Team Workover Grand Affair
The Age
Saturday April 26, 2008
TWILIGHT CHAMBER MUSIC 1
Rippon Lea, April 23 www.teamofpianists.com.au THE Team of Pianists usually runs its six-recital chamber music series on Sunday nights; this year it moved to a Wednesday but the Rippon Lea ballroom still attracted a sizeable body to hear the youngest of the Team's artists give the impressively robust Schimmel grand that the organisation is buying as a home instrument a thorough workover.Rohan Murray collaborated with the TinAlley String Quartet and double-bass Steve Newton in Finnish composer Olli Mustonen's Toccata of 1989. This Bach homage appeared in an Australian Chamber Orchestra concert last year with the composer playing his own difficult flourish-packed piano part but I doubt if he could have wound the short piece up to the pitch of excitement achieved by these young interpreters. Certainly, the echoes of the Brandenburg and violin concertos became more pronounced as the work built up its momentum but its mix of virtuosic practice and pastiche content found ready respondents in this sextet.The night's major work, Brahms' Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, applied the same energy and passion to a work that needed about half the intensity lavished on it. Murray's piano contribution in the second half of the work showed a mastery of the score's technical demands, and the unison lines from all three strings - violin (Lerida Delbridge), viola (Justin Williams) and cello (Michelle Wood) - came over with startling accuracy and ardour. But the group's attack was over-drawn, the composer's warm emotional breadth moving into over-drive too often for comfort, to the point where the final Zingarese rondo sounded in danger of toppling under its own enthusiastic propulsion.To open, the TinAlleys performed Bartok's Quartet No. 4, one of the composer's most rigidly structured works but loaded with melodic interest. First violin Kristian Winther encouraged his colleagues in a slashing interpretation of this powerful score, all of them taking each climactic point as a chance for a full-frontal assault on their material, blazing an aggressive path through passages of dense traffic. Such a reading impresses more for its overt characteristics than any interpretative depths. The quartet will play it again on May 8 during that month's series of Mozart/Bartok double-bill programs at the Australian National Academy of Music.
© 2008 The Age
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