Cold Comfort In Rippon Lea Recital
The Age
Wednesday May 19, 2004
MUSIC REVIEW: TWILIGHT CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW: Rippon Lea, May 16
Back in its regular recital space, the Team of Pianists presented the second of its Twilight Chamber Music series on Sunday evening. The Rippon Lea ballroom did not present its congenial side, being bone-chillingly cold at the recital's start and failing to warm up over the following two hours. Also, what I heard varied in quality, both in content and standard of performance.
The team's most junior partner, Rohan Murray (pictured), undertook no solos, his function for the program that of accompanist to the two soloists. Cellist Josephine Vains, last heard as a member of the successful local Trio 303, opened with a bracing trio of unaccompanied pieces by Henri Dutilleux, Trois Strophes sur le nom de Sacher, written as part of a series of works presented to the Swiss conductor-philanthropist Paul Sacher.
The French composer's spicy, aurally sensual pieces served as a kind of tonic, preparing us for the moderately modern mixture of works to come. Bass-baritone Stephen Grant, well-known as choral director of e21 and Early Voices, sang Mahler's Ruckert Lieder with unaffected dedication, although his voice makes an impressive sound only in its lowest reaches; the singer encountered serious trouble when reaching for the cycle's highest notes and his central operating layer has a nasal quality that distracted from the effectiveness of Liebst du um Schonheit and the moving Um Mitternacht.
Vains played the cello-focused Movement 5 from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, which will be heard in full at the Macquarie Trio's recital at Melba Hall next week. Murray's static chordal accompaniment tended to be more reticent than necessary but Vains gave a glowing reading of the fragment's lyrical seam of melodic/religious fervour.
Grant returned with three Shakespeare Songs by Fortner and, after interval, a compressed song-cycle for voice, cello and piano by Herman Reutter, Ein kleines Requiem, which employs a text comprising German translations of five Lorca poems. Both compositions present pitching problems which Grant negotiated well enough but this genre of musical endeavour needs more rich, expressive qualities of vocal timbre to give its elements a much-needed persuasiveness.
© 2004 The Age
