetic something you would be hard-pressed to say about the group's first recital.
DARYL COOTE and Robert Chamberlain, two distinguished graduates of Max Cooke's Team of Pianists, began this year's chamber music series at Rippon Lea with about as orthodox a first half-program as you can get: Mozart's D major sonata for two pianos, and the Haydn Variations by Brahms. While not breaking any interpretative ground, both pianists worked efficiently in two hard-driving readings.
In the second half of the recital, the focal work was yet another work from the ubiquitous, multi-talented Michael Easton: Jazzamatazz, a two-piano suite of four movements. Coote and Chamberlain played this youthful piece of ephemera with assiduity, determined to master its rhythmic pitfalls which I suspect is not the approach needed. This is witty music the suite uses quasi-jazz conventions with relish but it needs to be treated with whimsicality, and not with deliberation.
THE ASTRA Society, back under the direction of John McCaughey, opened its four-event series for this year with a surprisingly orthodox program in West Melbourne's large Catholic church.
The first half centred on choral music for Easter Lassus, Gesualdo, as well as some Gregorian chant and the second, contemporary works by Stephen Ingham, Neil Kelly and the American Robert Morris.
In their traditional spirit of searching for arcane and/or generally untravelled byways, McCaughey and his singers performed some Spiritual Madrigals by Lassus, from the Tears of St Peter cycle, rather than recycling samples of the composer's better-known sacred music. And while Gesualdo's madrigals are universally admired, the murderous Prince of Venosa's sacred music gets few airings because of its chromatic, ecclesiastically inappropriate daring.
As well as making telling dramatic points during the Renaissance section of its program, the Astra group followed its normal practice of treating the musical content with restraint, negotiating the unexpected modulations and sudden side-slips of Gesualdo with the same unflustered smoothness it gave to Lassus's rich and satisfying choral fabric.
Of the three recently composed works, Robert Morris's Four Fold Heart Sutra took up the longest time, communicated a type of trance- like state by its repetition of vocal matter, yet seemed as with many efforts by Westerners to enter oriental religious worlds to be skating over the surface of the Buddhist text's import.
TO PREPARE us in a more traditional fashion for Easter, the ABC presented two performances of Bach's St Matthew Passion over the weekend.
The participants gave an honest, workmanlike reading of this massive opus.
An abbreviated Melbourne Symphony, assisted by organist John O'Donnell, the viola da gamba of Miriam Morris and Calvin Bowman's harpsichord, could not be faulted for a generous and responsive framework for the singers.
Adrian Thompson made clear and expressive work of the lengthy Evangelist's line, and soprano Emma Lysons and mezzo Elizabeth Campbell impressed through their control of the sometimes tortuously ornate upper solo lines.
The Melbourne Chorale showed its ability in the score's more complex sections, especially during those choruses where the double choir sings antiphonally.
© 1995 The Age
