Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall. 27 Nov 2016
This was the third of three concerts showcasing the colossal talents of Pinchas Zukerman and his trio. It was a chamber music concert that has been without equal in Adelaide for some years. The programme was unashamedly grounded in entertainment, and it showcased the almost incalculable possibilities of the romantic duo, quartet (without actually playing a quartet!) and octet repertoire for strings.
The Debussy Sonata for Cello and Piano in D minor is beautifully understated and Amanda Forsyth (cello) and Angela Cheng (piano), who are members of the Zukerman trio, convincingly demonstrated that less can be so much more. The sparseness of the score felt anything but.
César Franck’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in A is one of the finest examples of the repertoire, and with perfectly disguised strength Pinchas Zukerman entirely filled the Adelaide Town Hall with the composition’s rich and eminently hummable melodies to the almost ecstatic delight of the large Sunday afternoon audience that couldn’t have cared less that Australia was at last wreaking its vengeance on the Proteas down the road at the Adelaide Oval.
Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings in E flat, Op 20, is a giant of the repertoire and was written when he was only sixteen. Despite the composer’s youth, the work comes across as a highly mature composition. At times, it is almost a ‘duelling banjos’ between two separate quartets, while at other times it has all the hallmarks of symphony for strings. Joining Zukerman and Forsyth were six members of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra: Natsuko Yoshimoto, Cameron Hill and Michael Milton on violin, Imants Larsens and Michael Robertson on viola, and Simon Cobcroft on cello. Zukerman and Forsyth led the ensemble with precision and controlled stylishness. Cobcroft showed why he is a worthy nominee in the category of Individual Professional Performance in the 2016 Adelaide Critic’s Circle Awards. Larsens was animated and demonstrative and clearly expressed his unabashed enjoyment of the moment. The final notes were greeted with thunderous applause and wolfwhistles, and the octet was brought back for several bows.
Pinchas Zukerman surely would have left Adelaide in no doubt that we loved him and his trio and would welcome them back at the drop of a hat.
Kym Clayton
When: 27 Nov
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall. 25 Nov 2016
This, the second of three concerts showcasing the immense talents and influence of the iconic Pinchas Zukerman, was a knockout.
Zukerman directed the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and played the violin lead in George Enescu’s tuneful Ballade for Violin and Orchestra, Op 4a, which was written when the composer was only 14 years old. Zukerman bordered on imperiousness, and the naivety of the rising and falling scale passages of the composition was swept aside by his grace and authority.
Some would opine that the highlight of the evening’s program was Brahms’ Symphony No 1 in C minor, Op 68, but this reviewer was totally delighted and utterly impressed by the performance of Beethoven’s Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano in C, Op 56, the so called ‘Triple Concerto’. It featured Nicholas Carter on the podium and The Zukerman Trio front stage and centre. The trio comprises Zukerman on violin, Amanda Forsyth on cello and Angela Cheng at the piano. The stage of the Adelaide Town Hall was full to overflowing and it was a magnificent sight; the music put and kept a smile on one’s face.
Forsyth was sporting a gorgeous full length gown, and wore her platinum blond hair and bright red lipstick almost regally. She sat on a slightly elevated platform between Zukerman and Cheng and commanded their attention (and ours!) as she coordinated the trio. Forsyth produced exquisite sounds from her 1699 Carlo Giuseppe Testore cello. The Triple is driven by melody, and under Carter’s finely balanced conducting the Trio expertly passed responsibility for the melody backwards and forwards amongst them never losing the momentum. Zukerman was statesman-like – no histrionics, no wasted gesture, just commanding presence and abundant musicality. Cheng was masterful at the piano, and demonstrated precisely how the piano part should be handled in a trio: dominant when needed, and always empathetic to the other instruments and to the intent of the composition.This was a superlative reading of the Triple. It doesn’t come any better.
Brahm’s first symphony is best remembered for the sweeping noble melodies in the final movement. The other three all lead up to what is almost an orgasmic rejoicing in the human spirit. The ASO was conducted by Pinchas Zukerman and he again demonstrated his intimate knowledge and understanding of the romantic repertoire. He placed the various sections of the orchestra in non-standard locations on the stage, and most noticeably the brass was stage right behind the violins, the horns were stage left behind the double basses which in turn were place behind the violas and cellos. The effect was to ‘even out’ the ‘muscle’ of the orchestra across the full width of the stage, and the impact was obvious.
Concertmaster Natsuko Yoshimoto demonstrated great expertise in some well voiced solo violin sections, and Simon Cobcroft and Imants Larsens on cello and viola respectively were well tuned into Zukerman’s interpretation. The horns and woodwinds were again a highlight and, at the end, Zukerman gave first acknowledgments to Adrian Uren (horn), Celia Craig (oboe), and Geoffrey Collins (flute), but the entire orchestra deserved our full praise, and got it.
The audience was emphatic in its deep appreciation of Pinchas Zukerman, and he was visibly moved.
A great concert!
Kym Clayton
When: 25 Nov
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall. 23 Nov 2016
The Zukerman Trio is a world class ensemble, comprising the iconic Pinchas Zukerman (violin), after whom the trio obviously takes its name, Amanda Forsyth (cello) and Angela Cheng (piano).
This evening they presented a program designed to showcase their individual talents, which they clearly have in abundance, as well as the rich diversity of the repertoire available for this particular trio of instruments. The program comprised Seven Pieces for Violin and Cello (Op 39) by Reinhold Glière, Piano Trio No 2 in E minor (op 67) by Dmitri Shostakovich, and Piano Trio in B flat (D898) by Franz Schubert. Collectively the three compositions traversed the romantic, neo-baroque and modern nationalistic idioms, and immersed us in spiky dance meters, consonance contrasted with ear-catching dissonance, and deeply affecting melodies that would fade gently to an excruciatingly silence.
The trio played without affectation. Vigorous passages were executed with the same calm and authority as the most delicate phrases. There were glimpses of ‘attitude’ as Forsyth looked briefly but deeply in Zukerman’s direction, or when Cheng would arch her back and then lean heavily into a forté section to set the synchronisation, or when Zukerman would deliberately sit forward in his chair and stare absorbedly at his music.
But, the music doesn’t stand alone or speak for itself. It needs to be interpreted and lifted from the page. The Zukerman Trio’s performance was decidedly and abundantly competent, but it needed more spirit. There was a glimmer of ‘chutzpah’ in the Glière, and more so in the Jewish folk melodies of the Shostakovich, but their performance of the Schubert was clinical and at times heavy handed. It lacked the requisite light and shade, and playfulness.
Despite one’s misgivings and musings as to why the Adelaide Symphony banners should be suspended over a trio rather than a full orchestra, the audience expressed great appreciation and some were driven to a standing ovation and to wolf whistling, and left with the uber-melodic strains of Schubert still in their ears.
Kym Clayton
When: 23 Nov
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Musica Viva. Adelaide Town Hall. 9 Nov 2016
Trio Dali comprises three 20-something soon-to-be-superstars of the world of chamber music. Jack Liebeck (violin), Christian-Pierre La Marca (cello) (“Crispy” to his friends, apparently) and Amandine Savary (piano) play with courage and sublime musicality.
Throughout the performance Liebeck and La Marca exchanged telling glances at each other: one looked at the other as if to seek confirmation they were ‘on track’ with what the other expected, or anticipated, and of course they always were. Meanwhile Savary, who formed the apex of the musical triangle, sat upstage of them at the Steinway and weighed into the non-verbal discussion with authoritative phrasing and influential dynamics. The three worked beautifully together, and the sum of the parts was greater than the parts themselves.
La Marca demonstrated beautifully graceful long lines in the adagio cantabile of Beethoven’s Piano Trio in E flat, op 1, no 1, and with Liebeck produced remarkable drone-like sounds in the scherzo. Savary was liberal in her pedaling throughout, but the sound was always clean. Liebeck injected unexpected humor and ‘attitude’ into the finale, and at the end the trio was saluted with generous and deserved applause from the enthusiastic audience.
Australian composer Roger Smalley’s Piano Trio was composed in 1991 and, according to the composer, invokes material from a Chopin Mazurka. It is an adventurous (modern) composition with ambivalent emotional content. The first movement has you on edge with its denatured sliding intervals from the strings that are neatly brought together by the piano. The dramatic scherzo second movement led into a vehement third movement full of pathos and anguish that was well explored by Trio Dali. This all gave way to a more contemplative final section that gently drifted to conclusion. The interval buzz was that the Smalley was interesting, but the Beethoven “did it” for the audience. But the best, at least in the mind of this reviewer, was left for after the interval.
Chausson’s Piano Trio in G minor, Op 3 – like the Beethoven – is an early career composition, and Trio Dali handled it with deftness, assurance, and vivacity. Where Trio Dali might have searched for a perfect expression of the emotional content of the Smalley, with the Chausson they found it and laid it bare. They found the inherent melancholy in the third movement but crucially they also exposed its sense of hope and promise. Savary beautifully executed the complex sections that required her to intertwine her hands as she accompanied the yearning violin of Liebeck.
Musica Viva have again graced the imposing Adelaide Town Hall stage with a wonderful chamber program delivered by inspiring and talented young artists.
Kym Clayton
When: 9 Nov
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Town hall. 3 Nov 2016
The Tallis Scholars are Renaissance choral music specialists, and they are at the pinnacle of their craft. Quite simply, they are without equal, and much of it is down to Peter Philips, their founder and conductor.
Philips has a sense of theatre. He has the choir file in and form a gentle crescent on the stage, and as it happened they were nearly in order of height. In what almost resembles a Mexican wave, they open their music scores one after the other, doing it all in reverse order when they file off at the end of the first half of the programme. When it is all over, and they depart the stage for the final time at the concert concussion, Phillips’ conductor’s score is left on his music stand centre-stage, illuminated by a bright spotlight from above. It is the score of the awe-inspiring Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis – that remarkable composer from the time of Elizabeth after whom the ensemble is named.
These are just little things that drive home the sense of occasion and make one realise that a performance by The Tallis Scholars is a special thing; something to cherish.
Philips places the members of his ensemble judiciously in relation to each other. For some pieces he has some of them stand in different places, presumably to facilitate them singing a different ‘voice’. In Arvo Pärt’s unusual Which Was The Son Of, Philips positions all the tenors and basses in the centre and flanks them on both sides with the altos and sopranos. The male ‘centre’ focuses our attention on the fact that the subject of the composition is the (male) genealogy of Jesus Christ (according the Gospel of Luke). It is perhaps the least successful piece of the evening. In John Taverner’s As One Who Has Slept, a quartet of voices is sent to a back corner of the stage and provides a liturgical drone effect common to Taverner’s music, underlining his attachment to the Russian Orthodox faith. It is a highlight of the evening.
But all roads point to the Spem in Alium – the finale of the evening – and everything else in the program which precedes it, and it is all exquisite, is doomed to take second chair. The ten Tallis Scholars are joined by thirty members of the internationally renowned Adelaide Chamber Singers. Their combined forces produce a world class performance and Philips remarks as much at the end of the performance. Of course he is right to say so.
So what does one do for an encore? How does one follow Spem in Alium? Well the answer is you don’t, you simply repeat it, at least some of it, and that is exactly what happened.
The audience leaves in a state of sublime contentment.
Kym Clayton
When: 3 Nov 2016
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed